Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over
Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over
尼尔·布洛姆坎普的新僵尸 AI“电影”不过是陈词滥调的重制
No amount of clever editing can make this Seedance-generated mess interesting. 无论剪辑多么巧妙，都无法让这部由 Seedance 生成的烂片变得有趣。
On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that’s loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every single one of Nightborne’s shots was made with ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator. 周一，《第九区》和《GT赛车》导演尼尔·布洛姆坎普公布了他的最新项目：一部名为《Nightborne》的 13 分钟科幻短片，该片大致改编自彼得·沃茨 2014 年的小说《Echopraxia》。这部短片出自布洛姆坎普新成立的 AI 初创公司/制作公司 Barley Studios，片中角色的声音和面孔均以真人演员为原型。然而，《Nightborne》的每一个镜头都是由字节跳动的 Seedance 2.0 文生视频生成器制作的。
In an X post about the short, Blomkamp described it as a “test start” meant to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he said that he wants “to tackle a full feature in this format” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think that Nightborne is a strong proof of concept that might get people intrigued to see what he prompts next. But as polished as the “film” might be compared to most of the AI-generated videos floating around the internet today, it still bears many of the hallmarks we associate with slop. And even though a team of real people was involved in the project’s production, Nightborne is such a terrible watch that one would be hard-pressed to call it the future of moviemaking. 在关于这部短片的一条 X 帖文中，布洛姆坎普将其描述为一次“测试性开端”，旨在展示生成式 AI 的能力，并表示他希望在未来某个时候“以这种格式挑战制作一部长片”。布洛姆坎普似乎认为《Nightborne》是一个强有力的概念验证，可能会让人们对他的下一个提示词（prompt）产生兴趣。但尽管这部“电影”与当今互联网上流传的大多数 AI 生成视频相比显得更为精致，它仍然带有许多我们所熟知的“垃圾内容”（slop）特征。即便有一个真实的团队参与了该项目的制作，《Nightborne》的观感依然极其糟糕，很难让人将其称为电影制作的未来。
Set against the backdrop of a military conflict between the US and Syria, Nightborne tells the story of an American pilot who sustains life-threatening injuries when her helicopter is shot down. Though most of the pilot’s body is badly injured, she’s still technically alive and her head is intact. Those things make her the ideal candidate for Project Nightborne — a governmental program that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote controlled, weaponized zombies. And because the military has an endless supply of bodies at its disposal, the pilot is one of many uniformed ghouls being trained for war in secret. 以美国和叙利亚之间的军事冲突为背景，《Nightborne》讲述了一名美国飞行员在直升机被击落后身受重伤的故事。尽管飞行员的大部分身体受损严重，但她在技术上仍然活着，且头部完好无损。这些条件使她成为“Nightborne 计划”的理想人选——这是一个将脑死亡士兵转化为远程控制、武器化僵尸的政府项目。由于军方拥有源源不断的尸体供应，这名飞行员只是众多被秘密训练用于战争的制服“食尸鬼”之一。
Like basically every other AI-generated film that has come before it, Nightborne is really a collection of very short video clips that have been edited together to tell a simple story. Nightborne frequently cuts from shots of its zombified main character to documentary-style interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts give the film — which was edited by Austyn Daines — a way to obfuscate the fact that Seedance 2.0 is only capable of generating a few seconds of video footage at a time. And the way the film’s dialogue is mixed almost (but not quite) makes it seem like you’re listening to real people speaking. 和之前几乎所有其他 AI 生成的电影一样，《Nightborne》实际上是一系列短视频片段的集合，通过剪辑拼凑成一个简单的故事。《Nightborne》频繁地在僵尸化的主角镜头和参与“Nightborne 计划”人员的纪录片式采访之间切换。这些剪辑手法让由奥斯汀·戴恩斯（Austyn Daines）剪辑的这部电影掩盖了一个事实：Seedance 2.0 一次只能生成几秒钟的视频片段。而电影对话的混音方式，几乎（但还没完全）让人觉得是在听真人说话。
