> the back of Threepio’s golden head: the reflected light fills the screen, dims as the giant metal door closes behind them—just before we hear the sound of the door’s teeth meet, the light goes—for a long second, we see nothing but the faint, oval-shape of Threepio’s head, then on either side of Threepio’s head, appear the grotesque faces of the palace guards: skin the texture of a slug’s and slick with a sweat of mucus, pink-rimmed snouts, stupid-marble eyes, and yellowed tusks protruding from their lower lip.
It's not long before we can feed that script to one of the AI engines and tell it to make a Lynch movie out of it. For other directors I don't know, but for Lynch that would be quite something.
This actually seems far less likely than for other directors. Lynch's style is so idiosyncratic it has its own name. AI has predominantly been good at synthesizing a broad gesture at a wide range of styles. Not really suited for recreating the effect of such a singular artist.
That's why I think it's a better challenge. AIs can create generic looking scenes but trying to do something that looks like a unique director style is more interesting.
A lot of people in this thread have an extremely facile understanding of art, David Lynch, and the capabilities of generative AI, but I look forward to someone returning to this thread in 10 or 100 years or whatever to link me to a convincing example.
> A lot of people in this thread have an extremely facile understanding of art,
I don't think anyone would deny Lynch had his own, distinct Lynch-ian stye. A lot of people probably can't describe it clearly in words but they'll recognize when they see it. So I think it's plausible LLMs "getting the gist" of the style and asking them to generate something "Lynch-ian" might just work.
I propose a Turing test for it. Show a bunch of people unfamiliar with most of his work some of his works mixed in with some generated, and see if they could tell which is which. It will fail today, but I think in 10 years we'll get there, even if not sooner.
His style is being ambiguous and surreal, making everything dream like. It has a pattern just lie anything else and I think AI would be able to emulate and apply it just fine.
Well that's one of the wonderful things about saying "one day AI will be able to do x," you don't really need to have any evidence for some segment of the population to believe it's not just plausible but inevitable.
It's not just wild speculation, it's based on the observation that Lynch's style of films all fit a pattern and have certain traits, which is exactly why AI would be able to learn it and imitate it.
Besides this just... not really being true of Lynch's films, it also misses how a Lynch film came to be. David Lynch didn't pull out a notepad and go, "Okay, time to write a Lynch film." He just decided to make a film and made it the way that made the most sense to him. His perspective on film-making, on people, compassion, curiosity etc. led the creation. At best (and this is seriously stretching the definition of "not just wild speculation") I think it's more likely you get something that exhibits formal qualities that remind someone of some of David Lynch's works, probably a fairly incoherent and incongruous mash of tropes, like a particularly bad episode of Family Guy. I don't know if I'd even credit that with praise as dismal as "imitation", it would be more like a visual laundry list. I'd love to see something that would cause someone to believe otherwise besides "AI learned how to string a sentence together, therefore one day it will be able to learn and produce literally anything," but it eludes me.
> Besides this just... not really being true of Lynch's films,
I'd say it is, although I can understand it is anti-thetical to what his fans get out of his films. Objectively though, I think you can certainly make a list of defining traits and show a pattern.
> David Lynch didn't pull out a notepad and go, "Okay, time to write a Lynch film." He just decided to make a film and made it the way that made the most sense to him.
I'm well aware, but it doesn't mean there isn't consistency or a pattern in his results. Plenty of filmmakers have a particular style and have elements that show up in anything they make allowing people to recognize their influence.
> At best (and this is seriously stretching the definition of "not just wild speculation") I think it's more likely you get something that exhibits formal qualities that remind someone of some of David Lynch's works, probably a fairly incoherent and incongruous mash of tropes, like a particularly bad episode of Family Guy.
So to discuss this further in detail, I think you'd need to at least try and define the ineffable qualities you think an AI wouldn't be able to recognize (keeping in mind eventually AI will be able to take things like your comment history into account to help it 'understand') to help it create something that could have been made by the man himself.
Just to note in case it's not obvious: there is no David Lynch Revenge of the Jedi script, because he didn't take the job (and probably wouldn't have been the writer even if he had?).
The "excerpts" here are snippets of the Dune and Return of the Jedi screenplays, with the bulk of the material, including the part you quoted, being the author's own work.
> It's not long before we can feed that script to one of the AI engines and tell it to make a Lynch movie out of it.
This is both, I suspect, literally true and substantively false: it will not ne long until you can ask for that and get something recognizable as audiovisual output. It will, OTOH, be long before you can do that and get anything that would satisfy anyone as a movie worth watching, and even longer if you want something satisfying to anyone with a reason for including Lynch in the prompt other than that he was a specific filmmaker who the model might recognize and do something with.
> It will, OTOH, be long before you can do that and get anything that would satisfy anyone as a movie worth watching, and even longer if you want something satisfying to anyone with a reason for including Lynch in the prompt other than that he was a specific filmmaker who the model might recognize and do something with.
I think soonish we'll get to clips that look Lynchian so that an average person might recognize it as such. Kind of like DALL-E can emulate styles and people might say "aha, looks like it was painted by such and such". But with a full movie, not sure, will the true fans accept it as anything connected to Lynch? Probably never, and will even hate it with a passion...
But then there are fan edits of Dune, for instance: https://fanedit.org/dune-1984-the-alternative-edition-redux-.... Ok what if the edits were made by the AI? I can see accepting that. Next step is what if it's not a pure cut, but maybe it corrected a few scenes which looked odd, or the character wasn't fitting it gets spliced out of the move altogether, I really don't know, I might like that I suppose.
I just want simple things, like transforming the stop-motion shots in Terminator 1 to motion shots. I don't want upscale or anything, just light touches. It's the only thing in the movie which doesn't look gorgeous.
Why not make something new instead? Why is the impulse to use AI to generate more of the same old stuff we’ve already seen, just with a different look?
It's not long before we can feed that script to one of the AI engines and tell it to make a Lynch movie out of it. For other directors I don't know, but for Lynch that would be quite something.