For a brief moment toward the middle of the AI-generated movie Hell Grind, I realized I was experiencing something unexpected: a genuine emotion.
As the male protagonist, Rocco, stares at a photo of his recently kidnapped lover, he experiences flashbacks of the two of them growing up together in an orphanage. The sadness and longing felt real.
That feeling didn’t last.
During the flashback, Loco and his AI-generated co-stars opened their eyes wide and began laughing in eerily synchronized fashion. As I sat in New York’s Metro Private Cinema this week, scooping a handful of popcorn, the uncanny valley of AI came roaring back.
Loco, the male protagonist of Higgsfield AI’s Hell Grind. Courtesy of Higgsfield AI.
Generative AI has crept into many areas of the entertainment business this year, surprising many creators who are concerned about how it will impact their work. While post-production teams are turning to technology for anti-aging and other effects, some actors in short dramas have already lost their roles to AI characters. The changes are a top concern for actors union SAG-AFTRA, which this week approved new contract language that forces producers to negotiate over the use of synthetic performers.
The AI-powered Hell Grind was born in May at the Marché du Film in Cannes (a separate side event to the famous Cannes Film Festival). The brainchild of Higgsfield AI, a startup that runs an AI platform for creators, brands, and marketers, it was conceived as a way to showcase the technology’s potential as more than just a short video creation tool. The company, which surpassed a $1 billion valuation earlier this year, spent about $500,000 to make the 95-minute film, with much of the budget going toward computing costs. Hollywood productions regularly feature AI in parts, but Hell Grind is the most high-profile film made entirely with AI-generated visuals.
Higgsfield created and edited about 100 hours of content, leveraging a group of in-house creatives and outside filmmakers using very specific text prompts (typically around 3,000 words). Higgsfield CEO Alex Mashrabov told me that he thought the film was significantly less effective.
The result is a visually impressive film with a passable plotline that falls somewhere between a video game and an effects-heavy project like Planet of the Apes.
Action scene from the movie “Hell Grind.” Courtesy of Higgsfield AI.
“This is a new workflow, and it’s very important to us in terms of showing the world what’s possible,” Mashrabov told viewers at this week’s screening. “The creative process looks different when you can actually go back and iterate with AI and express exactly the emotion the creative director had in mind.”
At various points in Hell Grind, I was taken out of the story when a character did something I found offensive. For example, in one scene, when Rocco holds up a slice of pizza, it looks like he’s encountering the food for the first time. The synthetic children in the film were generally creepy, and the AI-generated voice work always felt inconsistent (one character seemed to oscillate between a British and American accent, for example).
Still, it was hard to shake the feeling that the talented AI teleprompter might soon become a coveted player in Hollywood.
While I don’t expect AI actors or screenwriters to play a major role in the production of films like “Taal” or “One Battle After Another,” I have a feeling this technology will be hard to resist for budget-conscious executives looking to speed up film production. This is especially true for genres like action and science fiction, where visual effects budgets can be a major constraint. And this technology could open doors for independent filmmakers with big ideas but small budgets.
“Budgets and opportunities are not equally distributed around the world,” Mashravo said. “We hope this will inspire the next generation of creativity.”