AI Film and AI Games Festival draws 300 to hear about AI taking the director’s seat

The second annual HOLL·AI·WOOD AI Film and AI Games Festival took place in San Francisco on Tuesday night and offered us a preview of the future for both passive and interactive entertainment.

Edward Saatchi, CEO of Fable Studios and an organizer of the event, said more than 300 attendees from the world of AI, cinema and gaming came to the event at the Alamo Drafthouse cinema. I attended and was part of the AI Games panel after the show.

Other speakers came from Andreessen Horowitz, Pixar, Inworld AI, Google AI, Pika Labs CEO Demi Guo (AI filmmaking tool), PAC Capital, CRV VC, First Spark Capital and Pillars Films.

“There’s no better time for AI than now,” said Jack Soslow, a partner at A16z, during the gaming panel.

Scott Lighthiser at Pillars said, “I see a lot of potential in CG characters being piloted by AI agents.”

HOLL·AI·WOOD started last year and showed experiments and demos in the then-months-old world of AI cinema, this year those experiments in cinema have evolved into full complex short films using tools like Runway, Pika and PILLARS-1.

For the first time we also got to see previews of upcoming playable AI Games.

For the films that were shown, (like The Red, and the piece in the Louvre) about a third of them were shot traditionally with AI elements — almost equivalent to VFX (visual effects).

“I don’t necessarily think those are AI movies, but they show a bit of what’s possible,” Saatchi said. “The rest were entirely generated. I would consider only those films are true AI movies.”

The festival team created this set of rules (similar to the filmmaking rule set Dogme 95) to help people have a feeling for where we draw the line of a true AI film, rather than simply using AI in a way that’s similar to VFX. The event featured speakers like Scott Lighthiser and Katya Alexander of Pillars Films.

At the festival, here’s a taste of the films and games shown to the audience. (Here’s a look at last year’s event).

Hidden Door showed off its game which was like a social roleplaying experience centered around a kind of AI-powered Dungeons and Dragons game. It takes a royalty-free property like The Wizard of Oz and generates AI-created narratives for you to play. Hilary Mason, CEO of Hidden Door, will speak at our GamesBeat Next event on October 23-24 in San Francisco.

Then there was Geppetto’s Workshop, a Garry’s Mod-style game powered by COLLODI text-to-3D models. The game is set in the 1890s. The player works with an AI-powered Geppetto to unleash their creativity — building characters, sets, making short film or game experiences. Players buy the base game for $20 and can purchase credits (Lira, the currency of Italy at the time) to get faster ability to generate assets and characters in-game.

Starlight Labs showed its top-down 2D AI simulation game where AI characters live in a small village and make emergent plans.

Exit Valley was an AI-created TV Show from The Simulation. It showed a sneak peek of its satirical AITV show Exit Valley powered by a living simulation of San Francisco: Sim Francisco. I thought this one was pretty hilarious. It featured a South Park-stye animated satire.

Exit Valley’s first episode showed a school teacher in Silicon Valley High School teaching the class the (made-up) story of Thomas Zuckerberg III, an ancestor of Mark Zuckerberg during the Gold Rush who sought gold with his friends the Winklevoss twins and Alejandro Saverin – with bloody results.

Exit Valley is the first AITV show — a show powered by The Simulation, where viewers can, with a single prompt, also turn into creators. The Simulation showed off its South Park AI earlier this year and the SHOW-1 model which handles dialogue, animation, editing, music, voice and Exit Valley will be its first original AITV show.