The AI kept getting things wrong. In one shot, Tiggy looked inexplicably jacked. In another, his back was too dry. When the filmmaker told one piece of software to give the back of Tiggy\u2019s head \u201cfrog-like skin,\u201d it superimposed an entire frog\u2019s face. The AI seemed to resist depicting Tiggy naked, but Tiggy does not wear clothes. When the director asked for a \u201cshort shirtless alien,\u201d he got an error message, presumably because of the tool\u2019s safeguards. \u201cBecause I said the word shirtless,\u201d he guessed.<\/p>\n
Narratives around AI tend to be all-or-nothing: Either we\u2019re cooked or it\u2019s all hype. Watching the filmmaker work with AI software\u2014morning iced coffee in hand, brown hair and beard lightly unkempt\u2014is quirkier and less dramatic than all that. It\u2019s like dropping in on puppy school<\/a>. The tools keep ignoring instructions, making odd choices, or veering entirely off-course. But with care and patience, he reins them in, eventually coaxing out eight minutes of densely scripted original TV.<\/p>\n In this case, those eight minutes constituted the latest episode in the sci-fi cinematic universe that the filmmaker has created under the name Neural Viz<\/a>. The project started in 2024 with a mockumentary web series called Unanswered Oddities<\/a>, a talking-head TV show from a future where the Earth is inhabited by creatures called glurons, who engage in Ancient Aliens\u2013style speculation about their human predecessors. Each episode explores a different (and badly mispronounced) aspect of “hooman” civilization, like America, exercise, or the NFL. At first it seemed like a funny, self-contained bit.<\/p>\n But then the universe, known as the Monoverse, started to expand. Neural Viz churned out episodes of different series from the same gluron TV network, Monovision: a documentary cop show, a UFC-style show about fighting bugs. Then came podcasts, street interviews. Subplots and arcs started to emerge between videos, with romances forming, religious cults lurking in the background, and grainy archival footage surfacing about the true circumstances that wiped out humanity. Before long, the filmmaker had built an entire world with its own language, characters, and lore, all of it made with AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The AI kept getting things wrong. In one shot, Tiggy looked inexplicably jacked. In another, his back was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,7269,363,364,51695,409,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-63448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-animation","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-longreads","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}