When you really take a good look at Nightborne’s visuals and listen closely to its audio, it’s easy to pick up on how much gen AI is in the mix. Signs in the background are often written in complete gibberish, and characters deliver their lines with unusual emphases that make them come across like people who don’t actually know what they’re saying. According to Blomkamp, “real concept artists” contributed work to the project, and 32 human actors agreed to have their likenesses used on-screen. But that human input doesn’t seem like it’s anywhere near enough to keep Nightborne from feeling more like machine-made content than a piece of art. 当你仔细观察《Nightborne》的视觉效果并认真聆听其音频时，很容易发现其中掺杂了多少生成式 AI 的痕迹。背景中的标志通常写着完全无法辨认的乱码，角色在念台词时带有奇怪的重音，让他们听起来就像根本不知道自己在说什么的人。据布洛姆坎普称，有“真正的概念艺术家”为该项目做出了贡献，且 32 名真人演员同意在银幕上使用他们的肖像。但这些人类的投入似乎远不足以让《Nightborne》摆脱那种“机器制造内容”而非“艺术作品”的感觉。
Aside from it coming from the same director who dreamt up Alive in Joburg — an imaginative exercise in using VFX to explore ideas about apartheid-era bigotry — there’s nothing remarkable about Nightborne. Blomkamp’s creative voice feels almost nonexistent as the short’s story unfolds, and if Seedance 2.0 wasn’t part of the equation, people probably wouldn’t be talking about it. 除了它出自曾构思出《约翰内斯堡外星人》（Alive in Joburg）——一部利用视觉特效探索种族隔离时代偏见思想的创意作品——的导演之手外，《Nightborne》并没有什么值得称道的地方。随着短片故事的展开，布洛姆坎普的创作风格几乎荡然无存；如果不是因为 Seedance 2.0 的参与，人们可能根本不会讨论它。
Though Seedance 2.0 can clearly churn out videos of people emoting, Nightborne highlights how the model still doesn’t have any sort of real understanding of the minute details that make human performances feel organic and truly alive. Whatever emotive nuance you might see in the short is really just a reflection of the videos Seedance 2.0 has been trained on, and not exactly something that it can take credit for. 虽然 Seedance 2.0 显然能产出人们表达情感的视频，但《Nightborne》凸显了该模型仍然无法真正理解那些让真人表演显得自然且栩栩如生的微小细节。你在短片中看到的任何情感细微差别，实际上只是 Seedance 2.0 训练数据中视频的反射，并不能算作它自己的功劳。
Aside from zombies, Nightborne doesn’t have all that much in common with its source material. But it’s a lot like Jia Zhangke’s Dance short and Ruairí Robinson’s viral AI video depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting — both of which were created with Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects has demonstrated that traditional filmmakers tend to know how to downplay gen AI’s technical limitations, but their skills can only do so much to offset the technology’s innate weaknesses. 除了僵尸元素外，《Nightborne》与原著并没有太多共同之处。但它与贾樟柯的短片《舞》以及鲁艾里·罗宾逊（Ruairí Robinson）那部描绘汤姆·克鲁斯和布拉德·皮特打斗的病毒式 AI 视频非常相似——这两者都是用 Seedance 2.0 创作的。这些项目都证明了传统电影制作人确实知道如何淡化生成式 AI 的技术局限性，但他们的技巧在抵消该技术固有的弱点方面作用有限。
Though text-to-video models may be getting more sophisticated, they haven’t advanced enough to produce finished works that audiences are excited to see. Nightborne’s announcement was almost immediately met with a wave of backlash from people who saw the film as a sign of Blomkamp being washed. And while Blomkamp might have thought that Nightborne would generate some positive buzz for himself, it seems much more like he’s wandered into an unfortunate situation similar to the one Darren Aronofsky created with his terrible AI series about the Revolutionary War. 尽管文生视频模型可能正变得越来越复杂，但它们尚未进步到足以制作出让观众感到兴奋的成品。关于《Nightborne》的公告几乎立即遭到了人们的强烈抵制，他们认为这部电影是布洛姆坎普江郎才尽的标志。虽然布洛姆坎普可能认为《Nightborne》会为自己带来一些积极的关注，但看起来他更像是陷入了一个不幸的境地，类似于达伦·阿伦诺夫斯基（Darren Aronofsky）因其关于美国独立战争的糟糕 AI 系列剧所引发的争议。
The most interesting thing about Nightborne is the way its story can be interpreted as commentary on the technology that was used to make it. Project Nightborne is all about individuals in positions of power repurposing dead people’s bodies without their consent. 关于《Nightborne》最有趣的一点在于，它的故事可以被解读为对制作该片所用技术的某种评论。“Nightborne 计划”的核心正是关于身居高位者在未经同意的情况下，重新利用死者的身体。