Director Danny Boyle Says He Used AI to Animate Photos in Latest Film ‘Ink’

The director Danny Boyle has taken the unusual step of admitting that he used generative AI on his latest movie, Ink.

The famed British director of films including 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire told the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado that “there’s about 30 seconds of it in our movie where we animate a couple of old photographs.”

Ink follows the rise of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch as he purchases the British tabloid newspaper The Sun.

Deadline reports that the few people who have seen the movie, which played at the Venice Film Festival as well as Telluride, speculated that AI was used to animate old photographs of the former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and images of the Kray brothers. Some viewers also mentioned that the use of AI is disclosed in the movie’s credits.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Boyle also adds that generative AI is “very good with animals.”

He explains that when he filmed 28 Days Later in the early 2000s, he used real chimpanzees and was told off by PETA for doing so.

“They wrote to me and said ‘you must never do that again,’ and I haven’t,” says Boyle.

The AI-generated animals in the movie are mice that are running around the floor of The Sun’s newsroom.

“AI is very very good at creating animals,” says Boyle. “We’ve got some mice in this one.”

When asked about what he thinks about AI in general, Boyle says, “It doesn’t really matter what I think about AI, it matters what 20 year olds think about it is the honest truth.”

However, he does acknowledge the technology is a “very useful tool in many ways, provided you use it respectfully and provided you pay actors if you’re going to replace them with some kind of AI embodiment.”

Boyle’s honesty about using AI will undoubtedly upset some people, but it is certainly a different attitude to many in Hollywood who refuse to disclose the use of AI.

Image creditsHeader photo licensed via Depositphotos.