Late Night With The Devil creators address those viral AI images
Fans were disappointed to discover that the new, found footage horror film uses AI generated images for a few of its transitions
Aux News Late Night with the Devil
The temptation to use artificial intelligence instead of human artifice has come to haunt the film industry as much as any ghost. The latest title to come under fire for caving into this particular poltergeist is IFC Films’ Late Night With The Devil, a found-footage horror flick from Australian sibling duo, Cameron and Colin Cairnes, that follows the entirety of a fictional late-night broadcast from the ‘70s as it spirals out of control due to a Satanic possession.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity to let some artists sink their teeth into a cool and unique aesthetic, right? That’s not what the Cairnes brothers decided to do, at least not with a few specific images. Although the film officially releases in theaters tomorrow, early screenings revealed that it includes some clearly AI-generated images in cutaway scenes throughout its run.
Spurred on by a Letterboxd review from user “based gizmo” (via Variety), who urged viewers not to “let this be the start of accepting this shit in your entertainment,” disappointed fans took to the platform as well as Twitter/X to express their disappointment in the directors’ choice. “They didn’t care enough to make it, why should I care enough to watch it?” wrote one user. “This could have been a dream job for an artist like me,” wrote another, who actually took the time to recreate the image herself. Here it is as a salve:
In a statement to Variety, the brothers justified the decision as follows:
In conjunction with our amazing graphics and production design team, all of whom worked tirelessly to give this film the 70s aesthetic we had always imagined, we experimented with AI for three still images which we edited further and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film. We feel incredibly fortunate to have had such a talented and passionate cast, crew and producing team go above and beyond to help bring this film to life. We can’t wait for everyone to see it for themselves this weekend.
Especially as writers and actors just picketed for weeks on end over this particular issue, it will be interesting to see how this decision impacts the movie’s success at the box office—if it does at all. The David Dastmalchian-led film also isn’t the only title to incite widespread frustration over the unwelcome use of AI in recent months. In January, viewers noticed that Issa López’s True Detective: Night Country also used the technology to generate a few posters in the background of a scene, which the writer justified by saying it was “so sad up there (in Alaska where the show is set) that some kid with AI made the posters for a loser Metal festival for boomers” and that the writers were feeling “not kind” towards ChatGPT during the show’s production.
As hollow as these excuses may ring, we’re lucky that AI is still in the phase of its development where it’s relatively easy to tell when an image is, in fact, artificially generated. Hopefully, the movement instigated by the strikes and spurred on by backlash like this will curtail its momentum in the industry before it harms the livelihoods of the talented people who make movies.
66 Comments
that issa lopez headcanon fantasy about the kid in alaska making the AI posters is one of he funniest entertainment industry quotes of the past year
Man, such a fucking waste. This movie looks great. But I already refunded my ticket.
Yes. Let’s curtail the advancement of technology and the liberation of humanity form the necessity of all work by wasting human energy, intelligence, and life on creating an image of a dancing skeleton. Truly a fantastic use of the limited time and abilities we have.Cretins.
Oof. Those “this could have been a dream job for an artist”-type of tweets ring really hollow to me, since generally (albeit not always) an art department will hire all the graphic artists they need for a movie, and then those artists will create all of the art for the movie. And it’s probably one of the human graphic artists who wrote a prompt to generate the image in the final film.I’d love to have discussions about how underfunded and overworked artists might be pushed to use A.I.-generated graphics, or more broadly what specific legislation we should be passing to stop corporations from replacing union artists with non-union prompt writers, because just pointing and yelling at every instance of it popping up in a movie or TV show isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.“They didn’t care enough to make it, why should I care enough to watch it?” wrote one user.Like, come on, man. Really? This is the same rhetoric that popped up when the VFX industry was emerging. “If they didn’t care enough to build it for real, why should I care enough to watch it?” Movies are the product of collaboration between hundreds of people. You can criticize the use of A.I. without painting the entire film as the result of people who “didn’t care.”The sad part is the studios heard these complaints and simply shifted to lying about the use of VFX in movies, going so far as to hide blue screens and add CG elements to “behind-the-scenes” footage. And rather than saving practical effect houses and jobs, the VFX industry grew anyway, without the benefits and protection of a strong union or the respect and recognition from the rest of the industry. Can we be a little smart about how we talk about generative A.I. and its use in media?
“You can criticize the use of A.I. without painting the entire film as the result of people who “didn’t care.”
