London artist, animator, and video essayist Alan Warburton parses the issues surrounding the use and ramifications of generative AI in this thoughtful documentary with most of the footage created with the tools under discussion.

Alan Warburton: “The Wizard of AI is a 20 minute video essay produced one year after the release of Midjourney v4. Treating this particular release in November ’22 as an historic moment in visual cultures and creative economies, the film focuses on the real impacts this technology continues to have on artists and designers around the world.

“The video itself was produced using generative AI tools, and is 99% comprised of images and videos created with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Runway and Pika. But, I am careful not to give in to the ‘wonderpanic’ brought about by generative AI, using generative AI tools themselves to discuss and critique the legal, aesthetic and ethical problems engendered by AI-automated platforms.”
 
 

 
Client: Data as Culture at the Open Data Institute

Writer/director/animator: Alan Warburton
Back to The Futch animator: Ewan Jones Morris.
Research Assistant: Fabian Mosele
Steve Ballmer Genie: Christian Schlaeffer
Pretty fishes: UglyStupidHonest
In Memoriam images: Alex Czetwertynski
Concept development/AI collaboration: John Butler, Samine Joudat, Ben Dosage, @dzennifer, Ben Dawson, Alejandro González Romo, @symbios.wiki, Ugur Engin Deniz
Special thanks: Joanne McNeil, Tom Pounder, Hannah Redler-Hawes, Omar

Soundtrack: Alan Warburton
Wonderpanic theme music: Sonny Baker
VO: Alan Warburton

Toolkit:
· Runway Gen 2 to generate 16:9 ‘AI Collaborator’ video clips
· Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALLE 3 to generate still images
· Pika to generate 3 second fish loops
· TikTok for detective speech synthesis
· HeyGen to generate AI talking detective head
· Adobe Photoshop AI to expand images
· Topaz Gigapixel AI to upscale images

Clips attribution:
· What is the Internet? (1995) by The Today Show
· Microsoft Clippy (1997 onwards) web compilation
· CNN Internet Report (1993) by CNN News
· Napster Report (2000) by CNN Headline News
· Tech Events in 2023 Be Like (2023), Verge, featuring footage from META
· Zane Lowe meets Kanye West (2015), BBC Radio 1.
· Unit 9 AI Workflow (2023) Unit9Ltd
· Thanos Snap, Avengers: Endgame (2019) Marvel Studios, LLC