The Mass: AI independently makes short film in 24 hours
The Mass is a short apocalyptic science fiction film. Although there are no unexpected plot twists, the film gives a good impression of what AI is capable of now.
The makers used three AI tools. The speech synthesizer Elevenlabs, the video scene generator Gen2 from RunwayML and the well-known ChatGPT-4.
How big is the AI’s share?
In themselves, the three Al tools that the makers of this short film The Mass have used are quite powerful. Therefore, it is quite plausible that most of the work has been done by an AI. But the key question is and remains of course: how big is that part exactly? Elevenlabs is indeed a likely source of the generated voice; this matched my own experiences with the tool. Gen2 also probably sounds like a source for the videos.
Speech synthesizer and video probably done by Ai
There are a few things that come into play when writing a movie script. It is likely that the maker himself glued the various scenes together by hand. There are many sci-fi movies whose plot broadly boils down to the plot behind The Mass, for example the Alien franchise. An alien life form arrives on Earth and ends up in the civilized world by reckless people, after which the Earth is destroyed.
Text The Mass seems to be written by people
I put it to the test and had the transcript of the short film analyzed by OpenAI’s AI detection tool. This indicated that the transcript was probably not written by an Ai. Whether the filmmakers’ claim is entirely correct is therefore the question. They probably did a lot of editing themselves on the ChatGPT generated movie plot, if it was written by ChatGPT at all. But also in this combination, AI in The Mass shows that it offers powerful possibilities for filmmakers.
