Star Wars has been a huge influence on visual effects in cinema. Lucasfilm and its VFX division Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) have been pushing the boundaries for decades, from motion control cameras to virtual production and a deepfake Peter Cushing in Rogue One, creating some of the best CGI movie moments in the process.
But many fans will be hoping these pioneers' current vision of the future of VFX is uncharacteristically wonky after they released an experimental AI-generated short called Star Wars Field Guide. Fans and artists alike have been astonished by the presentation during a TED Talk.
"What happens when you put the latest AI tools in the hands of talented artists?" asked Rob Bredow, ILM's chief creative officer and Lucasfilm's senior vice president of creative innovation. Erm... it seems you get the same kind of slop we've seen seeing for years in every presentation about AI image generators: a bunch of crossbred animals.
As one of the biggest names in VFX, Industrial Light & Magic is the last company I thought we would see peddling AI, particularly in such an unimaginative and half-baked way. Those in the audience must have been checking the date to see if wasn't 1 April.
Rob begins the talk, which was picked up by 404 Media, with a brief history of ILM's VFX innovations over the years. He also touches on the fears many in the industry have that "AI is coming" for their jobs.
Then, apparently with the aim of showing that AI still needs talented artists behind it, he premiered "a short created by an artist using the latest generative AI tools so you can see the trajectory we're on and the trajectory we want to be on".
The two-minute Star Wars Field Guide, supposedly set on a new Star Wars planet, is basically a compilation of barely moving AI-generated animal crosses: a peacock-snail, tiger-bear, a spider-monkey and a whole bunch of animals that are coloured blue for some reason. A rousing Star Wars score tries to elicit emotion in the hope nobody realises we've already seen imagery like this in ads for dozens of AI image generators.
None of the creatures looks like it belongs in Star Wars, and none of them is remotely creative. They're merely bits of existing Earth animals combined in the most basic way, demonstrating that AI can't generate anything genuinely new.
Sure, the germ for many famous sci-fi creatures may have come from imagining chimeras of existing animals, but they were iterated on. And because they were created by humans rather than AI, the results weren't literal, and they ended up looking like genuinely novel alien species.
Even the quality of the AI output in the video is nothing more impressive than what we've already seen in demos by Adobe, Meta, Runway and others. Hence why the applause at the end felt embarrassingly muted. If this "a new era of technology" as Rob says, Star Wars doesn't have much creative life left in it.
I get that the idea is that this is the start of something bigger, and perhaps the choice of demonstration is what went wrong here, causing the message to get lost. On the other hand, if the point was supposed to be that VFX is safe from AI, the presentation may have succeeded, just not in the way that was intended.
For more movie and VFX news, don't miss the new Superman trailer and the leaked Kung Fury 2 footage.
