内容来源：https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/968703/neill-blomkamps-nightborne-barley-studios-seedance

内容总结：

《第九区》导演新作遭群嘲：AI短片《夜裔》被批“机器味太重”

曾执导《第九区》和《GT赛车》的导演尼尔·布洛姆坎普近日发布新作——13分钟的科幻短片《夜裔》。该片根据彼得·沃茨2014年小说《回声祈祷》改编，由布洛姆坎普新成立的AI初创公司Barley Studios制作。尽管片中角色声音和面容均由真人演员提供，但所有镜头均通过字节跳动的Seedance 2.0文生视频AI生成。

影片讲述一名美军飞行员在直升机被击落后重伤濒死，但头部完好，因此被选入“夜裔项目”——政府将脑死亡士兵改造为遥控武器化僵尸。然而，这部作品被评论界形容为“AI垃圾食品”，称其虽比网上常见AI视频更精致，但“无论怎么剪辑都救不了这个烂摊子”，并指出“布洛姆坎普的创作灵魂几乎为零”。

技术硬伤明显：AI只能生成数秒片段，靠大量快速剪辑遮掩；背景文字全是乱码，角色台词语调怪异，“听起来像根本不知道自己在说什么”。虽然32名真人演员授权了肖像，但成品“更像机器产物而非艺术作品”。

最具讽刺意味的是，影片情节本身成了对AI技术的隐喻——故事中军方未经同意将尸体改造成廉价劳动力，与现实里推动AI取代人类创作者的行为如出一辙。该片发布后迅速遭舆论反噬，有网友批评布洛姆坎普“江郎才尽”，步了达伦·阿伦诺夫斯基推出糟糕AI历史剧的后尘。评论最终总结：“文生视频模型或许越来越强大，但远未到能产出令观众期待的作品的地步。”

中文翻译：

周一，《第九区》与《GT赛车》导演尼尔·布洛姆坎普揭晓了他的最新项目：一部13分钟的科幻短片《夜诞者》，该片大致改编自彼得·沃茨2014年的小说《回声狂想曲》。这部短片出自布洛姆坎普新成立的人工智能初创公司兼制作公司Barley Studios，片中角色的声音和面容均以真人演员为原型。然而，《夜诞者》的每一个镜头都是由字节跳动的Seedance 2.0文生视频工具生成的。

尼尔·布洛姆坎普的新僵尸AI“电影”不过是炒冷饭的劣质作品。再巧妙的剪辑也无法让这部由Seedance生成的烂片变得有趣。

在X平台关于该短片的帖子中，布洛姆坎普将其描述为一次“试验性启动”，旨在展示生成式AI的能力，并表示未来他计划“用这种形式制作一部长片”。他似乎认为《夜诞者》是一个强有力的概念验证，或许能激发观众对他后续作品的好奇。然而，尽管这部“电影”在制作精良程度上可能优于当今互联网上流传的大部分AI生成视频，它仍然带有许多我们与“垃圾内容”挂钩的特征。即便有真人团队参与了制作，《夜诞者》的观感依然糟糕透顶，很难让人将其称为电影制作的未来。

《夜诞者》以美国与叙利亚之间的军事冲突为背景，讲述了一名美国飞行员在直升机被击落时身受重伤的故事。虽然飞行员的身体大部分严重受损，但在技术上她仍存有生命迹象，且头部完好无损。这使得她成为“夜诞者计划”——一项将脑死亡士兵转化为遥控武器化僵尸的政府项目——的理想人选。由于军方拥有取之不尽的躯体资源，这位飞行员只是众多被秘密训练用于战争的制服僵尸之一。

和几乎所有先前的AI生成电影一样，《夜诞者》实际上是由一系列极短视频片段拼接而成，用以讲述一个简单的故事。影片频繁地在变成僵尸的主角镜头与记录片式采访参与“夜诞者计划”人员的镜头之间切换。这些剪辑为这部由奥斯汀·戴恩斯剪辑的影片提供了一种手段，用以掩盖Seedance 2.0一次只能生成几秒钟视频片段的事实。而影片对话的混音方式几乎（但并非完全）让你感觉像是在听真人说话。

布洛姆坎普的创作声音几乎不存在。当你仔细审视《夜诞者》的画面并仔细聆听其音频时，很容易察觉到其中混合的生成式AI元素。背景中的标志常常是毫无意义的乱码，角色们用不寻常的重音念出台词，让人感觉他们并不真正理解自己在说什么。据布洛姆坎普称，“真正的概念艺术家”为该项目贡献了力量，32位真人演员同意他们的肖像被用于银幕。但这些人类投入似乎远远不足以让《夜诞者》摆脱更像机器制造的内容而非艺术品的感受。

除了它出自那位构想出《约翰内斯堡生存》（一部运用视觉特效探索种族隔离时代偏见的想象力之作）的同一导演之手外，《夜诞者》毫无引人注目之处。随着短片故事的展开，布洛姆坎普的创作声音几乎不存在。如果Seedance 2.0不是其中的因素，人们很可能根本不会讨论它。

尽管Seedance 2.0显然能生成表现人物情绪的视频，《夜诞者》却凸显了该模型仍然未能真正理解那些让人性表演显得自然且真实生动的细微之处。你在短片中可能看到的任何情绪上的微妙之处，实际上只是Seedance 2.0训练所依据的视频的反映，并非它自身的功劳。

