The AI kept getting things wrong. In one shot, Tiggy looked inexplicably jacked. In another, his back was too dry. When the filmmaker told one piece of software to give the back of Tiggy’s head “frog-like skin,” it superimposed an entire frog’s face. The AI seemed to resist depicting Tiggy naked, but Tiggy does not wear clothes. When the director asked for a “short shirtless alien,” he got an error message, presumably because of the tool’s safeguards. “Because I said the word shirtless,” he guessed.
Narratives around AI tend to be all-or-nothing: Either we’re cooked or it’s all hype. Watching the filmmaker work with AI software—morning iced coffee in hand, brown hair and beard lightly unkempt—is quirkier and less dramatic than all that. It’s like dropping in on puppy school. The tools keep ignoring instructions, making odd choices, or veering entirely off-course. But with care and patience, he reins them in, eventually coaxing out eight minutes of densely scripted original TV.
In this case, those eight minutes constituted the latest episode in the sci-fi cinematic universe that the filmmaker has created under the name Neural Viz. The project started in 2024 with a mockumentary web series called Unanswered Oddities, a talking-head TV show from a future where the Earth is inhabited by creatures called glurons, who engage in Ancient Aliens–style speculation about their human predecessors. Each episode explores a different (and badly mispronounced) aspect of “hooman” civilization, like America, exercise, or the NFL. At first it seemed like a funny, self-contained bit.
But then the universe, known as the Monoverse, started to expand. Neural Viz churned out episodes of different series from the same gluron TV network, Monovision: a documentary cop show, a UFC-style show about fighting bugs. Then came podcasts, street interviews. Subplots and arcs started to emerge between videos, with romances forming, religious cults lurking in the background, and grainy archival footage surfacing about the true circumstances that wiped out humanity. Before long, the filmmaker had built an entire world with its own language, characters, and lore, all of it made with AI.
Neural Viz became a cult hit—a favorite of Redditors and AI nerds on Twitter—then a hit-hit, with individual videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and millions on TikTok and Instagram.
But beyond any measures of popularity, Neural Viz counts as a historic accomplishment: It is among the first pieces of AI filmmaking that truly does not suck. The words “AI video” tend to conjure the worst possible associations: hippos on diving boards, babies flying airplanes, Will Smith eating spaghetti, Trump and Barack Obama kissing. In other words, slop. The medium’s reputation is understandably negative, for reasons both aesthetic and political. The bots will ruin Hollywood and destroy jobs, the argument goes, and drive audiences even deeper into their algorithm-induced stupor.
