Christopher Royal King began publishing his AI generated still images to Instagram under the account @totalemotionalawareness. He later extended his practice into video through the RunwayML suite of tools, among others. His videos often begin as text prompts sourced from lucid dreaming forums across the web. The resulting videos involve impossible scenes which lack clearly identifiable subjects. They contort, morph, or collapse into other subjects or their environments. These impossible scenes are characterized by what are considered “machine hallucinations”, which is more often than a bug and not a feature of the system.

Generative AI’s ‘hallucinatory’ tendencies when transforming text into images or video sequences recall the disjointed and enigmatic terrains of our own dreams. Generative AI takes text prompts and maps them to visual outputs based on its own learned associations. But the connection is rarely a one-to-one match. AI draws from its vast reservoir of patterns to create something that can sometimes seem eerily accurate or wildly off the mark. AI, much like the human unconscious, doesn’t produce replicas but rather makes interpretations. Our dreams too operate on a logic where the connections between images, sensations, and feelings are not always immediately accessible to our conscious minds. They are informed by our memories, desires, fears, and the myriad bits of sensory input we receive daily. Both AI hallucinations and human dreams appear as systems trying to navigate vast terrains of information and produce meaning, however elusive that meaning might sometimes be.

RunwayML, founded in 2018 as a student research project at New York University, is a startup focusing on the potential of AI for the creative industries. Over time, Runway’s emphasis has transitioned towards generative AI, with a particular interest in video generation. Their flagship product at the moment is Gen-2, a system designed to produce videos based on textual cues or a pre-existing image. In summer of 2023, the company closed $141 million in funding from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Nvidia Corp., Salesforce Inc. and other investors. RunwayML’s tools assisted in the visual effects of the Academy Award winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

https://www.christopherroyalking.com