Type text into AI image and video generators, and you’ll often see outputs of unusual, sometimes creepy, pictures.
In a way, this is a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are wielding this aesthetic to create a new storytelling art form.
The tools, such as Midjourney to generate images, Runway and Sora to produce videos, and Luma AI to create 3D objects, are relatively cheap or free to use. They allow filmmakers without access to major studio budgets or soundstages to make imaginative short films for the price of a monthly subscription.
I’ve studied these new works as the co-director of the AI for Media & Storytelling studio at the University of Southern California.
Surveying the increasingly captivating output of artists from around the world, I partnered with curators Jonathan Wells and Meg Grey Wells to produce the Flux Festival, a four-day showcase of experiments in AI filmmaking, in November 2024.
While this work remains dizzyingly eclectic in its stylistic diversity, I would argue that it offers traces of insight into our contemporary world. I’m reminded that in both literary and film studies, scholars believe that as cultures shift, so do the way we tell stories.
With this cultural connection in mind, I see five visual trends emerging in film.
1. Morphing, blurring imagery
In her “NanoFictions” series, the French artist Karoline Georges creates portraits of transformation. In one short, “The Beast,” a burly man mutates from a two-legged human into a hunched, skeletal cat, before morphing into a snarling wolf.
The metaphor – man is a monster – is clear. But what’s more compelling is the thrilling fluidity of transformation. There’s a giddy pleasure in seeing the figure’s seamless evolution that speaks to a very contemporary sensibility of shapeshifting across our many digital selves.
Karoline Georges’ short film ‘The Beast.’
This sense of transformation continues in the use of blurry imagery that, in the hands of some artists, becomes an aesthetic feature rather than a vexing problem.
Theo Lindquist’s “Electronic Dance Experiment #3,” for example, begins as a series of rapid-fire shots showing flashes of nude bodies in a soft smear of pastel colors that pulse and throb. Gradually it becomes clear that this strange fluidity of flesh is a dance. But the abstraction in the blur offers its own unique pleasure; the image can be felt as much as it can be seen.
2. The surreal
Thousands of TikTok videos demonstrate how cringey AI images can get, but artists can wield that weirdness and craft it into something transformative. The Singaporean artist known as Niceaunties creates videos that feature older women and cats, riffing on the concept of the “auntie” from Southeast and East Asian cultures.
In one recent video, the aunties let loose clouds of powerful hairspray to hold up impossible towers of…