Well you see this is X so the person is just trying to get attention, they don’t really care about the issue and will probably watch the film anyhow.
Can we be a little smart about how we talk about generative A.I. and its use in media?A lot of us can, but I think the practical effect of the “some people scream their heads off if AI used in any capacity, even if it obviously isn’t hurting anyone’s jobs” approach is that it moves the Overton window on this topic toward making “don’t replace people with AI” acceptable, while leaving “talented artists can use AI-based tools and nobody really minds” on the table. Which is fine! LLMs or whatever aren’t the problem. Capitalists’ insistence on using every new tool to get rid of labor (even when the resulting output is worse) is the problem.
IMO “talented artists can use AI-based tools and nobody really minds” isn’t being left on the table, but I certainly hope that’s how everything shakes out.
Just like synths, drum machines and autotune didn’t kill music, ‘AI’ art won’t kill art.
Exactly. The real fight is against, as always, the capitalists trying to exploit labor. It’s not the tools at the bottom that’s the problem, it’s the tools at the top 😉
Absofuckinglutely, this guy gets it!
False equivalency much? It’s like saying a non-musician who had no skill typing in a few lines and the synth creating the beat, rhythm and music. It is not even close to the same thing
I guess if you don’t look at the statement as intended: Historically, whenever a tool comes along that makes work easier, people who are heavily invested in older methods of doing that work will fight against it. Historically, the people fighting against the new tools tend to be in the wrong. ‘AI’ generated art is not going to be the end of hand made art no matter how many articles blow things out of proportion for the sake of the clicks.
Artists have been using AI-based tools for quite a while now with nobody caring. Photoshop and Lightroom have plenty of AI-based tools for selecting, deleting, moving, or otherwise tweaking aspects of a piece, and they’re tremendously useful.
Purely generative prompt-based AI is the thing people take issue with.
I don’t mind talented artists using prompt-based generative A.I. I don’t mean just typing something into a prompt box and calling whatever the generator spits out “your” art, but using it as an element of a larger work? I don’t have a problem with that, though I think most people would, especially here.
Those “this could have been a dream job for an artist”-type of tweets
ring really hollow to me, since generally (albeit not always) an art
department will hire all the graphic artists they need for a movie, and
then those artists will create all of the art for the movie. You just described someone’s dream job right there. I’m not sure what’s hollow about that.
And it’s probably one of the human graphic artists who wrote a prompt to generate the image in the final film.
You have no way of knowing that, and I highly doubt that they would have paid an artist to put “70’s art style skeleton” into a search bar, first because anyone can do that, and second because if they were willing to pay artists to do something, it would be to, you know, MAKE ART.
Plus, I can’t help but think that it would be kind of humiliating for an artist to be told “here, type some words into the machine that’s replacing you, then watch as it craps out something not nearly as good as what you would have made.”
You just described someone’s dream job right there. I’m not sure what’s hollow about that.To me, the hollowness comes from suggesting that someone typed a prompt instead of hiring an artist to create a piece of art, when all we know is that the image was generated by an algorithm instead of a human being. You have no way of knowing thatI didn’t claim to know anything.and I highly doubt that they would have paid an artist to put “70’s art style skeleton” into a search bar, first because anyone can do that, and second because if they were willing to pay artists to do something, it would be to, you know, MAKE ART.Graphics come from the art department, so sure, anyone in the art department could have written the prompt, from the production designer to an art PA. Either way, everyone in the art department is paid per day (or week), not per piece of art produced. I’m not claiming they hired an artist with the explicit goal of having them write prompts all day; simply that they needed X amount of art produced by a certain day, and it may have been on a graphic artist to figure out how to meet that deadline.Plus, I can’t help but think that it would be kind of humiliating for an artist to be told “here, type some words into the machine that’s replacing you, then watch as it craps out something not nearly as good as what you would have made.”I’m sure it would be, and frankly, nothing about that scenario sounds implausible. Art departments are workplaces, subject to human pettiness and office politics, just like anywhere else. Though I think what’s more likely is that the art department was running behind, they needed the skeleton graphic, and someone in the art department used an MLM to meet their deadline.I don’t know much about Late Night with the Devil, but this article says it’s produced by IFC Films, so not a Disney, Sony, or Warner Brothers or some other giant studio with a mammoth corporation behind it. They specialize in indie films, and indie films often have to stretch every dollar, doing more with less. So, while I could be 100% wrong, I would bet a lot of money that the art department wasn’t budgeted properly, or had its budget cut because of whatever reason, and they couldn’t afford to hire another graphic artist to finish work on time.
