Back in 2023 during the early days of AI video, an enthusiast generated an advert for the technology in which he made John Lennon’s likeness say things like “give prompt a chance” and “prompt is all you need”. Unsurprisingly, it was savaged.
Fast forward just three years and Steven Soderbergh, the director of the Ocean’s Trilogy, Traffic and Erin Brockovich, is using AI video for his upcoming documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. He says AI-generated scenes will make up 10 per cent of the movie – and he thinks the late Beatle would approve.
The documentary will set visuals to John Lennon’s last in-depth radio interview, which he gave with Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 – hours before he was shot dead in New York.
Much of the audio will be accompanied by archival photos and video, but it proved to be a challenge to find visuals for part of the interview that deal with more abstract and philosophical concepts, which left holes in the movie that needed to be filled.
The director told Deadline that Meta happened to be looking for a filmmaker to “stress test” some of its AI video tools. It agreed to provide the tech for free to allow the him to finish the movie.
Just this past weekend, the Academy Awards updated the Oscars rules to clarify that AI won’t be accepted for acting or writing awards. John Lennon: The Last Interview could now be an interesting test of how willing the public is to accept significant use of AI visuals for other uses in a genre where they might seem out of place.
In the interview, Steven recognises that AI is a “very emotional subject” but argues that he isn’t using it in a way that would replace human endeavour.
That’s debatable since a human animator or VFX artist probably could create something that suits the film with enough time and resources. Back in December, the music video for a song by former Beatle George Harrison received acclaim for its handcrafted stopmotion animation directed by Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things fame. The issue for the John Lennon documentary seems to be that it’s running out of money, which Steven admits was a factor leading him to resort to AI.
“There’s a way of using AI in which your intention is to fool somebody or manipulate them, to create an image that you want them to think is real. And then there’s a use, which is what we’re doing in the documentary, where it’s obvious that it is AI and that it is being used essentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology,” the director argues.
He says Sean Ono Lennon, John’s son told him that the late Beatle “would’ve wanted to engage” with AI. “He loved all new technology. All The Beatles did,” the filmmaker said. “He would want to play with it just to see what it could do.”
Would Lennon really have wanted to “give prompt a chance” after all?