THANK YOU FOR NOT ANSWERING (2023)

AI-generated art is simply one of the topics that is fueling the current Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) strike. Using various AI engines like ChatGPT or more, people are able to generate whole scripts for fake movies. Are they any good? Not really, no. But if you squint your eyes (and ears), you can see its resemblance to human creation. Kind of.

Enter THANK YOU FOR NOT ANSWERING. Written and “directed” (his words) by Paul Trillo, the short film twas AI-generated using only Image and Text Prompts on Runway’s Gen-2. But what is it about besides this exercise in technology and being a potentially cautionary tale?

As a man leaves a voicemail to a person from his past, he is flooded with fragments of his fading memory and imagines a life that could have been.

So is this good (on its own)? Could it pass some sort of critical Turing Test where you wouldn’t have known it’s AI generated? And what about how it all bodes for the future of art, film in particular?