The gorgeous images are promotional materials for the new short film Instagays – and they’re all AI-generated
INSTAGAYS is a gay spaghetti western about a group of vainglorious #instagays whose trip to Fire Island takes a dark turn when they accidentally murder their token friend of color. (You can read So.Gay’s feature on the film here!) The film was an inaugural recipient of the Joel Schumacher/Sophia Cranshaw Mentorship Award from The Gotham Film & Media Institute, a recipient of the 2022 Phil Johnston Comedy Grant at Columbia University, and is supported by Film Independent.
The short film is written and directed by p0laris and stars Max Emerson, Andres Camilo, Isaac Vega, and Sushant Adlakha.
As part of the promotional rollout of the new film, the director, p0laris, created a bevy of AI-generated images and spoke to So.Gay about his artistic reasoning behind the choice:
“Ultimately Instagays is an exploration of all things problematic and AI ‘art’ felt like a natural way to engage with the core themes of the film…This was a way for me as an artist to continue to engage with the subject matter way past the making of the short film. To create art is not inherently accessible to most people and technology has always moved towards democratizing the means of production. I was able to feed in my references and ideas into Midjourney and come up with these images that I could have never created in real life without a budget. It was also super interesting to see how my own work and intellectual property was being repurposed. The first few images I created had remarkable similarities to members of the cast and I attribute that to Max and Andres’s public association with the word ‘Instagays’ and my own press that I did featuring that keyword that included images of the film and its cast members. As Charli xcx would say, “I’m your favorite reference baby.”
P0laris continues, “When I began to post the AI imagery I was surprised by how many people in my own network asked what the deal was with those images and then to see them reach strangers who seemed to believe that they were images of real people was pretty concerning and unsettling. But it feels like a natural progression of society’s obsession with setting unattainable beauty standards through the ages. I’m not so sure if society has ever been interested in representing real life beauty than or if we as artists have an obsession with creating the “ideal” and appealing to our basic instincts of human cognition that have now been repurposed in service of capitalist structures. I think people can’t recognize AI imagery these days for the same reasons they can’t recognize FaceTune, or Photoshop, or vaseline on the lens. Tools for image manipulation are so ubiquitous in our culture that our perception of what’s real has been altered as a species.”
You can stream Instagays here and check out all of Instagay’s promotional imagery below. Many, if not most of the images, are shockingly realistic. Can you tell the difference?
