Generated by AI (with irony intended)
An AI rant by Alain Loubeau
It is what it is, and it ain’t much!
“Hell Grind” a new film generated by the AI company Higgsfield AI recently premiered at a subsidiary function loosely associated with the Cannes Film Festival. Some press outlets were quick to write 'premiering at Cannes' in the headlines…but in reality it premiered at a third-party industry event in the city of Cannes, not the festival itself. A distinction the producers were happy to let slide. Don’t let the details get in the way I guess.
Co-founded and led by former Snap Inc. Generative AI chief Alex Mashrabov, Higgsfield hit a $1.3 billion valuation and raised $130 million. The idea to create this company came from the Higgsfield team sitting down with industry professionals—ranging from Hollywood-level directors to regional commercial producers—and asked them what was broken about existing AI video tools, and they all came back with one answer: total lack of camera control.
Before existing foundation models could generate beautiful, random imagery, they could not execute specific cinematic commands like a precise dolly zoom, a whip pan, or a tracking shot without wasting hours on unpredictable prompting. Mashrabov realized that tech engineers were building tools in a vacuum without understanding the actual pipeline of visual storytelling.
Rising to the challenge, the team hired several of those frustrated film directors and sat them directly next to machine learning engineers, leading to the idea for a unified workspace where AI behaves less like a random generator and more like a physical camera crew and an intentional storyboard.
Created by a 15-person professional team in just 14 days, the film proved that AI can maintain narrative arcs and character continuity over feature lengths. And what was the response from the screening you might wonder? Did it succeed in its mandate?
Reactions were polarized to say the least. Comments ranged from… "AI from beginning to end; characters' eyes were giveaways; female lead looked less like a character and more like a photorealistic borderline-anime AI waifu; constant jitter in the frame rate; jerky limb movements during action scenes; physics lacked weight; VFX felt like an extended video game cutscene rather than actual cinema".
In direct response to the screening in France, over 1,000 film industry professionals signed a global petition titled "Protect The Film Industry From AI". The petition raised alarm bells that the film used zero live-action crews, actors, or set builders, exposing a massive loophole in current labor legislation. Yet others were cautiously optimistic, particularly independent producers—viewed it as a “terrifyingly impressive warning shot.”
Some critics admitted that despite the "cheesy, campy plot," it was actually more entertaining than some traditionally shot films on the market and proved that narrative coherence over 95 minutes is now achievable.
Hollywood directors attending the screening, such as Chuck Russell (The Mask), expressed a shift toward "cautious acceptance," acknowledging that while flawed, it delivered "wow moments" that prove the technology is ready to disrupt the traditional studio pipeline.
Well sorry Chuck, but I gotta a hard disagree with you on that one! It’s not only NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME–IT’S STILL STUCK IN DEVELOPMENT HELL!
There are other factors at play here for the intense criticisms that cannot be swept aside. The economy right now is in shambles, people are on edge about their quality of life dwindling before their eyes, and as a marketing brand AI has been effectively labeled as one of the main culprits. It’s coming for all of our jobs, which doesn’t seem as farfetched as one would assume…
Up to 60% of jobs in advanced economies are exposed to AI, with roughly half of those at high risk of direct displacement. Don’t believe me? Well Meta, formerly known as Facebook, just laid off 8,000 workers. Intuit: 3,000 workers. Linkedin: 500.
No more has the brand been affected as it relates to cinema. Seth Rogen’s recent comments on AI are practically shared by a large swath from the creative community. When asked about AI recently at Cannes, Rogen put it plainly “I don’t understand what it’s supposed to do… Every time I see a video on Instagram that’s like, ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ what follows is the most stupid dog shit I’ve ever seen in my life. And if your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process. You shouldn’t be a writer. Because you’re not writing.” He continued, “Go do something else. And if you don’t want to go through the process, you shouldn’t be a writer. The idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing.”
These things that we call movies…are not easy to make. As a matter of fact, they’re quite painful to bring into the world, good and bad ones for that matter. Can a machine really erase the difficulties of the process, or is the difficulty the point in generating any piece of art?
I’ll just cut to the chase, after seeing the trailer I had a sudden wave of depression drowning my mind, body and spirit. Not because it looks like utter dogshit on its face, but it does set back the idea of the advancement of innovation within cinema through the use of virtual technology. The hype, the promise of something new through AI holds no sway over me at this moment. If this is what AI firms are all giddy about then these people are not only deluded but quite frankly out of touch with audience taste and expectations. If you want to play a videogame then yeah this looks great, but with a full narrative feature some verisimilitude is required and that means:
· REAL SCREENPLAYS
· REAL CREATIVE BATTLES
· REAL CREATIVE COMPROMISES
· REAL SETS
· REAL COSTUMES
· REAL PEOPLE TALKING TO EACH OTHER
You know…the basics. But what we have here with HELL GRIND is just a facsimile of a labor intensive process now built from language model prompts that crawls and scavenges through a vast ocean of IP.
The problems are evident right from the jump: nothing looks real! And these tech wizards expect me to plunk down $17 along with 83 minutes of my life that I will never get back to watch this shit? This is not only an aesthetic offense to the senses but this is just gaslighting people into thinking they should enjoy this.
I will concede there are modern movies made now that look similar to Hell Grind, but there are enough real elements employed within them to ground the audience with at least a semblance of realism. This is not the case here and that’s what bothers me. All this capital and brain power spent to extol the virtues of “perceived” evolutionary technology that will change the world as we know it, and what do we get out of it so far? Sloppy digitized facial tics. Atrocious bad “acting”. Generic landscapes. Distracting virtual VFX. Yeah ai is certainly coming for us!
This tech sucks!
And it will continue to suck as long as engineers use frame of references from far superior IP than to actually use their own imaginations. But that’s not gonna happen simply because at the end of the day the bottom line is all that matters, and this is the result. Computers are dumb, they only know what you input into their databases. If an engineer can’t access the messiness, the poetry, the exhilaration of an active imagination then this thing ain’t gonna fly. Full stop.
Author Bio:
Alain was an 80's kid who grew up in the movie theater and watched everything from E.T. to Robocop. No genre was off limits. His writing has earned a list of accolades for his various screenplays….written without AI. Check out his other articles: HERE.
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