“says it’s produced by IFC Films, so not a Disney, Sony, or Warner Brothers”It was produced independently. It is being distributed by IFC.
“subject to human pettiness and office politics” how many toxic work environments have you been in? I have worked for 40 years and never dealt with either other than one person’s “human pettiness” which resulted in a warning to them from HR and never happened again
I’m probably overestimating most people’s office experiences because I regularly read the Malicious Compliance subreddit, but in a production office, it’s not uncommon. Most people put up with it either because they’ve accepted that’s the culture or because most jobs only last a few months and then you could be working with a completely different team, so might as well chin up and bear it. And HR might be an option if you’re working for a studio, but for independent and low-budget productions, it may effectively not exist.
People even complained about Toy Story at the time like using computers for animation was wrong because people didn’t physically draw the frames.
I’m going to need a source on this. The only negative reaction I can recall from the time is that Toy Story heralded the death of traditional theatrical animation, and that proved largely correct as far as the theatrical animation Hollywood is willing to produce.
“They didn’t care enough to make it, why should I care enough to watch it?”Person supports Elon Musk and complains about a movie using ‘AI’ generated art. Give me a damn break.
“This could have been a dream job for an artist like me,”
I’d rather give a dream job to someone who doesn’t support Elon Musk, thanks!
Don’t you like Elon Musk?
Maybe. What’s today?
Just because they are on Twitter does not mean they support Musk.
IDK, I don’t think AI image generation for shit like brief interstitials is going anywhere.What’d be nice is if creators of art scraped by AI tools could reliably sue for compensation over copyright. AI tool takes your copyrighted skelly drawing and passes it off as original? That’s violation of your copyright, and that’d lead to the kind of noise that randos pay attention to.
When a massive element of the movie’s impact and success hinges on the verisimilitude of the presentation, fucking up interstitials actually kinda matters! It’s the graphic design equivalent of the costume department having the host wearing Crocs. The movie is designed to look like a lost 70s broadcast and they clearly put in plenty of effort elsewhere to nail that appearance, so there was no reason to fumble these.
“fucking up interstitials actually kinda matters!”Oh, fuck you.
Anyone whose copyrighted work is used in a database to train an LLM program should be able to sue over it. Yes, that won’t solve the problem, but it might help. Especially if the courts correctly put the onus on the AI developers to prove that they have usage rights to everything involved in their creation.
Given what we’ve seen on the music side, I think an artist who saw an image that drew from their work would find a pretty sympathetic court. Some expensive wrist slaps and studios will decide it’s not worth it to save five grand.
Adobe (and several other corporations) are creating data models of fully cleared and compensated art for A.I. image generation. I doubt it will be very lucrative for those involved but they will be compensated. Stock footage used to be extraordinarily expensive and hard to market or license. Now the price has gone down and it’s also easier to procure. It’s also open to almost anyone to contribute but now it’s hard to make a living off just stock photos. I knew at least one person in the early 90s who lived quite well off skyline photos of major cities that he took in partnership with a helicopter pilot.
What really gets me is that none of these productions using AI are up-front about it. They all try to sneak that shit in through the margins where they think no one will notice. The end credits of Secret Invasion, the creepy crowd scene in Prom Pact, the poster for Fallout the series, now this. None of these productions told anyone they were using AI, the internet had to figure it out and call them out on it. We keep being told that AI is this exciting new technology that everyone’s gonna love (and if you don’t, they’ll shove it in your face until they MAKE you love it) but if execs really believed that, they wouldn’t be so secretive about sneaking it in. They know this shit’s ugly, they know people don’t want it, but they figure they can hide it in the margins of various productions, basically stress-testing how much of this crap audiences will tolerate. Anything to avoid actually paying creators.
It’s fucked up and I’m glad the public isn’t putting up with it.
I mean I kind of see your point but…. how exactly would you have liked this to be flagged??? They used 3 AI images in what seems like brief or background spots. Do you need a disclaimer on the screen anytime AI is involved??? Should it be listed at the start of the movie?? No one was trying to sneak anything man… this is a low budget movie with I am sure an overstretched art department who used AI to fill in some minor gaps… it’s not some grand conspiracy. If I had to guess. I would say the directors and producers didn’t even know it was AI. If someone in Art just used it to start them off instead of starting from scratch and then edited to match it to what exactly they needed.
