"The King's Secret"

That's Osvaldo Rivera Vazquez's short movie from Runway's Gen:48 competition. They say that when you get old enough, everything reminds you of something else. Looking at these short AI-animated films put me in mind of the late 1980s when desktop publishing meant that anyone could put out a magazine or publish a book. 

It's a revolution. Yesterday, you needed a fair bit of money to put together a movie. Now a writer can realize their vision without having to learn about animation, framing, editing, and all the other skills. That's a good thing because there are many very creative people, previously locked out from any means of getting their work in front of the public, who will now be able to flourish.

But it's double-edged. When publishing had its gatekeepers, maybe a hundred thousand new books came out each year. Now that figure is in the millions. At such scales Sturgeon's Law proves not to be linear. Along with the nuggets of gold like "The King's Secret" will come a tsunami of mud, to put it politely. An example is this -- trite, obvious, visually dull, mawkish. And it won the sodding Grand Prix. AI can make our dreams a reality, but it can't fix the problem that the popular taste is always for the shallowest and least original stories. What we really need is AI to make our minds more interesting, but that might take a little longer.