Dear Gossips,   

Late Night with the Devil, starring That Guy David Dastmalchian as a 1970s late-night host suffering through personal loss and a ratings slide, opens in theaters today (it will stream on Shudder as of April 19). It’s been trending on social media off and on for the last several days, though not because people are excited about a cool, stylish horror mockumentary about a late-night show featuring the devil, but because of the use of AI art in the film. 

 

Written and directed by Aussie filmmaking duo Colin and Cameron Cairnes, Devil is a found footage film that recreates the last, fateful broadcast of Night Owls with Jack Delroy. As the show suffers increasingly bizarre incidents, there are multiple cutaways to “we’ll be right back” type interstitials, some of which were made with AI. The most obvious example is this dancing skeleton with f-cked up hands and a weird leg:

 

Though Devil premiered at SXSW last year, the first person to draw attention to the use of AI in the film is, apparently, a Letterboxd user with the handle “based gizmo”.

Letterboxd on Late Night with the Devil 

The drama concluded yesterday with the directors admitting they “experimented” with AI for “three images only”. David Dastmalchian backed them up, saying they’ve “learned so much” about AI since making the movie:

 

Kevin McCarthy, an entertainment reporter, specifically notes all of this happened “prior to the strike”. Why does that matter? Well, honestly, a LOT of people in the entertainment industry didn’t give two sh-ts about AI as anything other than another creative tool until the strikes brought the issue to the fore, highlighting how much copyrighted work was being violated to train the algorithms, and the threat it poses to EVERYONE in the industry, even the most highly paid and sought after artists. I mean, just look at the timeline—this film has been playing festivals for a YEAR, and no one said sh-t about AI until THIS WEEK. Some people have been paying attention to the AI issue for a while, but a lot haven’t.

 

So, I can believe the use of AI in Late Night with the Devil was the result of f-cking around with a new technology, but I still don’t get why, if they had such an incredible team of artists and designers, as Dastmalchian says, they ever needed a computer to make f-cked up bone hands for them. It’s especially strange because the production value on Devil is SO high, it so meticulously recreates a 1970s television studio, yet they let those weird ass skeleton hands through the vetting process? I can understand being infatuated with a new toy but look at those freaky fingers—putting those in the final cut smacks of laziness. 

 

Late Night with the Devil is a really fun, good horror movie, and it’s great to see David Dastmalchian crushing it in a leading role, and I do understand the frustration that THIS has become the dominant conversation about this film, but at the same time…ignorance isn’t an excuse. Neither is “we only did it three times”. Things are going to get worse before they get better regarding AI in the entertainment industry—if they ever get better. Animation as a viable career might be f-cked. Who knows. It’s still the wild west with this technology, but it definitely doesn’t help when filmmakers who apparently have amazing teams of artists at their disposal opt for the half-assed computer’s bent bone hands, instead.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah