‘Minority Report’ meets ‘Benjamin Button’ in real AI non-fiction storytelling frenzy ahead of us.
2024 may likely witness a surge in non-fiction films; for instance starting the super doc made from a bedroom near you.
The thread that binds these two Hollywood movies, ‘Minority Report’ and ‘Benjamin Button’ is the elasticity of time, presence and predictive reality. In one, human AIs, precogs, extrapolate the future. What if you could do that for the past? You can and do. In the other, we see a character in a Schrödinger’s cat scenario both age in time but de-age in youthfulness.
Can we predict what a character in our non-fiction film would look like to a close degree of accuracy in another time and setting? We can, as my thought experiment turned physical experiment shows.
Before further insight, some context. This time last year I’d completed working with Google and its EU fund for innovation in News. Several AI-driven projects made it through giving a glimpse of AI apps in new journalism.
In 2020 I launched a programme with my colleague JT enveloping AI on the back of a successful visiting professorship in Vancouver. One of our cohorts re-imagined a lesser known Martin Luther King speech and the circumstances of his delivery. That slice of story, and more, is soon to feature in a new tech-story project.
In 2015 I made a film near the Syrian border. We ran the film through IBM’s Watson which provided a patterned analysis of its reception and thus who would likely watch and enjoy the film.
These vignettes all feed back into where we are now. Last week I was invited to speak to Channel 4 board Directors and weeks earlier the British Screen Forum and students from NYU. Re-creating documentaries of our pasts without physical film ever shot, based around stated research, is as scary to my journalistic persona as it is exciting to my artist self.
The exciting bit. We’re crystallising visual memory. There’s a skill involved which involves markers and language, and I don’t doubt soon we’ll all be doing it. It will open up new stories, particularly for cultures that lack archival evidence.
The scary bit. What is truth? ‘The ground is complicated, strewn with abandoned fortresses and trenches, fought over by shifting alliances’, says Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford Uni. Truth as a means to tell what is not a lie or made up is a matrix of the social, realism, sources of knowledge and its boundaries. Princeton University’s Davis Centre has just closed its application process into scholarship around truth.
If I can create a film from memory — a feat that has antecedents in some way documentary makers re-imagine storytelling, what’s to say our own hallucinations of memory are recrystallised as truthful events?
Short film/ trailer (2 mins) below.
The platform www.videojournalism.co.uk
