Thread of soulless "AI" ""art""

[Uncle]

paging benji:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of-the-apocalypse-guy-named-josh/

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of-the-apocalypse-guy-named-josh/

Narratives around AI tend to be all-or-nothing: Either we’re cooked or it’s all hype. Watching the filmmaker work with AI software—morning iced coffee in hand, brown hair and beard lightly unkempt—is quirkier and less dramatic than all that. It’s like dropping in on puppy school. The tools keep ignoring instructions, making odd choices, or veering entirely off-course. But with care and patience, he reins them in, eventually coaxing out eight minutes of densely scripted original TV.

In this case, those eight minutes constituted the latest episode in the sci-fi cinematic universe that the filmmaker has created under the name Neural Viz. The project started in 2024 with a mockumentary web series called Unanswered Oddities, a talking-head TV show from a future where the Earth is inhabited by creatures called glurons, who engage in Ancient Aliens–style speculation about their human predecessors. Each episode explores a different (and badly mispronounced) aspect of "hooman" civilization, like America, exercise, or the NFL. At first it seemed like a funny, self-contained bit.

But then the universe, known as the Monoverse, started to expand. Neural Viz churned out episodes of different series from the same gluron TV network, Monovision: a documentary cop show, a UFC-style show about fighting bugs. Then came podcasts, street interviews. Subplots and arcs started to emerge between videos, with romances forming, religious cults lurking in the background, and grainy archival footage surfacing about the true circumstances that wiped out humanity. Before long, the filmmaker had built an entire world with its own language, characters, and lore, all of it made with AI.

Neural Viz became a cult hit—a favorite of Redditors and AI nerds on Twitter—then a hit-hit, with individual videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and millions on TikTok and Instagram.

But beyond any measures of popularity, Neural Viz counts as a historic accomplishment: It is among the first pieces of AI filmmaking that truly does not suck.

omg they doxed him

Just as Trey Parker and Matt Stone reinvented cartoons by reaching for the cheapest tools available, the man behind Neural Viz is taking a technology many people consider beneath them and using it to push the medium in a new direction. He just might be the first AI auteur.

He has also maintained near-total anonymity in this role—until now.

The youngest of three brothers, Josh Wallace Kerrigan grew up in a small town outside Wichita Falls, Texas, watching movies like Tremors and Jurassic Park. When he was 9 or 10, he and a friend used the video camera on top of his desktop computer to make a short film about a baseball player serial killer. (Tagline: “Three strikes, you’re out.”) He studied film at Minnesota State University Moorhead, and after graduating in 2012, Kerrigan moved to Los Angeles.

In late 2024, Hollywood executives started DM-ing Kerrigan on social media. He spoke with “almost all of the major studios,” he told me, as well as producers and creators who wanted to talk about collaborating. Many commenters on YouTube told Kerrigan that his videos should be on Adult Swim. But when he met with producers affiliated with Adult Swim, he said, one of them suggested that he might not need them; that the power had shifted to creators. “That sentiment has come up multiple times in meetings with other various studios,” Kerrigan said.

The meetings resulted in two job offers. One was to work in-house at a studio, focusing on AI projects. Kerrigan turned it down in favor of making his own TV pilot (unrelated to the Monoverse) with an independent producer. He was also planning to debut a non-AI film short, which he’d codirected, at SXSW in the spring of 2025. Between his new contract for the TV pilot and the revenue Neural Viz was generating on YouTube and TikTok, Kerrigan now had enough money to live on. So in January, for the first time since moving to LA, he quit his day job.