Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in theaters today.
A couple of days ago, a self-described AI movie studio Fountain 0 announced their AI generated movie Odysseus: The Fall. It was generated by content creator Ash Koosha, who’s solely responsible for the movie.
First of all, I’m not going to comment on the AI movie because I haven’t seen it. I wanted to comment on part of Koosha’s director’s statement:
“It’s a threat to nothing except distance, the distance between a person with a story and the means to tell it. More films will be made this way; that seems certain to me, the way it was certain once that anyone would be able to shoot on the camera in their pocket. What has to survive the change is the only thing that ever mattered: the story, and the reason for telling it. A tool has never made a film worth watching. A person with something urgent to say has made every one of them, and that won’t change, whatever they’re holding when they say it.”
This statement is nothing more than defending generative AI while ignoring what it actually does; using millions of trained images and videos to formulate your generative AI output. All Koosh did was type out instructions on a keyboard… he has not created anything.
Koosh argues the only thing that ever mattered was the story. So, does that mean he sat down and wrote out his script? Or did genAI do that for him as well? Are there storyboards? Drafts? Rewrites? Since he’s the writer, director and producer of this movie, there has to be notes or checklists somewhere?
In Koosh’s statement, he says that a tool has never made a film worth watching. That spits on the face of a century’s old industry filled with men and women who dedicated their lives to create meaningful films. Fountain 0’s AI movie studio omits the tools necessary to produce impactful cinema.
So, there it is… Koosh and Fountain 0 have licenses to sell. Throw away your tools so you can sign up for their generative AI movie creator.
Now that I’ve picked Koosh’s statement apart, I can conclude by saying that as a lover of cinema, and as a level-headed person, I will pass on watching Odysseus: The Fall because that is my option. The golden rule will remain: keep generative AI out of creative spaces.
