Defying criticisms of ‘slop’ and ‘theft’, the growing culture of AI-powered creativity is attracting interest from Hollywood
In a former hemstitching workshop where artisans sewed pleats for Stockholm’s 19th-century bourgeoisie, a distinctly 21st-century craft is taking root: AI film-making.
One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as “automated slop” or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked.
This was a production from a new era by Gossip Goblin, the nom de plume of a tiny kitchen-table AI film-making outfit led by Zack London, whose audience is growing fast – he calculates more than 500m views.
Gossip Goblin’s speciality is grotesque and satirical sci-fi shorts that riff on the absurdities and anxieties of the technological zeitgeist, all knocked together at low cost in London’s Stockholm apartment using off-the-shelf AI tools and with a team of eight collaborators dotted across Europe. But this is no longer a hobby. Heavyweight LA talent agents, movie producers, screenwriters, studios, streamers and A-list actors are clamouring to get involved, with some leading Hollywood players boarding flights to Stockholm in the coming weeks, intrigued not least by Gossip Goblin’s surging Instagram and YouTube audience numbers.
