My most disastrous early attempt at AI video generation involved the sinking of The Titanic, which seemed appropriate.
I had just started using Runway for a TikTok campaign, and the written part of the prompt was “Cinematic, monochrome shot. The captain of the Titanic falls into the sea.” Here is the result:
Quite a lively bloke, given the circumstances. I don’t think I would have been anything like as chipper after hitting a colossal iceberg. But good on him.
I refused to give up, and decided to bring some of my ancestors back to life. Not with voodoo, you understand, but using Runway again.
I had a photograph of my great-great-grandfather Fred from 1902. He was a cabinet maker in London’s Soho, and I managed to animate his photo far more realistically than I had the captain of The Titanic (not a particularly high bar).
It went so well that I decided to visit the address of his workshop on the corner of Wardour Street and Tisbury Court to find out what had replaced it. Here is what I found (Fred is the one on the left).
Runway really was opening up a thrilling new world, both on screen and in real life.
After my Runway skills had really taken off (so to speak), I decided to try this AI video-real life combo in more ambitious style.
Cuthbert Huntsman is the world’s worst life coach, and the focus of six comedy novels. I had clocked up several million views on TikTok as him, spouting terrible advice on weight gain, confidence reduction, and timewasting, and I wondered whether I could create a motivational event as metaphorically disastrous as the actual sinking of The Titanic.
I persuaded my director friend Rob MacFarlane to film “Cuthbert” giving a pumped up, wildly inept speech in his virtual studio, and then spent countless evenings on Runway, generating the pained reactions of individual audience members to nonsensical ideas like “The 30-Day Lose Programme”, “5K to Couch”, and “Think Like A Bankrupt”.
It was not a TED Talk, but it was important to me that the audience members looked and behaved like comparably smug, upwardly mobile millennials plausibly residing in place like San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver – and I wanted their individual and collective suffering to be agonisingly evident.
Here is the whole thing: Self-Hindrance: The Full Talk
One earnest bloke at an AI convention told me that mixing real human comedy with AI was a throwback, and that things had moved on to talking cats. He may have had a point – cats talk far more sense than Cuthbert Huntsman.
If Cuthbert Huntsman has tickled your fancy, I write as him on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and you can subscribe for free here.
But I’ll be back on far more in-depth AI stuff on Thursday.
