Some facets of a trip to see an AI-generated movie mimic seeing a regular one. You’re seated in a theater, one thankfully with reclining chairs. Living, breathing human beings take up the seats surrounding you. A bowl of popcorn, ostensibly popped by humans, sits in front of you.
But everything you see and hear on the screen, from the characters traversing a city on skateboards to the pizza they eat between battle scenes to many of the songs scoring the film, is generated by AI. It is, in a word, surreal.
Such surrealism is what I endured last week when I took the A train down to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood for a private screening of “Hell Grind,” the 95-minute action adventure film produced by San Francisco AI startup Higgsfield AI. The film — which premiered last month at the Marché du Film, the Cannes Film Festival’s marketplace for films, as the main festival has banned wholesale AI-generated films — is focused on a team of four orphaned bandits led by Roco who attempt a heist before they inadvertently gain superpowers, battle an evil Japanese-speaking demon that captures one of their members, Lulu, to an underworld, launch a quest to find certain “artifacts” to open a portal to said underworld and battle the demon once again to try rescue their friend. No pressure!
