Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp built his reputation on sci-fi films like the critically heralded District 9, and the divisive Chappie and Elysium. His latest, "Nightborne," a 13-minute short film generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence, is getting a largely negative reception.Loosely adapted from the 2006 hard sci-fi novel Echopraxia, "Nightborne" was built using ByteDance's Seed 2.0 video model, which animated the faces and voices of 32 real people who signed likeness agreements. Per the video's own description, human artists produced the concept art, presumably so it could then be fed into the machine.
The plot of "Nightborne" follows a US Army pilot, who, after being shot down in the Middle East, is pronounced brain-dead and reanimated by the military as a mind-controlled super-soldier. There are also scenes of a journalist speaking with a film crew about his discoveries, as well as scenes of the scientist running the program.
You May Also Like
That the short turns real human beings into digital puppets to tell a story about the military turning a human being into a soulless killing machine is an irony apparently lost on Blomkamp and his collaborators.
Mashable Light Speed
