Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over

The Verge · 1 month ago · 37

Director Neill Blomkamp released a 13-minute sci-fi short film titled Nightborne created entirely with ByteDance's Sora text-to-video generator through his new AI startup Barley Studios. The film, loosely based on Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia, used AI to generate every shot while featuring characters with voices and faces modeled after human actors. Blomkamp described the project as a test to demonstrate generative AI capabilities and expressed interest in creating a full feature film using similar technology.