/IMAGINE | AI Short Film About Social Media Unreality

To explore themes of solitude and our artificial online existences, filmmaker Anna Apter created this short film with the sole assistance of AI tools and her dog. A selection of Short of the Week, the web&leading curators of quality short films. Subscribe to S/W on YouTube! ? /IMAGINE Dir. Anna Apter "What will AI-first art look like? Amidst the memes and the jokey homages, film and video works that articulate a distinct creative vision are underway, ones that move past the novelty of the process to enable new modes of expression. We’re still so easily impressed by the “how” of AI-assisted work that we’ve yet to fully engage the “what”, but that time is coming. I do think how we judge AI works will, ultimately, be pretty similar to how we’ve always judged art! Does it move you? Does it make you think? Do you appreciate the aesthetics? By these criteria, /Imagine, by French actress and filmmaker Anna Apter is an unqualified success. A mere 2min long, the film’s imagery is generated almost entirely by Midjourney, yet the quality of its script and art direction, plus the way it reflexively ties the means of its creation into its larger thematic points is very impressive. At its heart, /Imagine is a fairly familiar critique of the deleterious effects of social media on youth. In execution, it is anything but familiar. We begin with a blinking cursor. The film is a voice-over, possibly of “Anna” herself, supplying a text prompt to an AI generator. “Imagine…” she begins...