Digital storytelling with generative AI: notes on the appearance of #AICinema

Whenever we create a new communications technology, we try new ways of telling stories with it.

That’s one of my long-running contentions. I made it in digital storytelling workshops and my first book (ABC-CLIO; Amazon). My thinking is that humans are deeply invested in stories, and we are also capable of a great deal of creativity with technologies.

This is how I viewed a fascinating article about the so-called #AICinema movement. Benj Edwards describes this nascent current and interviews one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland. It’s a great example of people creating small stories using tech — in this case, generative AI, specifically the image creator Midjourney.

The short version is a creator crafts detailed prompts for the AI, selects the best results, edits them to some degree in Photoshop, aligns the best in a series, then adds a title which sets up a plot. For example, here’s “la dolce vita” by Wieland, each image in sequence: