Rick and Mortify is a system we built for creating never-before-seen episodes of Rick and Morty by leveraging the state-of-the-art in generative AI.<p>These days generative AI is so hot right now. It promises to revolutionize all aspects of creative work from copywriting and image creation, to video and audio synthesis.<p>Given the rapid progress of AI, when will we see an AI system listed in the closing credits of your favorite feature-length film?<p>Rick and Mortify is a tool we built to demonstrate that future is closer than you might think.<p>Our tool uses the state-of-the-art in large vision and language models to create never-before-seen episodes of Rick and Morty with minimal human intervention. All the plot points, dialogue, and accompanying visuals are generated with machine learning.<p>Why use Rick and Morty as a case-study?<p>Because 1) given the show's complex narrative structure and character profiles, it offers an ambitious north star for generative AI systems and 2) that show is the bomb and as AI researchers, we want to make Rick proud.<p>Rick and Mortify is only scratching the service of what is possible and we're excited to see what you create with it. If you've been thinking about AI-driven story generation, we'd love to hear from you!
On the "generate storyboards" dimension, the images generated for these generated scripts aren't really storyboards, they're visual cues for people who don't read.<p>Amazon launched the first AI "storyboarding" tool about 10 years ago[0]. It read through your script, saw there was a scene where a guy goes to the hospital, and put a picture of a guy in front of a hospital in the storyboards. That was clever, but not useful and served no purpose.<p>The storyboard doesn't exist to pander to people who won't read the script. It's there to help the director, producer, and crew work out how to tell the story. Don't show me a picture of the outside of the hospital because I didn't read the script, show me how the scenes go together so I know whether we need a shot of the outside of the hospital. If we do, where are the actors in frame? Is it a closeup of the actor or a wide establishing shot of the location. In animation, how many backgrounds/locations do we need to tell this story, each of which will need to be designed and drawn or modeled? How many characters are visible in each shot (which translates into how many animators and animator hours will be required).<p>If these images being generated are really actual functioning storyboards intended to show how to translate the story from script to screen for optimum storytelling power and production cost, that's super cool and definitely counts as storyboards, but I suspect that's not the case.<p>[0]<a href="https://venturebeat.com/media/amazon-launches-storyteller-to-turn-scripts-into-storyboards-automagically/amp/" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/media/amazon-launches-storyteller-to...</a>
The most amusing thing about this is that every recent development in both real science and science fiction for the last decade is something that Rick and Morty itself did first.<p>All you did was...<p>"Write an algorithm based on two heist movies I slept through and used it to automate a joyless process you call art? Yeah, I really did, didn't I?"<p>- Rick Sanchez