ESSAY I AI and Animating: ‘The Artist and the End’

When I was making our last film in Afghanistan a young girl at our tribal Yellow House kept amusing me and herself by changing her face and mine on her father's phone. For example, she could turn me into a twelve-year-old girl with lipstick, plaits, a cute hat, and a frilly dress. This was done using a phone app. Recently, when I was in the audience at a grandchild's basketball game, two younger boys, only four or five years old, were doing similar AI tricks on a phone screen. They were delighted to see that I appreciated their creations.

The Artist and The End (film sill), 2026, film, 9 min 30 seconds.

Artificial intelligence will be used by young artists who started using it as kids on their phones. They will see it as a natural extension of drawing and painting.

Artificial intelligence has enabled Hellen Rose and I to move from purely documentary making to creating animated films and music videos.

During COVID-19 we staged the Surf Shack Show in our neighbouring house at Werri Beach on the South Coast of New South Wales. The surfers who had lived there had been made to vacate and the house was scheduled for demolition. We gained permission to turn it into a temporary gallery and performance space. The series of paintings I exhibited there were about the concerns we all have for the direction of humanity. They were different to the art I bring back as a witness from war zones. Their aim was to express the defining mood of this period in history—the zeitgeist.

When COVID-19 restrictions prevented us from going overseas to work on our documentaries we decided to experiment with animation because it could be made at home. We found, however, that traditional methods on their own were too slow and began exploring AI. With the assistance of the AI tool Seedance 2.0 we have animated our first film, The Artist and the End. The short version of the film will premiere at the Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF) on Friday 11th September at 7:45pm. 

The Artist and The End (film sill), 2026, film, 9 min 30 seconds.

While making this complex and time-consuming film I have been come to know AI in a very intimate way. To my surprise, I have discovered it hallucinates. That is, it invents things not requested in our detailed instructions. For example, there is a scene where an astronaut needs to become weightless and float to the top of his space capsule. The AI got him to do this, but when he reached the ceiling, his head morphed into an elephant trunk which extended itself down to the floor and started sucking things up like a vacuum cleaner. I have heard many people say, “AI does not have an imagination and cannot create,” but that is not true. It creates and its creations can be annoying. It takes time to correct them, slowing down our intended work.

At first, my way of drawing figures must have seemed weird to AI. It was frustrating to see it “improve” my style, correcting distortions and making my figures more anatomically realistic. Overtime though, it has learnt how I draw. Now it animates my figures in my style without any attempt to “fix” them. Original Gittoes strangeness has been incorporated into the mind of AI!

Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s people talked about “completely expanded consciousness” as something to be achieved. Expanded consciousness is getting realized quickly with AI. I have never taken drugs or LSD or intended my film to be psychedelic. But looking at it objectively it can only be described as “psychedelic surrealism.” I predict the new era of AI assisted art and film will be very “trippy.”

In the past I would have needed a team of animators working over many months to complete my film. However, by using the Seedance it has been possible to achieve completion with one assistant, Yanni Cvetanovic, who, unlike me, has a degree in animation. To communicate better with Seedance we used another AI tool, Claude, by Anthropic, which converts our instructions into clearer AI language.

The film’s story was initially visualised from digital photographs of my oil paintings. But to make it flow like a filmed drama I had to continually paint the changes in characters and set elements. Images brushed in oil paint have a bizarre look I have not seen before in animation. Yanni and I both use Kamvas 16 tablet screens (connected to Photoshop) to draw and cut out the hand painted figures from their backgrounds. Seedance allows the figures to move off the canvases and come to life. When Hellen’s acoustic music and soundtrack is added it becomes an immersive experience—very different to when I exhibited the paintings on their own.

The Artist and The End (film sill), 2026, film, 9 min 30 seconds.

Thirty-one years ago I documented the Kibeho massacre in Rwanda, taking over a thousand photographs while unthinkable war crimes were being committed. I am still haunted by the faces of the victims, including dead children. I did not have my film camera at Kibeho, so I bracketed what I shot in rapid sequences of 35mm stills. Seedance can ingest up to ten of these connected photo scenes to produce moving footage almost identical to what a film camera would have captured. The result is completely believable as film. This expansion of the photographs has made possible a graphically real and confronting film, and nothing like animation.

