Hello dear /promptcollective readers - thanks for clicking!
Today I have something very special for you, a world premiere (at least as far as we know…): BOOM produced by DRIVE beta for ARD Kultur and online from today is the first AI improv film out there…
What we did
At the beginning of our BOOM journey was the question “Can AI act?”. This was one of the questions that I asked myself in the beginning of 2023 when I started diving deep into the AI rabbit hole.
To answer this question I had the idea to create a ChatGPT powered voice assistant and use it in an improv setting. I took this idea to one of our partners, the German broadcaster ARD, specifically ARD Kultur led by Kristian Costa-Zahn. He liked the idea and we started developing a narrative outline with two writers and landed on the story for BOOM.
To create the tech for BOOM we combined a GPT4-powered character backend (very similar to the one we used in Better than Human) with a Voice-to-Text with push-to-speak and a text-to-voice API based on one of our actors’ voices. We also included a Go-Pro Kamera to give the AI an Eye. All of it runs on an Arduino computer to create a self-contained “AI actor” - the BOOM bubble:
And when I say “we” did all this tech stuff what i really mean is that our in-house dev Dominik did it - here you can see him on set updating the prompt for the next scene:
The bubble plays the role of “IzzAI” the AI twin of Izzy, one of three members of the girl band BOOM. The audience is with the band during the last 60 minutes before a huge press conference to launch their new album as well as the AI merch that “IzzAI” is a part of. And let’s just say that things do NOT go as planned!
Here is the cast with IzzAI:
Improvising with the AI proved really fun while also challenging sometimes. To create a true improv situation we gave the AI a goal for each scene, the same as we would for the human actors, while also playing with the human actors only discovering the full truth about IzzAI during the shooting.
AND NOW WHAT?
For me, this was a very fun and successful experiment that proves huge potential for using AI in fiction production, not only in the setting of a writers’ room or in post-production, but also during shooting. Especially this idea of improv with a non-human actor is something that we will keep on exploring in the future.
Please let me know what you think and reach out if you would like to discuss further!
Who Are We?
The /promptcollective was founded by Jes Brandhøj (Denmark) and Hannes Jakobsen (Germany). We're on the lookout for like-minded enthusiasts. If you're passionate about the AI-creative nexus, reach out at join@promptcollective.xyz.