The future of artificial intelligence is not just chaos

The AI ​​kept getting things wrong. In one snapshot, Tiggy appears inexplicably exhausted. In another case, his back was very dry. When the director asked a show to give the back of Tiggy’s head “frog-like skin,” he superimposed the entire frog’s face. The AI ​​seems to resist photographing Tiggy naked, but Tiggy is not wearing clothes. When the director requested a “short, shirtless alien,” he got an error message, possibly due to the tool’s safeguards. “Because I said the word Without a shirt“, guess.

Narratives around AI tend to be all or nothing: either we’re cooked up or it’s all just hype. Watching the director work with an AI program – morning iced coffee in hand, brown hair and slightly unkempt beard – is a little more eerie and less dramatic than all that. It’s like going to puppy school. Tools continue to ignore instructions, make strange choices, or go completely off course. But with care and patience, he was able to rein them in, and eventually managed to get eight minutes of a densely scripted original television programme.

In this case, those eight minutes constitute the latest installment in the cinematic sci-fi universe the director has created under the name Neural Viz. The project began in 2024 with a mockumentary web series called Unanswered anomaliesa talky television show from the future where Earth is inhabited by creatures called Gloron, who engage in… Ancient aliens– The method of speculating about their human ancestors. Each episode explores a different (and severely mispronounced) aspect of “human” culture, such as America, exercise, or the NFL. At first it seemed like a funny, self-contained thing.

But then the universe, known as the monoverse, began expanding. Neural Viz has produced episodes of different series from the same gluron television network, Monovision: a documentary cop show, a UFC-style show about pest control. Then came the podcasts and street interviews. Subplots and arcs begin to emerge between the videos, with romance emerging, religious cults looming in the background, and grainy archival footage about the true circumstances that wiped out humanity. It wasn’t long before the director had built an entire world with its own language, characters, and lore, all crafted using artificial intelligence.

Neural Viz became a hit — a favorite of Redditors and AI nerds on Twitter — and then went viral, with individual videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and millions on TikTok and Instagram.

But beyond any popularity metrics, Neural Viz is a landmark achievement: it’s among the first pieces of AI filmmaking that doesn’t actually suck. The phrase “AI video” tends to conjure up the worst possible associations: hippos on diving boards, kids flying planes, Will Smith eating spaghetti, Trump and Barack Obama kissing. In other words, slither. The medium’s reputation is understandably negative, for both aesthetic and political reasons. This argument goes that robots will destroy Hollywood, destroy jobs, and drive audiences deeper into their algorithm-induced stupor.