# Lorecore: The Final Chapter – ZORA ZINE

Source: https://zine.zora.co/lorecore-shumon-basar-y7
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Lorecore-The-Final-Chapter-ZORA-ZINE?index=0x64e0960586cdfa2c98ace9ba245b3c87a48a7f2708dcf13244b311638bb8154ef2cbbb12
Submitted by misha on 2023-08-19 UTC, 1 upvote, 0 comments

## Summary

Y7, a Salford duo specializing in theory and audiovisual work, collaborated with writer Lore on the final chapter of the Lorecore Trilogy, a film made with generative AI. The team began with a script that Y7 fed as prompts into text-to-content models, including Runway's Gen-2, Midjourney's Infinite Zoom and AudioLDM, to produce characters, voices, video, theme music and sound design. The work is presented as an exploration of what Boris Groys calls "the chaos hidden behind the smooth surface" of generative AI, not an attempt to make writing, acting or scoring redundant. The piece was released while Hollywood writers and actors were on strike over fears that studios would use such technology to auto-generate content.

## Article

For the final chapter of my Lorecore Trilogy (read the first part here, and the second here), I’ve collaborated with Y7, a duo based in Salford, England, who specialize in theory and audiovisual work. Ever since generative AI flooded our feeds—just think of Moncler Pope or Fake Drake—Y7 and I jested about how we had now entered the “Promptcore” era. Here, according to a neologism from “The Lexicon of Lorecore,” the zeitgeist is taken over by “Deepfake Surrender”—“to accept that soon, everyone or everything one sees on a screen will most likely have been generated or augmented by AI to look and sound more real than reality ever did.” Y7 and I also agreed that, so far, most material outputted from generative AI apps (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney) is decidedly mid. But, does it have to be?

I set about writing a film script. The premise is “Lore Island at the end of the end of the internet.” An apocalyptic meet-cute! Y7 then used the script as prompts in a panoply of text-to-content AI models (such as Runway's Gen-2, Midjourney’s Infinite Zoom and AudioLDM etc.) to produce characters, voices, video, theme music, and sound design. At the time of release, Hollywood’s writers and actors are on a sensational strike, in part out of existential anxiety about the survival of their crafts once studios use this kind of technology to auto-generate film and television content. In “Core + Lore,” Y7 and I have not set out to make writing, set design, scoring, or acting redundant through an aesthetics of illusory realism. That would be truly mid. Instead, we are interested in what Boris Groys calls “the chaos hidden behind the smooth surface” promised by generative AI, at this nascent moment in time. Or, as one of our film’s protagonists, Lore, blurts out: “Prompting is winning.”