Narrative Framing
The narrative framing of Fin du Monde is quite simple: neither a human-caused apocalypse nor one brought about by a malevolent superintelligent AI have come to pass. Instead, an unanticipated, intense, and highly destructive meteor storm has impacted the planet. This event may or may not have eliminated human life from the face of the Earth.
Fin du Monde includes two narrative layers. The first is a series of large sets of DALL-E 3 generated images of the meteor storms impacting different cities and environments such as Washington D.C., Tibet, Chicago, London, Paris, and the International Space Station. These images are represented here as video slideshows. The slideshows are accompanied by AI-generated musical soundtracks that relate thematically to the events and cultural contexts represented.
The second layer of Fin du Monde is a series of short newscasts distributed in the days, weeks, and months after the cataclysmic event has taken place. They are purportedly produced by a benevolent AI system trying desperately to locate human survivors and struggling with its purpose in the absence of human interlocutors. The AI newscasters depicted in the videos are neither malevolent, nor superintelligent, but they are confused. Electricity continues to power the server farms upon which they run, but the people who used to farm them and for whom they labored seem to have gone silent. The news broadcasts are human authored but produced with AI actors.