Promonews's own Rob Ulitski has created an original music film, based upon his own horror short story Rubber, using an innovative blend of AI-trained models to create both the music and the visuals.

Rubber is one of the monthly short stories Rob has written exclusively for indie horror platform Godless, and contains both cosmic and body horror elements. So he experimented with two AI programs - one for music and one for vision - to see what would happen once he had prompted them with a synopsis of the story.

“I’ve seen a lot of different people using AI in both the music and video space, and I was waiting for a project that would suit that kind of work I’m doing,” he says. “I’m focusing on my horror writing work at the moment, but with one foot in horror and one foot in the music video world, I thought this could be a perfect way to combine my interests.”

Using music platform Mubert to make the track, Rob typed in the synopsis of his book and used the first track it generated, to keep the experiment as spontaneous as possible.

“Mubert uses an innovative algorithm which is still musician-first, and as such, whilst the AI does a lot of the work in the generation, musicians still get paid for their work and get a royalty from each use," he continues. "I think this is one reason the music sounds so much more fluid and professional in this case, compared to other AI-only algorithms - the musicians are still front and centre in the process.”

The visual elements were made using Neural Frames, a software that is growing in popularity worldwide, which allows users to input prompts and change them whilst the visuals are generating.

"I wanted to work chronologically through the short story, so used the first paragraph of each page of the story to generate the visuals. I tweaked as I went in some cases, when the software went a little off-track or the prompt was too vague. But I kept things as spontaneous as possible, to ensure it was a fun experiment. I wanted the video to look like the old 80s / 90s pulp horror fiction covers, and I think the uncanny nature of the AI works really well for this. It’s almost like the not-quite-real airbrushed paintings that were used back in the day.”

He was also mindful of ethical concerns in the AI space as he made this project. "This is very much a not-for-profit experiment. I always pay artists for my book covers and interior artwork, as well as their work in other mediums, and will continue to do so for any project like that. This was a fun way to get involved in the AI space and keep up to date with what’s happening in a world outside of my comfort zone.”