Sergio Cilli knew AI actors could be unpredictable, but he didn’t expect one to pull a gun on him.
“I never thought it would start singing gibberish when I asked it to act without words,” the Gifted Youth commercial director told Ad Age. “I definitely never thought it would pull a gun on me. That’s kind of the magic sauce, though. Nobody knows what it’s going to do, and I’m just kind of experiencing it in real time.”
In his entertaining new video series, made with production company Caviar, Cilli auditions AI actors using a variety of AI video software. The AI actors, it turns out, are uniformly bad at acting. They can’t take direction; their emotions seem fake; they randomly face- and voice-swap with others in the scene. Sometimes new actors materialize out of nowhere. It’s a mess.
All this was evident from the first episode, posted Oct. 28, in which Cilli instructed a single AI actor to act angry, then excited and then try eating a cheeseburger. The weirdness that ensued included the gibberish and the gun.
The series has quickly gained a fandom, no doubt in part because it allays fears—at least for now—that AI actors might soon replace humans. For Cilli, those fears were really the starting point of the project.
“This summer, there was a lot of stuff in the news about the AI takeover, especially in commercials and Hollywood in general. I think we were all feeling pretty down about it,” he said. “My wife encouraged me to just start playing with it. ‘You’ve got a funny brain, maybe you’ll come up with something funny.’”
The Emmy Award winner created some short AI comedies, but while they turned out fairly well, they were time-consuming to make and not very fulfilling—and didn’t really find an audience. Cilli, who’s done lots of commercial and improv acting himself and considers himself “an actor’s director,” then had the idea to interact with his characters.
This opened things up. In addition to the crazy things that transpire, it’s Cilli’s bemused reactions that give the clips their energy and humor
“I thought it would be an interesting way to show what AI can and can’t do,” Cilli said. “I have an improv background. So I was like, I’ll just improvise. I have no idea what they’re going to do. The prompts are real. I’ll just react to what’s going on as if it’s a real audition.”
While the first video was quite broad—asking the actor to try out different emotions—the seven videos since then have been more specific, including the actors acting out commercial scripts. Arguably, they’re even worse at this.
There are lots of glaring technical errors in the videos. (“People say it takes 200 takes to get the result you want,” Cilli said.) But even when those errors are minimized, Cilli still feels the acting is incredibly wooden.
“Maybe you can get to an acceptable performance, which in my opinion is still not as good as a human performance, just because they’re not drawing from anything,” he said. “I think it was in the third video where I’m like, ‘OK, yeah, you guys did everything I said, but it still sucks.’ Even if it looks good and they don’t switch faces—or whatever crazy stuff happens—I’m still not impressed with the actual performance.”
In Cilli’s most recent video, released Thursday, he auditions Tilly Norwood from AI talent studio Xicoia, who’s become famous this fall as the first truly well-known AI actress. (So far, she’s appeared mostly in short comedy sketches and mock movie trailers.) She’s also, it probably goes without saying, pretty wretched at acting.
Reaction to Norwood has been almost universally negative across the industry—perhaps not surprisingly, as she’s a threat to human actors’ livelihoods. On the flip side, Cilli has been getting a lot of love and praise for his videos, which put characters like Norwood in their place—in a lighthearted way. This has made the project a joy to create, said Cilli.
“What’s been incredibly heartwarming is so many people have said, ‘This is really making me happy,’” he said. “It’s cheered up a lot of people. I feel like my purpose in life is to make people happy and spread joy. I love that people can look at it and laugh. We’ve got to laugh along the way. We have to.”
Cilli said he plans to continue the project indefinitely. See more videos from the series below.
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