Director: Vasco Diogo
Running time: 9mins
We are more than three years down the line, and umpteen alleged upgrades into the various AI tools that were said to be ushering in a new era of content creation in 2023. The imagery the technology weaves together (out of pre-existing, usually non-consenting work by real human artists) has apparently come along leaps and bounds in that time: the blurry-limbed homunculi of earlier tools has largely given way to a set of Disney-Pixar identikit figures, or overly-emoting approximations of mass-produced pop-stars/influencers that are convincing as long as you don’t dwell too long on how many necks they have, or how their pupil seems to be melting into their lower eyelid.
But that really summarises this whole sordid chapter in capitalism’s quest to divorce creative content from creative humans who require a wage. It’s good enough, as long as you don’t actually think about it. What does that say about someone who is willing to settle for something knitted together by a copyright-infringement machine; which still can’t manage to produce a consistent, let alone accurate, image; and which can only produce the most mediocre of content for the small price of boiling the ocean each time it has to recalibrate? Primarily, that they have given up. That isn’t just the case for the viewers who have submitted to wallowing in the slurry, either – it’s also the case for those behind the slop.
As a consumer, overwhelmed by an internet life now unavoidably flooded with AI-rendered crap, it can be exhausting to want better for yourself, or those around you. As a producer, meanwhile, who in the majority of cases is finding every door for funding slammed shut, or tightly managed by corporate and state sources; who has probably seen multiple passion projects buried for decades by man-made slop thanks to the algorithmic hegemony maintained by the likes of Google and YouTube; it can also be tempting to simply churn out the same kind of shit with AI – and hope something, somewhere, sticks.
This is the death of ambition.
The aptly-named Missing Meaning is the latest example of that process in action. Former experimental filmmaker Vasco Diogo has submitted two films to Indy Film Library previously, and they chart a tragic course on the journey. Walkscape took us on an abstract walk through the life-cycle of consciousness – utilising minimalistic editing techniques and basic filters to adapt visuals from a trip through a city, fading in and out of focus as our eyes ‘age’ throughout the film. Mixed Movie moved on from this, to deliver almost 10 minutes of low-resolution clips seemingly ripped from YouTube, and layered over poor quality stock images alongside clip art animations Diogo did not produce himself. Missing Meaning takes this a step further, by largely removing the montage aspect from proceedings, and leaving us to wonder what exactly it was he did to bill himself as a director.
The most common action Diogo seems to have taken is to type ‘prompts’ into a black box of an AI – which then produced an amorphous blob of imagery, waxing and waning, shifting between forms like a sloshing soup of human viscera. The results include questionable renditions of Disney’s Snow White and Ariel from The Little Mermaid flop and writhe on the tempestuous, liquid ‘floor’, it feels like watching a stomach-churning deleted scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing – as the creature tries to recreate either form “perfectly” without any cultural understanding or context clues as to how the raw materials should go together.
IF that had been intentional, then Diogo might have stood a better chance of justifying this experiment. These are images which are Missing Meaning, the fantasy-glue which can bind an idea together, but when absent sees the attempted construction of a coherent vision crumble and dissolve under the most minute pressure. We get glimpses of what ought to be when the AI flukes on the right concoction of tokens, but they cannot hold, because they come from a machine that doesn’t have any grasp on meaning – and never will.
That wasn’t Diogo’s intent, however. I know this, because for one, he repeatedly films himself through his phone-camera, the blankest of gazes on his face as he uses technology to augment his face in a number of ways that would be really impressive if even the most basic webcam technology hadn’t allowed this sort of thing for over 20 years. In these moments, it becomes clear that meaning is just as absent in Diogo’s own intent, as it is in the machine’s programming. Were he interested in going beyond that, these would be the chances to convey some grander meaning – if not through facial movement, then literally through speech. But he is all too happy to simply sit back and show us what the technology can “do” (and besides making me feel the worst motion-sickness of my life, I’m still not convinced what it can “do” is much at all).
Second to this, I know Diogo wasn’t trying to expose the vapidity of AI content because he attached a blurb in his submission form, which spends the duration of two conspicuously hyper verbose, em-dashed paragraphs excusing the inability of the technology to show us anything that could actually tell a story, or be used to infer any kind of meaning. No, this “psychedelic journey through fears, nightmares, fleeting heroes and luminous wonders — echoes of an infant’s radical openness to the world.”
In the old days, at least if an experimental artist pumped out some banal, effortless crap, they would need to figure out their own line of bullshit to help sell it. Here though, I am not even sure we got that.
Diogo’s submission is bad. I would suggest it is one of the worst films I have ever seen, if I felt it qualified as a film. But the fact that he used AI to rip off a number of copyrighted characters at a time long before Disney was stupid enough to sell the rights to OpenAI tells me that Missing Meaning does not even comply with Indy Film Library rules, which state that films which utilise imagery from an AI that they did not create themselves will receive an Unrated score. AI engines working on this basis regularly make non-consensual use of artists’ labour, and Indy Film Library is ethically opposed to such production methods. And we certainly have no interest in helping such production methods to improve – although, given from the abject lack of ambition on display here, the filmmaker has long abandoned any such ideas of improvement.