THERE’S REALLY NO nice way to put this: In his new film, Zone Out, Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch makes you want to do just that. It’s not simply that he talks about having sex with a jar of salsa, it’s also that he looks absolutely ghastly. His face appears to flicker in and out of the head that houses it; his mouth, normally in a wry downturn, droops and then disappears. His co-star, Elisabeth Gray, doesn’t fare much better: a mustache—someone else’s—finds a home above her lips.

The director of the film, who goes by “Benjamin,” was not available for comment. Benjamin is an AI—one that created Zone Out in a matter of 48 hours, piecing it together out of thousands of hours of old films and green-screen footage of professional actors. The resulting movie, created for a two-day AI filmmaking challenge, is not going to win awards.

But it’s still impressive. And the real live humans who made Benjamin are taking steps toward automating video creation at a time when artificial intelligence and face-swapping technology are enabling a sketchy line-blur between what’s real and what’s not. Fictional narratives, you could say, are never real, but the people who write them, direct them, and portray characters in them are. Benjamin changes that.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com