Reading by Tim Foley:

Another AI atrocity propaganda project about Iran has been unleashed, this time in the form of a movie titled “Dreams of Violets” at the Tribeca film festival.

Variety calls the flick “the first full-length, live-action film generated by AI to be accepted by a major film festival,” describing the plot as follows:

“The film, which will premiere June 10 during the festival’s 25th anniversary, is a 75-minute docudrama inspired by the protests that swept Tehran in January, highlighting five Iranians who meet in a Tehran alley before they’re executed, all witnessed from a window by Amir, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. The clashes reflect the real-world protests between Iranian authorities and civilians, which left at least 7,000 people dead and more than 50,000 people arrested, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.”

The film’s trailer depicts sympathetic protagonists being brutally victimized by Iranian authorities, and concludes with the image of fighter jets soaring overhead while an English-captioned Persian voiceover says “If Iran gets liberated, celebrate for me. Enjoy it for us!”

Tribeca Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal gushed enthusiastically about the so-called “docudrama” and its implications, telling The Hollywood Reporter that “At this time in history when both artificial intelligence and Iran are central to global conversation, this film offers audiences a rare and intimate perspective into a conflict many have not been able to fully see or understand.”

Well hey, now they can see and understand the conflict! They can see and understand it with the help of completely fake AI video footage! Golly gosh, isn’t that deliciously convenient?

This follows our discussion last month about another project using AI-generated atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for war with Iran called Generative AI for Good, which creates deepfakes of supposedly real women who say they were sexually assaulted by Iranian government forces.

The Canary reports:

“An Israel-based AI firm, Generative AI for Good, claims to be using deepfake technologies for positive ends. ‘Positive’ appears to mean creating deepfake videos to help the illegal US-Israel war on Iran.

…

“Generative AI for Good claims that it uses AI to ‘help survivors testify safely — in their real voice, without revealing their identity’. But Israel and its mouthpieces have been shown to have used false allegations of rapes and other atrocities on 7 October 2023 to justify its genocide in Gaza.”

The Canary notes that Generative AI for Good is staffed with Israelis who have very conspicuous agendas, including a creative director who pushes the discredited narrative about mass rapes on October 7, a marketing manager who served in the IDF’s “Psychotechnical Headquarter”, and a founder who said in early 2024 that “Artificial intelligence is a secret weapon of ours” in using the revolutionary technology to bolster the military’s efforts both online and on the ground in the information war being waged alongside the military battlefields in Gaza.

It is unsurprising that generative AI is being used to churn out atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for imperial war projects, because these new technologies lend themselves perfectly to the task of creating realistic-looking video footage of events which never transpired. If you want to tug at people’s heart strings and push them toward anger at an empire-targeted government, generative AI is a cheap and easy tool for doing so.

We are only just beginning to catch the first glimpses of the ways in which AI-generated videos will be used to manipulate the minds of the public to advance imperial agendas. The projects we are seeing today are just the first droplets of ocean mist from a tsunami that is roaring to shore.

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Feature image is a screen grab from the “Dreams of Violets” trailer (Fair Use).