This week we wrapped up and finalised our second assignments. My finished piece was a children’s fictional tale called ‘The Moonflower’s Choice’ which I am very happy with how turned out. It is a simple story but has a deeper message towards the very end of the film, with an ambiguous choice that is unresolved or up to the audience to decide what happens. What was interesting to me and my thought process throughout the creation of this story was the idea of this even being allowed to be called a real ‘story’. With AI being capable of doing creative tasks such as writing stories and generating art, there is a big debate in the world about whether or not it should be allowed to be called ‘art’. Ervik (2023) stated that “Humans at once see something as depicted and as a depiction” (Ervik 2023 p44), and discusses what he calls a “dual frame mind”, which is the human’s ability to both identify what something is trying to be, and what it actually is, such as AI generating a depiction of an apple, where it is not a real photo or drawing of an apple, just a depiction. Ervik (2023) goes on to explain that humans have the ability to see “through and at images” (Ervik 2023 p44), which is another reference to how we have this sense in ourselves that we can’t really explain but tells us something is fake or inauthentic. This is similar to the saying ‘uncanny valley’ which describes the weird, creepy feeling we get when we see a robotic or mechanical or fake person where they resemble one but we know that something is not quite right about it. This feeling I found was evoked in me when I was generating my data and images, which made me somewhat uneasy seeing my characters that did not have a real persona, name, or character. It did feel like just a depiction of something I was trying to convey, not something I had actually made.

This week in class we had a Prompt Battle using Runway. In teams, we were required to respond to a prompt given to us, to prompt something into Runway and try to generate something as accurate to the given prompt as possible. This was quite difficult as most of our generated media were quite similar to other teams. It was hard to think outside of the box creatively while also being simple enough for the AI to understand and accurately produce something that we wanted.

Overall, I had a fun time and discovered how difficult it is to work with AI in a competitive way, which is something I had never done before. The added pressure of the competition meant more stressful prompting which made me realise how difficult and frustrating it can be when it does not generate what you are wanting.