除了僵尸这个元素，《夜诞者》与其原始素材并无太多共同点。但它很像贾樟柯的短片《贾樟柯的舞》以及鲁阿伊里·鲁滨逊那部描绘汤姆·克鲁斯与布拉德·皮特打斗的、走红网络的AI视频——两者均使用Seedance 2.0创作。这些项目都表明，传统电影制作人往往知道如何淡化生成式AI的技术局限，但他们的技巧在弥补该技术固有的弱点方面作用有限。

尽管文生视频模型可能正变得更复杂，但它们尚未进步到能制作出观众期待看到的成品。《夜诞者》发布后几乎立刻遭到了一波强烈反对，许多人认为该片是布洛姆坎普江郎才尽的标志。虽然布洛姆坎普可能以为《夜诞者》能为自己带来一些正面热度，但看起来他更像是陷入了一种与达伦·阿伦诺夫斯基制作那部关于独立战争的糟糕AI系列片相似的尴尬境地。

《夜诞者》最有趣之处在于，它的故事可以被解读为对创作所用技术的评论。“夜诞者计划”的核心是有权势者未经同意、利用死者的躯体来廉价获取劳动力。生成式AI不像杀人僵尸士兵那样（立刻或明显）具有破坏性，但那些推动使用这项技术的人，其背后的驱动力与《夜诞者》中的反派如出一辙。

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英文来源：

On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that’s loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every single one of Nightborne’s shots was made with ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator.
Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over
No amount of clever editing can make this Seedance-generated mess interesting.
Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over
No amount of clever editing can make this Seedance-generated mess interesting.
In an X post about the short, Blomkamp described it as a “test start” meant to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he said that he wants “to tackle a full feature in this format” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think that Nightborne is a strong proof of concept that might get people intrigued to see what he prompts next. But as polished as the “film” might be compared to most of the AI-generated videos floating around the internet today, it still bears many of the hallmarks we associate with slop. And even though a team of real people was involved in the project’s production, Nightborne is such a terrible watch that one would be hard-pressed to call it the future of moviemaking.
Set against the backdrop of a military conflict between the US and Syria, Nightborne tells the story of an American pilot who sustains life-threatening injuries when her helicopter is shot down. Though most of the pilot’s body is badly injured, she’s still technically alive and her head is intact. Those things make her the ideal candidate for Project Nightborne — a governmental program that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote controlled, weaponized zombies. And because the military has an endless supply of bodies at its disposal, the pilot is one of many uniformed ghouls being trained for war in secret.
Like basically every other AI-generated film that has come before it, Nightborne is really a collection of very short video clips that have been edited together to tell a simple story. Nightborne frequently cuts from shots of its zombified main character to documentary-style interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts give the film — which was edited by Austyn Daines — a way to obfuscate the fact that Seedance 2.0 is only capable of generating a few seconds of video footage at a time. And the way the film’s dialogue is mixed almost (but not quite) makes it seem like you’re listening to real people speaking.
Blomkamp’s creative voice feels almost nonexistent
When you really take a good look at Nightborne’s visuals and listen closely to its audio, it’s easy to pick up on how much gen AI is in the mix. Signs in the background are often written in complete gibberish, and characters deliver their lines with unusual emphases that make them come across like people who don’t actually know what they’re saying. According to Blomkamp, “real concept artists” contributed work to the project, and 32 human actors agreed to have their likenesses used on-screen. But that human input doesn’t seem like it’s anywhere near enough to keep Nightborne from feeling more like machine-made content than a piece of art.
Aside from it coming from the same director who dreamt up Alive in Joburg — an imaginative exercise in using VFX to explore ideas about apartheid-era bigotry — there’s nothing remarkable about Nightborne. Blomkamp’s creative voice feels almost nonexistent as the short’s story unfolds, and if Seedance 2.0 wasn’t part of the equation, people probably wouldn’t be talking about it.
Though Seedance 2.0 can clearly churn out videos of people emoting, Nightborne highlights how the model still doesn’t have any sort of real understanding of the minute details that make human performances feel organic and truly alive. Whatever emotive nuance you might see in the short is really just a reflection of the videos Seedance 2.0 has been trained on, and not exactly something that it can take credit for.
Aside from zombies, Nightborne doesn’t have all that much in common with its source material. But it’s a lot like Jia Zhangke’s Jia Zhangke’s Dance short and Ruairí Robinson’s viral AI video depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting — both of which were created with Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects has demonstrated that traditional filmmakers tend to know how to downplay gen AI’s technical limitations, but their skills can only do so much to offset the technology’s innate weaknesses.
Though text-to-video models may be getting more sophisticated, they haven’t advanced enough to produce finished works that audiences are excited to see. Nightborne’s announcement was almost immediately met with a wave of backlash from people who saw the film as a sign of Blomkamp being washed. And while Blomkamp might have thought that Nightborne would generate some positive buzz for himself, it seems much more like he’s wandered into an unfortunate situation similar to the one Darren Aronofsky created with his terrible AI series about the Revolutionary War.
The most interesting thing about Nightborne is the way its story can be interpreted as commentary on the technology that was used to make it. Project Nightborne is all about individuals in positions of power repurposing dead people’s bodies without their consent in order to generate labor on the cheap. Generative AI isn’t as (immediately or obviously) destructive as killer zombie soldiers, but those pushing for the technology’s use are driven by a desire that’s similar to the one motivating Nightborne’s villains.
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