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Oh, sweet Netflix. They got to the tippy top just at the very end. The breaking news today originally came to me in the form of Netflix buying HBO. No, no. They're buying all of Warner Bros too: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/netflix-to-buy-warner-bros-rcna247510
Why not? I just spent hours a few days ago on the draft of a post about how Netflix was blowing absurd amounts of cash on in-house programming. Why not buy yourself the biggest diamond mine right around the time that pocket sized diamond factories start popping up everywhere?
The original target of my ire was Frankenstein. I hated it because I have lost the childlike innocence required to sit through a Guillermo del Toro movie and like it. I grew up, he didn't; or worse, he did and still has to make this shit. At least I can fold laundry while watching it. Which is, by the way, the average streaming viewing experience. Which is now the average "high" culture consumption experience. Phones being the lower version and garnering more and more of that sweet eyeball juice called money every day.
Instead, I decided to see what I could make with Veo for around $200 dollars. I present it to you, the discerning culture war audience:
I am a fan of multiple book series featuring talking cats, eg Dungeon Crawler Carl, Craig Alanson's Convergence. However current CGI techniques are expensive and the thespian skills of cats are famously limited.
So I am very excited about the possibilities that AI is creating for feline main characters.
It should be possible to do a scene with a puppet or very rough cgi and just have AI replace it with a realistic cat.
Off-topic, but I recently came across Fritz Leiber's short story Space-Time for Springers. It's about a super-intelligent kitten who can't yet speak but longs to become a man. Very good (though melancholic) if you like cat literature. AGI will have been achieved once it figures out how to adapt it to screen.
anime_butterfly_boy.jpg Is this AGI? https://youtube.com/watch?v=8opC-VYGiTc
I'm genuinely unsure. I didn't read the story you linked to try to avoid influencing Opus 4.5 as much as possible. I did see from the text it loaded that it involves a cat and I do indeed see a cat in the video, so benchmark score of 1/1?
I'd call it a failure. But that's not because of failing to understand the story or ugly visuals, but just because it's a really hard story to adapt to the screen--I'm skeptical a human could do any better (maybe what I proposed is a benchmark for ASI, not AGI).
The core difficulty is that the story is very deeply intertwined with Gummitch's internal dialog. That's hard to represent even for a human character, but for a cat, you're likely to land in ridiculous territory. The video sidesteps this by using music to narrate what's going on. But, something about it just comes off as a saccharine commercial.
That said, I appreciate the attempt!
I agree that a voiceover or some change to the lyrics would have helped a lot. I feel like this was less of an adaptation and more of a companion piece for people who are already familiar with the story. If I had to guess at the story from the video it'd be something like: a playful kitten is growing up and wants to eat with the family instead of the older cats, there's something wrong with the daughter, she tries to kill the family's new baby which the now older kitten / cat feels obligated to protect, the cat protects the baby by some sort of magical healing of the daughter(?) that robs the cat of its magic(?) and now it has to live out its life like an ordinary, older cat.
Which, while not a terrible story, strikes me as unlikely to be difficult to adapt. I'm guessing there's a lot about the magic cat and the little girl's problem that's being glossed over.
In fairness to Opus 4.5, I did tell it that I only had the money / time for a roughly 3 minute video. We still ended up going over - I would have trimmed Act 1 considerably. I think that would have helped cut the sweetness.
Opus 4.5 brought a little sugar to the party (example video generation prompt: "1960s kitchen table from low angle. Two adults pour coffee, hands and cups visible, conversation implied. Warm, hazy.") but the real Hallmark schoolmarm here was Veo. I did have to try several rounds of generations and tweak the prompts for about 10% of the shots - enough that I considered just using a black background and "[Veo refusal]" caption. It may not surprise you to learn that Google is extremely sensitive about generating clips of sad looking little girls in their bedrooms.
If anyone's interested in the process / instructions for making your own videos on topics of your choice, here's the transcript of the Opus 4.5 conversation showing how it developed the story / prompts / etc.: https://claude.ai/share/93589514-db93-4ffb-aa7d-579f28154a38
Thanks for the challenge and the feedback. It was fun.
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