Sci fi author Lavie Tidhar: Using Midjourney to explore ethics of AI

Award-winning science fiction writer Lavie Tidhar is a busy man. Between his personal writing and enhancing initiatives, together with The Better of World SF anthologies, he works with animator Nir Yaniv on sci-fi movie collection by way of their firm Positronish, together with Mars Machines, about “a toaster and a espresso pot on Mars”, and movie noir Loontown. However when Yaniv approached him about one more venture, creating one thing utilizing the AI image-generation program Midjourney, he mentioned sure – with just a few situations.

The end result, Welcome to Your AI Future! – which you’ll be able to watch under – is an unsettlingly surreal brief movie, set in a future by which the world has been destroyed, however one human has been discovered by an apparently well-meaning synthetic intelligence, which is eager to assist – to one of the best of its capacity.

Alison Flood: Who got here up with the concept to your newest venture?

Lavie Tidhar: The entire thing began as a result of I’ve a buddy who’s a sport designer and he began telling me about Midjourney with nice enthusiasm. I believed it was wonderful and informed Nir to go and play with it. We had been very conscious of the moral discussions happening, however we had no intention of doing something with it.

Then Nir phoned me up. And he mentioned, if we might do one thing like La Jetée, the French sci-fi movie from the 60s, manufactured from single pictures, that might be form of fascinating. The plot of La Jetée includes a person time-travelling from a post-apocalyptic Paris to our current – it was the inspiration for 12 Monkeys. We simply preferred the technical side of it: are you able to inform a cinematic story utilizing solely nonetheless pictures?

My first response was no. Then I believed, what if we use AI instruments to make a movie about AI – that makes it fascinating! I got here dwelling and began writing. It’s mainly a futuristic AI attempting to speak to the final surviving human. My different word was, if we do this, then we’ve to make it possible for the narration can also be achieved by AI. The audio is made up of two AI-generated voices, female and male, which can be merged collectively into a really disconcerting voice.

So each picture is a results of Nir asking Midjourney to give you one thing associated to a scrap from the story, is that the way it labored?

Sure. I needed to write instructions into the capturing script. What kind of pictures, what kind of feeling they should evoke. Nir then sat for 3 complete days and generated 1000s of pictures. I don’t understand how he didn’t go mad. Quite a lot of it was about really kind of forcing the AI into the correct place. I feel Nir used himself as a seed picture for some pictures for the human.

We had been actually leaning into the “uncanny valley” side of it. So every picture is improper indirectly. My favorite bit is I wrote in these rabbits, the place the AI is attempting to relax the human by exhibiting footage of rabbits. And it’s so disturbing! The concept is that the AI is attempting to do its finest, nevertheless it by no means fairly will get all the things proper.

What are your issues round AI? As a author, do you have got worries about it encroaching in your territory?

These AI techniques, they don’t have creativity. They should be directed to do something, they will’t give you something new. I don’t fear about some other author on the planet, I don’t continuously fear that I’m in competitors with the 8 billion individuals who is likely to be higher than me at writing, as a result of the one factor that you may convey to any form of artwork is your self. It’s that distinctive viewpoint. And these instruments don’t have that.

There are professional worries about companies utilizing AI as a substitute of human artists to save lots of prices. However from a inventive perspective, it’s actually nothing greater than a instrument that we acquired to make use of and needed to actually work with it to attempt to get the impact we wanted.

Do you have got any plans for different initiatives like this with Midjourney?

No – however I feel it was enjoyable to play with. I believed the end result was actually fascinating and we wished to leap in on the dialog whereas it was occurring, as a result of it’s shifting so quick.

It’s a priority that in the event you might be changed with a machine, you may be changed with a machine. However folks mentioned the identical factor concerning the digicam. They mentioned the identical factor about Photoshop, and we nonetheless want artists, and we nonetheless want folks to convey that distinctive perspective.

It can take a interval of adjustment, however we’re nowhere close to the precise basic synthetic intelligence that we’ve within the movie. I simply wished to speak about – and I see this from AI scientists as properly – the concept that AI goes to take over the world and destroy humanity. That appears such a Seventies catastrophe film sci-fi model of the longer term to me. If something, any evolving AI goes to be so closely depending on people.

So I wished to speak concerning the thought of AI simply attempting to assist and perhaps getting it catastrophically improper. The movie doesn’t counsel that it was the AI that triggered the destruction of the planet. It was individuals who did that, and the AI form of simply misses them.