Losing appetite and sleep watching movies with fake people

(Dan Tri) - Many people are willing to stay up all night, even spend money to fully watch short films created by AI with intense and dramatic details.

Spend the night watching AI movies

At 3 a.m., Thu Huyen (23 years old) tried to finish the unfinished AI short episode and then planned to go to sleep. But after watching, she still felt not satisfied, Huyen continued to click on the next episodes.

Just like that, when I looked up at the clock, the hands were pointing to 5am. At this point, Huyen realized she only had more than 2 hours left to sleep before it was time to get up to prepare for work.

She promised herself that she would sleep earlier the next day to have the strength to work, but then for a whole week Huyen still fell into the same cycle.

If a few months ago, the young girl was scrolling through AI short films on TikTok with a disparaging attitude, now this type of film has become one of the entertainment activities she spends the most time on after a long day.

"I've only seen AI movies that are ridiculous, even criticized this genre as brain rotten, and I've always wondered why so many people watch this type of movie," Huyen recounted.

Everything changed when an AI video on the topic of love with "suitable" character designs appeared on her recommendation page.

Only about 3 to 5 minutes per episode, so the movie always moves the plot quickly, the climax appears continuously.

More importantly, every episode ends right when an important knot has not been resolved, so Huyen can't help but be curious and watch the next episodes.

"From a short episode, I watched the second and third episodes without realizing it. Each episode ended on a cliffhanger so it was difficult to stop," she said.

The habit of watching AI movies quickly affected Huyen's daily schedule. Twitter finished handling her work and personal hygiene until around 11pm. Instead of resting, she went to bed and turned on her phone to "watch a few episodes to relax".

"I always told myself that after watching this episode, I would fall asleep. But the next episode is more interesting than the previous episode. Gradually, after watching this series, I started looking for other series," Huyen shared.

According to Huyen, the attraction of this series lies in its fast narrative pace, each episode only takes a few dozen seconds to a few minutes but always has new details. The characters are beautifully shaped, the backgrounds are eye-catching, and the plot often revolves around emotional, fantasy, revenge, time travel or genius motifs that easily attract viewers.

Not only Huyen, Minh Anh (25 years old) also became a loyal audience of AI movies by chance.

At first, she only watched a few short clips on TikTok before going to bed. And then the more she watched, the more drawn into the movie's plot. But at some point, the next episodes no longer appeared.

"TikTok only has the first few episodes. At the end of the episodes, they usually introduce the platform to watch the entire series. I was so curious that I downloaded the movie watching app," Minh Anh said.

Once she downloaded the application, she continued to watch the next few episodes. However, in later episodes, the platform requires users to pay to unlock it.

"At first I wanted to stop, but because I got to the thrilling part, I ended up recharging to continue watching," she said.

According to Minh Anh, the amount spent for one episode is about 20,000 VND, so she still easily accepted it.

But to complete a movie, if you spend a small amount of money, the cost will be very high. Therefore, Minh Anh decided to spend up to nearly 400,000 VND to be able to watch all the movies on the platform in a week.

For her, this is still a worthy sum of money in exchange for uninterrupted hours of entertainment, especially when AI short films have become an inescapable habit of Minh Anh.

Episodes made with AI attract millions of views

In fact, the short film market, although "born late", is suddenly rising and becoming a trend of interest in recent years.

In particular, since the explosion of AI video creation tools, artificial intelligence-generated characters have appeared in the short film industry.

With low-budget films, few actors and tight deadlines, staging big scenes used to be a big challenge. Now, AI can "summon" an army of digital actors quickly.

The episodes played by virtual people initially received a lot of controversy from the community, but now suddenly they have become spiritual food for many people.

Type keywords like "AI movie", "AI movie" on TikTok or short video platforms, users can easily see a series of accounts posting AI movies.

According to records, many episodes also attracted millions of views and tens of thousands of likes and shares. Under the videos, it is not difficult to see comments like "so exciting", "where is the new episode", "what is the name of this movie everyone".

Even beyond social networks, many AI short film storage applications have been formed and attracted many downloads.

For example, a platform specializing in AI movies on the App Store is currently leading third in downloads in the entertainment application rankings.

Accessing this application, users can easily search for movies of their favorite genre. The common point of these films is that each episode is short, has a fast pace, and has no breaks.

More attractive are the outstanding character designs, diverse backgrounds, new episodes released early and the content is also built according to formulas that easily push the climax such as love with many events, a wealthy family, revenge, time travel, and the perfect president.

Therefore, many people consider this a new form of entertainment, suitable for their habit of consuming fast, shocking content.

The fever caused a lot of controversy

However, attracting a large number of viewers does not mean that AI movies do not create mixed opinions.

Phuong Uyen (22 years old) said she had many times encountered AI movies recommended on social networks and also watched them out of curiosity.

"I saw a lot of suggestions from TikTok, so I clicked to watch it a few times. But the more I looked, the more it didn't seem right," Uyen said.

According to Uyen, what makes it difficult for her to continue watching is that the character's appearance is too unrealistic and lacks a sense of realism compared to live actors.

"The characters look too fictional, the script deliberately heightens the drama. Many parts of the AI ​​actors' faces are rough, some scenes are too exaggerated, so I feel the film cannot convey any emotions or values," Uyen emphasized.

Meanwhile, Ngo Trung (22 years old) also admitted that he had been exposed to AI movies but quickly clicked the "not interested" button and only prioritized movies with real actors.

"I once accidentally watched a few AI movies because they kept appearing on TikTok. But I only watched a few seconds and then skipped them because the content was quite cheesy and sometimes had offensive images," Trung shared.

According to Trung, real actors not only express emotions through dialogue but also through eyes, facial expressions, pauses or body language. AI movies absolutely cannot do that and will definitely not be his choice.

In particular, Trung also said that recently he had to block many accounts that created AI movies that he considered strange and full of weirdness.

Trung expressed: "I don't know why, but I see a lot of movies with strange characters created by AI appearing on both TikTok and Instagram. Many movies tell stories of adultery and betrayal with the characters being fruits or animals, which makes me feel very strange and uncomfortable."

Many people also have the same opinion when they disagree with the genre of movies created by artificial intelligence and consider them to be worthless works, especially for movies with toxic details and lack of depth.