As someone with generalized anxiety disorder, one thing that calms me down is thinking about how the sky is a constant. While the shapes of the clouds may change, the patterns of the aurora borealis might differ, they will all still happen, no matter what happens here on the ground. This video is a meditation to let the viewer relax into the same sense of calm I feel while watching the sky.

For this project I used AI as a reference. I am very interested in the fact that people have AI romantic partners. I was interested in how these partners looked and acted. My initial assumption was that a lot of them would look like 50’s housewives or the barefoot and pregnant trad wives that are gaining popularity on tiktok. To my surprise, they were not. There were two main categories of AI girlfriends that I found: nerdy girl next door and “goth”. The nerdy girl next door AI girlfriend had long ginger hair. She wore short shorts but with a star wars tshirt, all of them were wearing star wars tshirts. They did not wear much makeup and had freckles. The “goth” girl did not actually look goth. She always had her hair in pigtails or long and straight with straight across bangs. She is wearing latex, lace, and leather, and is submissive to her human boyfriend, they both are.

 I tried to emulate both sides of this with the Soranna character. She is wearing a star wars shirt that has been cut to be revealing as well as very short shorts. Some of the things about AI girlfriends I could not replicate, I recently cut my hair very short and there are no wigs accessible this time of year, so I put my hair in high pigtails to replicate some parts of her. I also noticed that none of the AI girlfriends in my research had glasses, however I am blind without them and I needed them to film at the end when Soranna offers the viewer food. I also noticed that none of the AI girlfriends had tattoos, even the ones who were supposed to be alternative. I attempted to cover some of my tattoos but I did not get all of them. If I was more skilled in video editing I would have edited them out, but alas I have the skills I have. 

This project idea was largely inspired by the Amber Doll Project. I wondered how it would change if you made an AI version of yourself that people could treat like they did the Amber Doll. I decided to make a trial video of this concept where the “AI girlfriend” would make you dinner based off of an early AI recipe. 

Everything was very intentional with the errors. AI tends to not know how to sync mouth movements in video to sound very well, therefore I recorded the talking portions in the video, removed the audio, and then recorded audio to layer overtop, slightly off of what my mouth was saying. The videos were purposely edited to be very yellow, as a reference to how for a certain period of time AI was feeding off of itself and making all images progressively more yellow, making it a tell of if an image was AI generated or not. I also wanted to include old technology sounds like the dial up internet sound during the loading screens. With AI becoming more and more prevalent there has been a big push for nostalgic technology from times before AI, which AI would most likely copy. 

The AI controlled the recipe and what the Soranna character looked like, but I modified it to fit better within the narrative of the video and myself. I did not generate anything for this project myself. I found the recipe on a blog talking about how bad early AI recipes were and researched the look for Soranna from r/MyGirlfriendIsAI.