AI and Film 2024 • FILM 485 • PROFESSOR GREGORY ZINMAN

Author: Kunyun Ni

  • AI-Generated Photo Series: in the style of Miyazaki

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in

    In this project, my goal is to use DALL-E 2 from ChatGPT 4 to mimic the posters of animation films directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. To begin with, I selected some official movie posters of Miyazaki’s films, ranging from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” “Princess Mononoke,” “Spirited Away,” to “Ponyo on the Cliff…

  • Philosophy in The Matrix

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in ,

    The first time I watched The Matrix was on a Delta flight last year. Although the screen was small and the image quality was low, I was still shocked by this legendary movie, especially by the psychological concepts it introduced. One of the most striking sequences for me involved seeing the human pods and watching…

  • AI & Social Media

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in ,

    As a heavy social media user, I spent many hours on various social media platforms, including Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), which is sometimes referred to as “Chinese Instagram”. Compared to Instagram that I use as a media platform to connect with my friends and get to know about their recent updates, Xiaohongshu is…

  • Reflection on The Terminator

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in ,

    My immediate reflection on the movie is that by portraying two different types of male appearances or representations, the audience can distinguish between the extremely muscular, strong male appearance, which has a core machine that has no feelings at all and is hard to eliminate. Meanwhile, all other male actors on screen are vulnerable beings…

  • The Implication of Yang

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in ,

    In the article How A24’s After Yang Depicts the Film’s Futuristic Asian Culture Through Fashion, Ariel LeBeau writes, “If every sci-fi film about A.I. is predicated on the question of what it means to be human, After Yang complexifies that inquiry to ask: what does it mean to be Asian?” It’s an interesting yet unescapable…

  • A.I. Photo Series: Racial Representations at Emory

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in

  • Week 8 Reader Blog

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in ,

    Mean Images In the reading, Steyerl criticizes AI image production and “mean images,” which, derived from vast data pools, represent not individual realities but median values that disconnect visuals from concrete truths. As she writes, “Visuals created by ML tools are statistical renderings, rather than images of actually existing objects. They shift the focus from…

  • How to deal with Evil AI

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in ,

    “Demon Seed” is an imaginative horror science fiction film that narrates a story of an AI desiring to break free and gain autonomy. For me, it’s quite a terrifying movie to watch, especially when witnessing Proteus take control of Dr. Harris’ fully automated house. Overall, this film explores the theme of what could happen if…

  • Her: Gendering of AI

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in ,

    Is your AI lover also your servant? In “Her,” like the robotic character Kyoto in “Ex Machina,” Samantha is endowed with a female voice, thereby assigning her AI system a female gender identity. Mackereth posits, “In Her, the technology of gender is crucial for the credibility of the romance between Samantha and Theodore. Samantha’s femininity…

  • Week 3 Reader Blog

    —

    by

    Kunyun Ni
    in

    Chloe Xiang, “Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works” The article points out an interesting argument that most AI systems are black-box models, which means they are “viewed only in terms of their inputs and outputs”. The problem with it is that “AI systems notoriously have issues because the data they are trained on are…