Back in the day people would have roast battles. Now we’re getting AI roast battles 🔥

Short Commentary

For some reason or other, shorts in which there is an argument or roast from Siri, seem to be crowd pleasers. They tend to perform well, and can be fun to make. Even before the AI boom a couple of years ago, these shorts were strong, repeat performers. There seems to be something fun about the concept of a computer character who functions as a ‘frenemy’. The Siri character in these shorts also tends to be very sharp-tongued. Always ready to hurl an insult, before doing her job. That idea came from a re-imagining of the concept of ‘AI gains consciousness and goes against humanity’. I think most people are familiar with the concept from movies like ‘Terminator’, but I wanted to do something a bit different. If instead of the ai character turning against humanity and wanting to attack humans, what if the ai was perfectly fine with what it was, but just held a bit of petty contempt for whoever is giving it commands. Sometimes funny situations can come from simple interactions and the idea of an endlessly petty, but functional robot lends itself to a lot of opportunities for play.

However, in this short Siri has a couple of new friends (frenemies). Making characters out of other ai agents adds a nice twist to these shorts and enhances the comedic opportunities. It’s fun seeing how these characters would act towards each other. It took some time trying to figure out which ai’s to use and how to characterize them, but eventually I settled on using ‘ChatGPT’ and ‘Grok’. The former, for its popularity and the latter for its… uh… interesting history. I think the 3 make a fun dynamic, but it’s a bit hard to give them each their time to shine in 30 seconds, so maybe future shorts will be less cramped. It’s also possible that more ai agents can be introduced in future shorts, or even have their own spin-offs at a later date. The technology evolves very quickly and there’s always some interesting news about this stuff, which means finding material to make jokes out of is very easy! I wonder what shenanigans all of these characters will get up to in the future?

Bonus reference for Grok hilariously calling itself ‘Mechahitler’:

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-traders-mint-millions-grok-063804319.html

Production Commentary

There wasn’t much new in the way of how this short was produced. Perhaps the biggest change was that the logo’s for the ai, which would usually be made in After Effects, was done fully in Toonboom Harmony Premium. I’ve spoken about my desire to move away from adobe products in the future so I won’t go into that here, but that was a novel circumstance for this particular short.

More interesting I think was that this short had 4 characters. Knowing that this would be a more complicated short due to that fact, I balanced the workload by removing backgrounds. I knew that I would have to do a lot of lip-sync for the ai, and I didn’t want to add more to my workload with having fancy backgrounds (which I knew most likely would not be seen because the camera is very close in most of the cuts). When making these shorts, balance is very important. The inclination is to make fully rendered backgrounds with beautiful, Disney-esque animation and captivating sound design, but if you try to do all of that, the difficulty in finishing a short becomes exponential. This is why a lot of animators exclusively work in ‘animatics’ with no sound, or forge teams to work with. In other cases, they simply aren’t prolific and will publish 1 or 2 videos a year.

Even though there was a lot of lip-syncing, the overall production for this short was smooth. Unfortunately, Siri’s icon faced a bit of a downgrade (her logo is very hard to recreate out of After Effects), but I think it all came together in a fun package. Especially Grok. The idea to give Grok an anime girl voice was kind of a last minute decision. I recall having the idea after the storyboards were complete, but it was worth it. Elon Musk would promote Grok’s image generation capability with anime and that inspired the voice. I made use of Elevenlabs’ custom voice feature to make it. I know there are anti-ai people, but I have previously disclosed my use case for ai in my shorts (seo and voice work due to expense). Ai doesn’t touch my animation process, but it does help guide some elements that I have a weakness in, or inability to provide myself.

Overall I’m happy with how this short came out. I enjoy how the animation of the characters turned out, though there were some ideas that didn’t make it into the final short that I will save for future ones. I also think it’s a nice expansion of my ‘Siri’ shorts, which were always planned to have more characters and character arcs. I think this is a good step toward evolving the format from creating characters for jokes, to making jokes from the characters.