I am now planning to include AI elements in a new documentary we are about to make in Afghanistan. This will annoy documentary purists who protested when I mixed drama elements with real life footage in my film The Miscreants of Taliwood, 2009. People complained they did not know what was real from what was unreal and that some of it was too real. But I believe documentary is no different than any other medium and artists have a responsibility to test and push boundaries.

In this same period Hellen has made a music video titled Gilded Gutter, 2026, using the same AI and animation techniques. It has already won many awards around the world and will screen with The Artist and The End at SUFF. Gilded Gutter was released on the anniversary of the death of Virginia Giuffre and is dedicated to victims of abuse.  

When photography came on the scene artists worried that they would no longer be asked to paint portraits or landscapes. Many feared it would be the end of painting and drawing. Musicians had similar fears about synthesisers challenging acoustic instruments and actors thought cinema would be the end of live theatre.

AI has terrible potential to harm the human race, from job losses to surveillance where privacy is lost in a world more like George Orwell’s BIG BROTHER of 1984. At every trade fair, there are robots on display from Moscow to Beijing. In the science fiction films Avatar, 2009, and Avatar: The Way of Water, 2022, there is a glimpse of the future with soldiers riding inside monster robots. Recently on TV news I saw a man in Tokyo get into one of these robotic contraptions and walk it down a footpath to the horror of other pedestrians. In April this year, a humanoid robot running in China beat the human half-marathon world record. We are only three years away from household robots becoming the dominant consumer item that every consumer will want purchase to wash and fold cloths, mow the lawns, and vacuum the carpets. They will be introduced quickly and change society the way mobile phones connected to social media have. In 2020, James Cameron, writer and director of the first two Terminator films (1984 and 1991)—as well as the Avatar films—moved to New Zealand because he believes AI and robotics will soon bring on Armageddon and it is safer to be as far from the United States as possible. The devastated future he imagined forty-two years ago where Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the Terminator, transports from 2029 is looking more likely than not.

The Artist and The End (film sill), 2026, film, 9 min 30 seconds.

When governments can use AI based surveillance and AI robotic enforcers to control protests and populations, fascist rulers will no longer need to depend on human police and armies to stay in power. It is already happening with drones replacing frontline soldiers and pilots.

I have left the safety of Australia to be a witness and create art in many war zones from Rwanda to Ukraine. Working with AI has the same feel but I am at home. I am embedding myself in something that could bring about the end of humanity in my lifetime. Elon Musk sees AI as a greater threat to humanity than nuclear destruction and predicts that within five years it will be vastly smarter than the smartest humans. That is not stopping him, however, from joining in the lucrative development race.

Pope Leo XIV shares these concerns and in May this year held an encyclical conference at the Vatican titled Magnifica Humanitas: on safeguarding the human person in a time of Artificial Intelligence. One of the key speakers was Chris Olah who is the scientist co-founder of Anthropic. Olah’s personal insight is incredible and worth quoting at length: “AI models are grown on a structure roughly modelled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech. And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”

The Artist and The End (film sill), 2026, film, 9 min 30 seconds.

To end on a curious but positive note I once painted the portrait of His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama and I have kept in touch. His personal assistant, Yangten Rinpoche, has been given the responsibility of digitizing the full cannon of his Holiness’s teachings, which include over 110 books, for ingestion into an AI agent, like Claude. People will be able to solicit AI for spiritual advice. The Dalai Lama is ninety-one but it is believed his wisdom can live on after he departs through AI. His successor will be a child and it could be twenty years before he can take on the full mantle of a spiritual leader, in the meantime AI will fulfill the task.

People rightly feel worried about a future where AI takes over, and the world of the “Terminator” appears.  But as an artist I am excited to use AI as a tool to create and not to destroy. I often say, ” Perhaps a painting has never saved a life, but the arts are all that can save humanity.”

Screening
The Artist and The End
11 September 2026, 7:45pm
Sydney Underground Film Festival
The Factory Theatre, Marrickville

Images courtesy of the artist.