It hasn’t rained this much since that video of Will Smith eating spaghetti appeared online. However, within a few years technology has evolved tremendously. Taking other people’s content as inspiration, you can now create videos with absurd fidelity. The funniest thing is that, If AI “steals”there is an artist “stealing” which makes the AI-generated videos appear to be AI-generated videos. And it’s delirious.
Tianran Mu is a Chinese actor and content creator who, at the age of 29, asked himself how he could create content inspired by what AI does. take a look to the video which we leave below in which you can see Tianran Mu -the one with the noodles- and another person.
Exactly, there are clumsy movements, misplaced facial expressions and inconsistencies galore that we associate with failures and hallucinations of artificial intelligence generative, and it is where the 29-year-old creator has seen an opportunity to create a series of videos taking advantage of these gaps in technology.
40 years of forgiveness
Recently, Wired He was able to chat with Tianran Mu. At 29 years old, he spent some time looking for work in the film industry, specifically at the huge Hengdian World Studios, but there was no luck. In 2019, he started creating ‘sketches’ on Chinese social networks and things went well for him.
After experimenting with content creation using AI, began to detect those patterns in which technology fails. For example, unnatural body gestures, erratic glances, plots that turn somersaults or elements that overlap and, in 2024, it began to release short videos imitating this which means that, luckily, we can still know if a video is AI or not.
And it’s… fun. In some videos, he uses different actors to play the same role, emulating the continuity problems that AI often has. The characters are also not looking anywhere and feel like robots.
The impact is there. In Chinese networksit seems that the young man has hit hard, but it was a few weeks ago when part of his content began to be shared on Western networks such as X or Instagram, accumulating more than 10 million views and thousands of reactions on platforms where he is not present.
The phenomenon has viralized in a very organic way at a time when there is an intense debate around these AI creations. That debate has intensified with the Sora 2 releasethe OpenAI model that has evolved tremendously compared to the tools we had until now and that makes really difficult to guess if certain videos are AI or not.
It is something that has already had its share of controversy, of course. content theft to train the modelbut Mu saw an opportunity in Sora 2. He identified that the human characters generated by Sora laugh in unpleasant ways and have hair with strange “physics.” So, he imitated it in a video he released a few days ago:
It’s curious because being 100% artisanal and human, Mu’s video is more uncanny valley than some videos made with AI. I think this speaks very well of his work, but also of the dark side of Sora 2. In fact, the actor himself confessed to Wired that It has been much more difficult for him to parody Sora 2 because the quality has gone up several notches.
In fact, he comments that it is almost impossible to create parodies and states that in a few months “there will be nothing left to imitate. If I try to act as the AI will, I would only be acting like a human.” And this is really sad. Yes, it is having enormous virality, but that does not pay the mortgage and Mu says that, in two years, many directors and actors will use AI to replace not only the special effects departments, but the actors themselves.
And, as an actor, he confesses that if it is already difficult to compete against other actors, it will be more difficult to do so against those who do not even exist, but who can potentially act like a human, bending to whatever the studios want. You don’t have to go in two years.
It is true that thanks to this virality, in China he has had some contracts with companies that want him to use AI for campaigns, but he affirms that, in his own content, everything he does is human because his goal is… well, to be hired for his acting skills.
Images | Tianran Mu
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