Jonathan Zawada says the Tall Tales videos were not made with AI

Jonathan Zawada, who made the feature-length film that goes with Tall Tales, tells Kevin Nguyen of The Verge that none of the videos released so far were made with AI. He doesn't read the comments, but Mark Pritchard does, and Pritchard was hurt to find viewers sure that the video for “Gangsters” was machine-made. Zawada blames his style, CGI deliberately bent out of shape. If it looks like something that’s not real now, people think it’s AI¹, he says.

In the full film he did use AI in a few places, for some backgrounds and the texture of a fish's body, running publicly available models on his own machines rather than services such as Midjourney or DALL-E. His bigger worry about the technology is older: whether anyone will want to make art once the attention economy is flooded with content.

The film began with Zawada thinking about forgeries, with Bruegel and Bosch among his early references. Nguyen, who saw it at a screening, singles out “A Fake in a Faker's World”, an endless row of mechanical arms painting a scene that never stops changing. Zawada found Yorke a sharp, clear and concise collaborator. I’m a massive fan, and I’ve found he’s kind of a terrifying person.¹

Tall Tales, the official trailer for the film· Mark Pritchardwatch on youtube →