"Oedipus King of AI" is a very ancient, deeply human story — told through a very young entity born of probabilistic mathematics. A meeting between modern AI technology and a founding myth. Between what the human has begotten, and what makes the human.
I chose the subject, adapted the play, wrote the screenplay. Then asked AI to generate every image and every voice in the film, following my directions.
But a great deal is not AI, and I hold to that. The music, the sound effects — a Foley artist in a studio, sounds under license —, all the post-production — editing, color grading —, and the mix, done in a studio. I adapted Sophocles. The voices, for their part, are generated from licensed and paid actors' voices — a casting.
The intention at the heart of this co-creation was not to imitate the real, nor to reproduce traditional cinema. It was to work with AI and its deepest nature — statistical.
A traditional film, too, is a co-creation: between a director and his teams. The usual means of cinema impose a substantial distribution and division of labor — directing, acting, shooting, post-production.
"Oedipus King of AI" was not produced this way. It remains a film: it assembles moving images and sounds in service of a narrative. But its co-creation runs through AI. The gesture, however, would not fundamentally change: setting up the conditions for the actors to give their best. Here, those actors gather within the AI, which embodies the role it is given. Direction takes the form of prompts and specifications. Some things remain unspoken, and one can provoke happy accidents.