Endless inspiration for directors and screenwriters: the website thismoviedoesnotexist.org generates a title, description and poster for a fictional film at the push of a button.
In "First Contact," an alien family visits Earth in the year 2050 and meets a human family who shows them around. Never heard of it? Very well.
But you may have heard of "The Rhythms of the Land." In the film, a young woman from the city inherits her grandfather's farm. Through it, "she learns about the natural rhythms of life and the importance of farming," according to the description. You don't know that one either? Huh.
GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion combined
These two films have not yet flickered across the big screen and probably never will. Responsible for the title, the poster and the short description are different AI systems linked by the website thismoviedoesnotexist.org. The text comes from OpenAI's GPT-3, and the images come from Stable Diffusion. All content is generated directly on the website via an API.
Prototype built in three days
The website's first prototype took developer Seb Lhomme just three days to complete, he revealed on Twitter. His greatest challenges:
- Generate a plausible film plot for the title/synopsis,
- stay as far away as possible from real-life movies and actors,
- and make the movie poster beautiful and appropriate to the movie genre.
To overcome the first challenge, Lhomme gave GPT-3 random parameters for characters, locations and eras. At this point, he also built in some key parameters to prevent the AI movie posters from resembling existing movies or actors.
"This is definitely more challenging than it seems because GPT-3 has been trained on real existing data," Lhomme said. Moreover, looking at the posters reveals that the title is not included there.
Here's how I built https://t.co/x2Ujzon5X4 from scratch in 3 days: pic.twitter.com/KxhsXdzrBd
— Seb Lhomme (@slhomme) October 7, 2022
Generating posters for your film ideas
Lhomme then added some features to the website. For example, there is the option to rate AI films, which ultimately results in a dynamic top 50 list.
In addition, users can generate their own movies by entering title, description, and genre. However, because the use of Stable Diffusion and GPT-3 incurs costs, Lhomme has sought and found a way to monetize: You can create three movie posters for free after logging in, credits for 50 more cost five dollars.
Website named in AI tradition
Before the rise of image AIs like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, one project was temporarily considered a poster child for the generative potential of artificial intelligence for Deepfakes: thispersondoesnotexist.com. The website, which launched back in early 2019, features a deceptively real-looking face with each new refresh.
The concept found numerous imitators in the years that followed, including thismoviedoesnotexist.com. Other examples are thisanimedoesnotexist, thismemedoesnotexist, thiscatdoesnotexist, and many more.