I would flag it with multiple superfluous question marks.
“Do you need a disclaimer every time AI is used on screen?”Yes. Yes i do
Do studios go through how much of their FX budget is computer generated versus practical? I don’t see a difference. CGI is much cheaper and faster than practical effects but I don’t remember people losing their minds over them. Should we expect a full budget of the film be released ahead of time so we can be sure the caterers and drivers are getting their fair share?
SO an artist ran the generation and then altered the AI image before it was final?
This is what I want AI for. I had to come up with 3 project charters this week. I used Copilot to give me the outlines and then edited the documents. Instead of 40 hours, it took 8.
That’s what happened here.
Presumably, since you did a job that should have taken 40 hours in only 8, you just worked on Monday and took the rest of the week off?
This may surprise you, but I did more work. Including holding stakeholder meetings, visual inspection of network gear, and got a free massage at work.You understand how tools work, right? I didn’t build ladders, or circuit boards or program my own word processing software. I’d much rather do actual useful things than copy paste headers and footers, and deal with formatting or grammar check, tone police, worry about being too technical etc.
If I was a contract worker, say an artist to pull a random job out of the ether, and was able to cut my time down to output more art for pay, then I would use AI to give me the rough bones of my skeleton before I went to work so I could earn more money.
So, then, you got paid more this week?
What are you talking about? Most labor is paid by the hour, why would they be paid more to do less work? As a freelancer, yeah you could get paid more because you’re spending less time on each project letting you get more projects done. But if you’re a salary worker, you’re expected to be putting in your 40 hours or so a week doing work. Just because you get your work done sooner doesn’t mean you don’t have to work or you get paid more.
Yeah, that was the point I was getting at (in a roundabout way).
I don’t see the value of AI for hourly workers, because being faster isn’t going to get them paid more. The business owners will certainly be happier because they’ll get more work for the same pay, but they aren’t going to give more time off or pay more money. If a worker asks for a raise, they’ll just say, “Why? The AI did half your work.”
If you’re a salaried employee, it’s the same thing. You can get more work done, but your pay isn’t going up. If your boss knows you use AI to do your workload, surely they’ll just expect you to do more work than you were doing before. You won’t get a higher salary or more vacation time. (I suppose you could lie and say you did your work without AI, but the truth would certainly come out at some point.)
Long term, new employees will surely be paid less because they won’t need as much skill or know-how.
Now, as was said, freelancing is surely where the perks of AI come in, right? Except, as a freelancer, I can say, all the AI craze has really done is ensure there is less work available, because companies can pay for work by a professional or they can get cheap, shitty AI work for free. The choice is easy for them. They will hire someone like me to edit that AI shit, but that just means there is less writing and editing gigs available, so the rates I used to be able to charge, based on my experience and ability, are too high for companies that no longer see the value in my experience and ability. I either lower my rates or lose out to someone who’s going to use AI to do all the work anyway.
(Side note: I was hired by a client to edit human writing, but after I went through the whole onboarding process and all the training, they switched to AI writing, so I was kind of stuck. But the AI writing is garbage; I don’t understand how anyone is impressed by it. I’ve been rewriting everything from scratch. I told the client that, but they aren’t going to ditch the AI. I suspect they’ll sooner ditch me and find someone who will tell them AI writing is good enough.)
So, in the end, the only people who seem to be materially benefitting from AI is owners. Sure, your day-to-day job might be easier, but if you’re not getting paid more or getting to have more time off (like, say, a 32-hour work week instead of 40), what difference does it make to you, the worker? Your boss will just give your work. The whole point of technology was to make us more productive so we had more freedom, but that’s clearly not happening.
I actually just asked for a raise and I got the 10% I was seeking with no pushback because my boss said “Your quality of work is excellent” and I work for a company that values employees. He said he didn’t have to argue with the Director either. I also got 50% larger annual bonus. That happened literally last week. You’re arguing we shouldn’t have ANY electrical outlets because some people will injure themselves.
Guess what? Shitty jobs and bosses are always gonna be shitty jobs and bosses. Your argument is the exact same argument that is used every time there’s new tech.
Are you telling us that you negotiated a 10% pay increase on the strength of your 500% productivity increase?
Yes, my point was obviously that no one would ever get a raise again. You did it, you proved me wrong. I clearly meant the world was changing overnight.AI is taking work away from people. That isn’t hypothetical, it isn’t hyperbole, it is happening right now. There are people struggling to find work right now, and one reason is because bosses/owners are hiring less or settling for free work. It might not be taking work away from you currently, for whatever reason (lucky you, I’m sure that will never change), but it is taking away work. And it’s doing it by poorly replacing real labor. The fact that you have already admitted things like grammar, tone, and technical aspects are too hard for you proves my point. You’ve given over half the work of writing to a predictive text algorithm. And as someone who has had to edit those algorithms’ work, I can tell you, their grasp of grammar and tone (and technical info) is poor at best. If AI is saving you time doing that for you, your writing was clearly never that strong.
Plus 10cities up there doesn’t seem to understand how labor markets work. If you’re salaried and become more productive then the employer is more profitable. Some portion of that (as you saw) will flow to employees because otherwise they’ll leave for a competitor that values that productivity improvement.Contract workers who become more productive can bid more work. The companies that contract them become more profitable, creating demand for those contractors. Hourly workers are a hybrid; a sea change in productivity increases profitability and thus upward pressure on wages. And that’s before you get into the market / societal benefits of goods and services being available at lower prices.
Do you think when a mechanic puts a wheel back on the car, they get paid extra if they do it with their fingers vice a power tool?
Presumably, you know how blatantly stupid and indefensible your position is, right?
Presumably you know how obvious it is that AI isn’t “just a tool.”
Tell me more about these, how did you pronounce it, ladders?
I mean, the way we do something about “AI” in contexts like this is not “people aren’t going to see the movie because it used AI” (since by all accounts it’s an excellent movie and most of the people involved had nothing to do with this decision) and more about “LLMs need to license the copyrighted materials they scrape for training” which changes the cost-benefit calculus.
I don’t think the backlash over things like this would be half as bad if there was a little more realism with what AI Art Software is and what it’s capable of doing. AI Art is great for making stuff that looks like everything else, what it’s incapable of doing is art.
This just feels so … unnecessary.
How much time would it have taken to get one of the artists already hired for the production to do this? Or, if not them, any of the artists on Etsy and elsewhere on the web who already sell this sort of work? Toss them a few bones and you could have something with this aesthetic, that looked better, for relative pennies, and no weird conversations around your well-reviewed movie right as it’s about to release.
What are you talking about? It was the graphics and production department, hired for the film, that made these.
Let me get this straight….a couple of still pictures, that were created with AI and then altered/corrected by an artist, is going to be enough for some people (who probably weren’t going to see the movie to begin) to loudly proclaim they won’t be seeing the movie. This isn’t like that horrible opening to Invasion on Disney+, it isn’t recreating dead actors and having them speak, it’s stupid little pictures that look like cutesy 1970’s transitions. I mean, thank you for the added free publicity for this movie by making a big stink about it and getting it in front of people who probably wouldn’t have heard about it before.
I’m pretty sure this site uses A.I. to write some of the articles, so this whole thing is pretty rich.
BarsantAI
I’d like to see THOSE instructions.
I know I’m late to the table, but the artist who drew the image still created AI art. The compositon, color, ect is still the same as the original. It is no different the artists editing the image after it was produced.
AI is good when used as an artists tool, not the artist themselves. In this case, it was. Most of the people reacting negatively are just being performative anyway.
I love all of the faux outrage and fearmongering from the people seeing their livelihoods affected! I bet you have ZERO issues though with AI when it benefits you though, right? So now AI is “good” in certain aspects but only “bad” when it affects your paycheck?LOL!
This movie fucking rules and I could not possibly care less.
People need to get over the fact that AI is a thing. It’s going to be a thing. It’s going to take jobs, it’s going to change commercial art and programming and all sorts of things. It’s also as bad as it will ever be. It’s going to get better from here and one thing after another and yet people still post things like this like they are so show going to stop it. It’s sad whining. Instead of catastrophizing about everything let’s find ways to build a better future for everyone with all the creative tools at our disposal including AI. Stop being silly people.
It doesn’t sound like the film didn’t have an art department. It sounds like the art department chose to use AI. I support greater AI regulation, but it sounds like the artists hired for the film used AI and then edited it after the fact. It’s not like the director just didn’t have an art department.
Four legs good, AI bad.
We need to talk about that man-spreading kid in the picture.
Male demon with huge ‘nads. Simple.
A commercial film is a business trying to do as much as possible with the budget they have. It’s not a program designed to give money to artists. They are not going to build a set to keep set decorators and painters employed if they can do it digitally.