This charming short places the "art" in artificial intelligence

What do you get when you blend an AI image generatorwith an elderly woman of 98 years named Lillian and Harry Potter? The result is 'HAIRY POUTER,' a short film made by director Chris Carboni. It blends increasingly fun AI-generated images and a an analysis of the classic book written by a funny nonagenarian.

"Lillian is my grandma," says Chris. "She has always enjoyed a great connection and I've been recording her reviewing for around 10 years."

In the time that AI images generators first began to take over the internet at the mid-2022 point, Chris saw the stars meet to create a project that could leverage his hours of audio and help him explore his relationship with this emerging technology. "I had a lot of conflicted feelings about [these generatorsthat I wanted to explore] and was searching for an opportunity about them," explains Chris. "At the moment, I was talking to my grandmother who just finished reading 'Harry Potter,' that I had bought for the occasion as a birthday present."

The film was put together in a flash thanks to a fast crew "my grandmother along with my wife and me, as well as our sound designer and composer who was the complete team" - and the rest is (futuristic) history. With the power of AI continue to evolve at the speed of light and we sat down with Chris Carboni to talk all things AI and art.

The quality of the images that you see in this video is amazing. What tools did you employ to get the outcomes?

Chris Chris: We used MidJourney as it was in the first version. The first step was to enter Lillian's words unedited and seeing what it would generate based on just the quotes in the interview. We loved the artistic style that it had come up with after only a couple of rounds of creating new images. Therefore, I had written down the hallmarks of its design direction, based on the picture it produced.

The first picture we saw was Ron wearing his long, wavy hair, and he looked amazing. I believe it was kind of shoulders up and it was clear that he didn't wear a shirt. It was like he looked like a beach god. Then, when we saw a shot of Harry and Ron with each other, it showed them almost embracing each other which we were thinking, "Oh, this is incredible."

The AI was allowed to create these fascinating theories, and once we hit on one that we liked We pushed it to go along with that particular thread in order to remain entertaining, and simple to follow.

Was it like applying AI to this very human tale?

Chris Chris I created this film I had some degree of concern [about AI]. However, I definitely enjoyed working with it for this film. I think that was the best use case for this project since the application of AI was a key element of the story.

It was enjoyable, fascinating and memorable. The project was about the unpretentious but adorable connection between AI and humans. The project was not one that we decided to not put a dollar into illustrators and decided to employ Artificial Intelligence instead. This was a project in which the application of artificial intelligence was essential to the story telling.

Do you feel you are comfortable with AI becoming a creative force?

Chris Chris: There's definitely something compelling there, but it's gotten obviously so much more difficult since the generators are used in a wide variety of ways. They've been fully unleashed, and expanded into all of these different applications. So, the topic is now a bit more complicated than I feel that it was once from my personal knowledge and opinions about it.

Anyone who is in a creative space will have to find out the implications of this for their work, and adjust to the fact that the world is likely be changing. And with that change will come opportunities to do incredible innovations, as well as the automation of much of the work we artists love. This makes me sad, but I'll be truthful. I am worried about art being devalued and commodified further than it already is.

Would you use this technology to help you in the future?

Chris Chris: Well I am a huge fan of making use of AI to improve my email and as a sort of personal assistant that can answer questions, explaining complicated concepts as well as handling repetitive tasks. In terms of creative work however, I'm not sure I comprehend. I certainly don't want to use it in a way to replace the human artist in my team. I believe that the results aren't as great.

A large part of the work we do relies on collaboration with other people. A project produced from start through to end using AI is reliant on prompts from one person's brain. In some cases that might be great, but generally speaking projects benefit from an entire team of professionals who work together, each with their own unique expertise and unique insights on the table.

The most appealing use-cases I have seen are those that involve generating preliminary ideas as well as kicking off creativity. Maybe for raising funding to fund a project or showing some initial concept work to get something off the starting point. But for animation it is essential to have complete control over the minutiae of a scene, both for creative and production-related motives. That level of control is probably coming however, it's not that far off.