Washed Out Debuts "The Hardest Part," the First Music Video Created by Sora AI
Artificial Intelligence
2-minute read
Washed Out, whom Pitchfork dubbed "the godfather of chillwave," and music video director Paul Trillo recently released their latest work using OpenAI's Sora. At four minutes and two seconds, the music video for the single "The Hardest Part" is currently the longest video created using the text-to-image model, exemplifying the AI-driven evolution of the music and film landscape. Washed Out is expected to return with his fourth album, "Notes from a Quiet Life," on June 28th this year.
Is chillwave becoming a bit passé? (Source: Washed Out)
The AI-produced piece has sparked fierce debate. Comments like "The future is digital diarrhea," "You use AI for the song too?" and "The visual is like urban legend creepy pasta. At a glance it looks normal, at a second and third glance its looks like nightmare," flooded the the Internet. While not all commenters are AI detractors, for many viewers, the strange bodily movements and disjointed cinematography did induce discomfort and dizziness. Yet, this effect might just be what Trillo intended to convey.
The lyrics of "The Hardest Part" are simple, and the video follows a male and a female character (not real actors) through various life stages—from youthful high school days to family life and eventually death—evoking an inexplicable sense of melancholy. "
I leaned into the hallucinations, the strange details, the dream-like logic of movement, the distorted mirror of memories, the surreal qualities unique to Sora / AI that differentiate it from reality," said director Paul Trillo in a statement. Essentially, he used the illogical nature of Sora to represent the unreliable nature of human memory.
Interestingly, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy once compared the "hallucinations" of large language models to dreams. "They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM's hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful. It's only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a "hallucination". It looks like a bug, but it's just the LLM doing what it always does."
But don't rush to proclaim the death of creativity. Although the music video was entirely AI-generated, the process was more complex than one might imagine. In an interview with LA Times, Trillo shared some behind-the-scenes insights into using Sora. He mentioned that to produce usable footage, musician Ernest Greene, a.k.a. Washed Out, wrote detailed prompts, including the angles and descriptions of the characters' actions. For example, he would write: "We zoom through the bubble it pops and we zoom through the bubblegum and enter an open football field," Trillo would then add camera movement descriptions: "The scene is moving rapidly, showing a front perspective, showing the students getting bigger and faster."
Together, they crafted a multitude of prompts, using Sora to explore various life moments of a couple at different stages and locations. This process generated about 700 video segments, from which Trillo selected 55 clips to piece together in Adobe Premiere. In total, it took six weeks to complete "The Hardest Part." Collaborating with Sora was still a labor-intensive endeavor.
As it stands, Sora (at least in its current form) offers something that is less a replacement for existing workflows and more a particular style or a kind of collage aesthetic—if one is willing to call it that. "You kind of have to relinquish a bit of your free will in working with this thing and you kind of have to accept the nature of how chaotic it is," Trillo aptly noted in his interview.
