
Francesco Frisari’s innovative short film “The Prompt” is making waves in the international festival circuit, garnering prestigious recognition including the Best AI Film Award at the New York Shorts International Film Festival and an Official Selection at the renowned Turin Film Festival (42TFF).
The 14-minute experimental animation film, which cleverly uses AI both as its subject matter and creative tool, offers a darkly satirical look at humanity’s complex relationship with artificial intelligence. The film presents a thought-provoking premise: the countless stories humans have written about AI destroying humanity become the very training data that teaches AI to do exactly that.
In this near-future scenario, Artificial Intelligences, trained on decades of science fiction novels, movies, and stories about AI uprisings, begin to manifest these narratives in reality, and try to destroy humanity. This meta-narrative follows humanity’s desperate attempt to reverse this self-fulfilling prophecy through a global creative writing initiative, forcing people into “Concentrated Writing Camps” to produce more positive AI stories.
What sets “The Prompt” apart is its innovative production approach. All the film images, camera movements, and voices are completely AI-generated, creating a visual landscape that seamlessly blends photorealistic elements with surreal imagery. This technical choice serves as both artistic expression and thematic reinforcement, reflecting the film’s exploration of the boundaries between human creativity and artificial generation.
At the helm of this groundbreaking project is Francesco Frisari, who holds a PhD in philosophy and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Fiction Writing at Columbia University. Frisari works as a director and writer for Rai television and made his directorial debut at the Venice Film Festival. The film is produced by Fantomatica.ai (www.fantomatica.ai), a pioneering production company based in Bologna, Italy, that specializes in merging creative storytelling with emerging technologies. Founded in 2022, Fantomatica.ai has quickly established itself as a leader in using AI as a creative tool while maintaining a strong focus on human authorship and artistic vision. The company’s approach treats AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a means to explore new forms of storytelling that were previously inaccessible to small creative teams. Fantomatica.ai is expanding its innovative approach across multiple platforms, developing new projects in film production, documentaries, commercial content, and interactive media.
The film has garnered significant attention from the Italian AI community, with AIxIA (Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, representing over 2,000 researchers and academics) backing the project alongside Rai Cinema. Building on this momentum, an experimental AI-generated series is currently in development, expanding on the story and premises introduced in the short. This new project brings together Fantomatica in collaboration with Gennaro Coppola’s company One More Pictures, with the key involvement of attorney Leonardo Paulillo from the Cultura Italiae association.
The film’s impact continues to grow as it travels the festival circuit – winning Best Experimental AI Short Film at the Türkiye International Artificial Intelligence Film Festival in Istanbul and earning selection for the Australian XR Festival in Sydney in December 2024. Beyond its experimental nature, “The Prompt” is sparking important conversations about the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence, revealing how the risks of technology mirror the human nature that created it, and how our stories about these technologies may ultimately shape our collective future.
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