#1493: “About a Hero” Doc Written by AI Trained on Werner Herzog Corpus Blends Realities and Opens IDFA

About a Hero is a documentary that reenacts an imaginal, true crime documentary script written by an AI language model that was trained on a corpus of Werner Herzog content. It's a film that blends and blurs the lines between what's physically-captured, documentary material versus completely constructed and fabricated content generated by AI. It's the opening night documentary film at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, and it's also featured within the DocLab Spotlight. I had a chance to talk with director Piotr Winiewicz and producer Mads Damsbo about the process of making this piece as well as the set of rules that they created for themselves in order to make it a true collaboration between man and machine.Also be sure to check out my interview with the DocLab curators talking about all 28 projects in this year's selection. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality