Neill Blomkamp irks fans with his new AI-short film

Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp built his reputation on sci-fi films like the critically heralded District 9, and the divisive Chappie and Elysium. His latest, "Nightborne," a 13-minute short film generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence, is getting a largely negative reception.

Loosely adapted from the 2006 hard sci-fi novel Echopraxia, "Nightborne" was built using ByteDance's Seed 2.0 video model, which animated the faces and voices of 32 real people who signed likeness agreements. Per the video's own description, human artists produced the concept art, presumably so it could then be fed into the machine.

The plot of "Nightborne" follows a US Army pilot, who, after being shot down in the Middle East, is pronounced brain-dead and reanimated by the military as a mind-controlled super-soldier. There are also scenes of a journalist speaking with a film crew about his discoveries, as well as scenes of the scientist running the program.

That the short turns real human beings into digital puppets to tell a story about the military turning a human being into a soulless killing machine is an irony apparently lost on Blomkamp and his collaborators.

Blomkamp's fans have not been kind in response. Comment sections on Instagram and YouTube skew heavily negative, with many mourning what they see as Blomkamp's fall from grace.

"Guys, be nice to Neill, he spent the entire afternoon prompting this," read one top comment on YouTube.

"It's actually impressive how you can throw this much talent at a project, and it still ends up looking like soulless slop," read another.

Whatever one thinks of AI-generated films on their own merits, Blomkamp now joins Darren Aronofsky as another high-profile director betting on generative AI as cinema's next act. That bet is facing real headwinds, considering Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey just posted a $100+ million opening weekend. A reminder that audiences are still very much willing to show up for something people actually made. Or you can watch the AI-generated version that Elon Musk wants to make.