The laborious process of making a film, from hiring actors and crew and sourcing props to securing film permits, could soon be made far cheaper and simpler by artificial intelligence, as demonstrated by a new short film entirely generated by AI.

An early glimpse of AI's potential to disrupt Hollywood, the short film The Frost can be viewed free of charge on the MIT Technology Review's website and gives a sense of how close AI is to being used in film production, as well as in new forms of art.

The 12-minute film, produced by Waymark, a US manufacturer of video software, was generated by taking still images and using AI image generators DALL-E 2 and DALL-E to generate each shot.

The images were then animated using the AI tool D-ID.

It's immediately clear that the use of AI in film production is still in its infancy, but the film's producers also say they were not entirely trying to replicate a "real" film with actors.

"We kind of hit a point where we just stopped fighting the desire for photographic accuracy and started leaning into the weirdness that is DALL-E," the MIT website quotes Stephen Parker, creative director at Waymark, as saying.

The result is surreal, and at times unsettling. The AI-generated film seems to oscillate between genres, from collage to animation to real film.

In some ways though, it creates its very own genre.

"It was a bit of a struggle to get certain things from DALL-E, like emotional responses in faces," The Frost director Josh Rubin is quoted as saying.

"But at other times, it delighted us. We’d be like, 'Oh my God, this is magic happening before our eyes.'"

 - dpa