Late Night With The Devil creators address those viral AI images

The temptation to use artificial intelligence instead of human artifice has come to haunt the film industry as much as any ghost. The latest title to come under fire for caving into this particular poltergeist is IFC Films’ Late Night With The Devil, a found-footage horror flick from Australian sibling duo, Cameron and Colin Cairnes, that follows the entirety of a fictional late-night broadcast from the ‘70s as it spirals out of control due to a Satanic possession.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to let some artists sink their teeth into a cool and unique aesthetic, right? That’s not what the Cairnes brothers decided to do, at least not with a few specific images. Although the film officially releases in theaters tomorrow, early screenings revealed that it includes some clearly AI-generated images in cutaway scenes throughout its run.

Spurred on by a Letterboxd review from user “based gizmo” (via Variety), who urged viewers not to “let this be the start of accepting this shit in your entertainment,” disappointed fans took to the platform as well as Twitter/X to express their disappointment in the directors’ choice. “They didn’t care enough to make it, why should I care enough to watch it?” wrote one user. “This could have been a dream job for an artist like me,” wrote another, who actually took the time to recreate the image herself. Here it is as a salve:

In a statement to Variety, the brothers justified the decision as follows:

In conjunction with our amazing graphics and production design team, all of whom worked tirelessly to give this film the 70s aesthetic we had always imagined, we experimented with AI for three still images which we edited further and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film. We feel incredibly fortunate to have had such a talented and passionate cast, crew and producing team go above and beyond to help bring this film to life. We can’t wait for everyone to see it for themselves this weekend.

Especially as writers and actors just picketed for weeks on end over this particular issue, it will be interesting to see how this decision impacts the movie’s success at the box office—if it does at all. The David Dastmalchian-led film also isn’t the only title to incite widespread frustration over the unwelcome use of AI in recent months. In January, viewers noticed that Issa López’s True Detective: Night Country also used the technology to generate a few posters in the background of a scene, which the writer justified by saying it was “so sad up there (in Alaska where the show is set) that some kid with AI made the posters for a loser Metal festival for boomers” and that the writers were feeling “not kind” towards ChatGPT during the show’s production.

As hollow as these excuses may ring, we’re lucky that AI is still in the phase of its development where it’s relatively easy to tell when an image is, in fact, artificially generated. Hopefully, the movement instigated by the strikes and spurred on by backlash like this will curtail its momentum in the industry before it harms the livelihoods of the talented people who make movies.