New streaming service's AI-generated romance movie looks embarrassingly bad

Let's be honest, romance movies aren't always masterpieces of filmmaking. Plenty of big Hollywood releases have been a mess of clunky cliches and stilted dialogue. Now cutting-edge AI video generation is being used to take those traits and run with them while throwing terrible visuals into the mix.

Video generation may be one of the next frontiers in generative AI. But for all the big advances, including the new AI tools in Premiere Pro that Adobe revealed yesterday, this trailer for a short AI film shows the results can still be spectacularly awful.

At first glance, we might think the video is a parody of AI-generated content. But it isn't. Nor is it merely a work in progress, a concept, or a demonstration of a new tool. It's a real trailer being used to promote the launch of a television streaming service's new content creation division.

TCLtv+ is a steaming channel belonging to TCL, an electronics company partly owned by the Chinese state. It's using the release of the trailer to announce the news that it's moving into "original content production". Kind of like Apple Originals,  but with montages of glitchy AI-generated content instead of Severance and Ted Lasso.

According to the press release, TCLtv+ Studios, TCL's first has a "global production team that includes animators, VFX experts and AI engineers". The trailer showcases its first original production, a short AI-generated romance movie called Next Stop Paris. The company claims the film features "professional voice actors and an original script" "brought to life with the latest AI animation technology". This, we are told, is "a leap forward in romance storytelling".

The result is a mess that showcases everything that makes AI-generated video pretty much unusable as it stands today. AI-powered editing tools such as those announced by Adobe for Premiere Pro look promising and could speed up workflows, but, as TCLtv+ helpfully demonstrates, creating a full film using AI is still some way off. In the trailer alone, the faces of the main characters seem to change from one scene to the next in a touching tale of two shape-shifting AI demons whose paths cross on a train bound for the city of wobbly lights.

I should clarify that TCLtv+ is free, and that it describes Next Stop Paris is an "early experiment", but it doesn't look like Netflix or Apple TV have too much to fear from it yet. Going into more detail, the company says the AI special was developed in house. It was written by its chief content officer Chris Regina and chief creative officer Daniel Smith and animated by a global team including artists from the US, Canada, UK, and Poland. It says TCLtv+ Studios is creating its own custom AI models as well as using Stable Diffusion and others.

The company is threatening to release more AI content in the future. "The AI technology used to create these characters and fictional world allows the creative teams to push boundaries and invigorate the viewer experience, while also creating new opportunities for marketing partners," it says. "The push into originals helps drive a market advantage in a noisy environment filled with content options, and the IP has many applications across the platform from interactive components to sponsorable elements and more."

Yep, as well as being visually terrible, they're going to try to sell product placement in this horror show. Regina insists that “Story will be at the heart of everything we do", adding “We are empowering creators and storytellers to use this new technology so the human experience is enriched, and we believe that Creatives with limitless imagination will drive endless innovation. We view Next Stop Paris as an early experiment and we’re excited to see how it’s received in the town square.”

I can't speak for the town square, but here at the Creative Bloq offices, the trailer has been received with a mix of incredulity, amusement and embarrassment for everyone involved. If you really want to see it, we're told the full film will be released on TCLtv+ in the summer.

Leaders in the media and entertainment sectors identify an "ability to work with AI" as top creative skill of the future, according to a report from Autodesk. I just hope they don't mean in this way.