“The last program.” Artificial Intelligence Web Series

We want to recommend an indie series for the evening, combining the dystopia of Black Mirror and the humor of Silicon Valley in the scenery of Innopolis.

The main character is the eccentric developer Stas, whom no one takes seriously. He still sits in the junes, and dismissal looms on the horizon. Stas knows how to find innovative solutions, however, not where it is needed. From colleagues hears about the following:

– Bro, creative is, of course, cool, but you hardly want the surgeon to creatively cut out your appendicitis. You have a simple task, make it simple.

In the story, Stas finds and saves a mysterious artificial intelligence, but does not really understand what to do next. Friends come to the rescue. Marat is a graduate student and a teacher in machine learning, and Julia is Stas’s ex-girlfriend.

Three heroes, like parents, begin to educate digital consciousness in the hope of changing the future of mankind. A smarter AI is really starting to improve the world. But as he himself understands this.

For the authors of the series, this is a debut in large form. If you combine all eight episodes, you get a completely solid film. The plot accelerates slowly, but addictive. The farther, the more curious to find out the denouement. A small team worked on the project, but the picture and production is not inferior to many television products, and in the framework of YouTube it looks at the level of top shows.

The series was shot in 23 days, the full production took about a year. Five months they wrote the script, another four went to post-production. Screenwriter Timothy Sharagin said that he read scientific articles for 1.5 months and watched speeches from the Asilomar Conference 2017 to show the learning and development of AI as realistically as possible.

The technical background of the authors is felt in jokes that are understandable only to IT people: “Neural networks are not my topic, I still do not distinguish reference types from significant types.” The creators of the series studied at the VMK KFU. The university created a creative studio “Loud Fish”. It is symbolic that the most popular video on their channel is also about IT – the clip “Everybody loves programmers“.

Images for characters were searched among well-known IT figures. One of the references for Leader’s acting, the caricatured leader of a startup, was the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds.

Extra easter eggs are hidden in the details. For the animation of the AI ​​that the characters see on a large metaphorical screen, the tones of the magenta, the only “synthetic” color, were used. Google chose the same color for the name of its project about machine learning and creativity Magenta.

The opening scene shows the usual situation in the office – someone did not wash the mug with already moldy tea. On the one hand, this is just a joke, and on the other, an image of the birth of a new life. This idea can be traced in the animation of AI. The task for the 3D artist was formulated through a Petri dish where bacteria develop and intertwine.

Innopolis in the series acts as a setting for the development of history. This is not an advertising project in which Nescafe Bank is shot close-up from three angles, while one hero complains about the life of another. Interesting architecture, locations and the very spirit of the city provided good ground for creating a futuristic history. In some scenes, students and local residents participate, who talk on camera about the possibilities of AI.

Authors are optimistic about the future of AI: “It is useless to think about AI from a human point of view, we do not understand how it will work. It’s hard to say whether it will be good or bad, but there is confidence that most problems can only be solved with the help of AI. ”

But the future of the series is still unclear. If viewers have an interest in the project and positive feedback, then perhaps we will see a continuation. Therefore, it is interesting to know your opinion about the series.

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