Introducing Tough Cluck

I made a terrible movie…

When veo3 dropped, I was intrigued. How far could I take the 8 second clips it generates? And so began the rabbit hole adventure that is Tough Cluck.

This was a proof of concept for myself and my kids, to get them thinking creatively about gen AI capabilities and limitations. We had a lot of fun. We know this is terrible and we had a blast making it.

But why?

Why make a series of shorts about a half-man, half-chicken hero?

Because it’s absurd. Tough Cluck is, on the surface, a playful homage to the films I grew up with. Gritty 70s cop dramas, over-the-top 80s action flicks, and stylized 90s thrillers. It also highlight serious capabilities and limitations of AI.

AI right now is both incredible and deeply flawed.

On the one hand, it opens doors for everyday creators. I can spin up a fake action hero on my phone. Twenty years ago, that would have taken a team, expensive software, and a lot more skill.

On the other hand, the results are limited, biased, and often glitchy.

• veo3 wouldn’t generate audio when kids were in the scene. That’s probably a very good thing – I’m not complaining – but it forced us to record some of our own audio or explore other workarounds.
• Tons of errors. In one scene a prompt that mentioned “seals barking” resulted in seals barking like dogs. The “magic” still requires a lot of trial and error, curation, and polish. I could have fixed a lot of these scenes with more prompts & retries, but I like highlighting the AI fails in this context. Tough Cluck 2 will get a little more serious and polished.
• Bias is rampant. Without specifying anything in my prompts, the majority of scenes defaulted to white characters. Is that the fault of the training data, the model, or both?

There’s also the fascinating question: who owns this?

• The AI model spits out a scene based on the countless works it was trained on. Is the result mine? Yours? Everyone’s?
• I used commercial AI tool licenses (vs free accounts) throughout the process so I ostensibly have more ownership and rights over the output, the sum of the parts, but who owns the parts is still a legally evolving question.

I do know that these tools democratize creation in a way that’s exciting. I can make (bad) movies now that I couldn’t before. But they also risk displacing the very professionals who inspired me in the first place.

Tough Cluck is both a joke and a statement. A celebration and a critique. It’s me playing with the tools at hand, while openly wrestling with the bigger implications. I hope you hate or enjoy it. Even better if you feel conflicted.

(and yes, AI helped me workshop this draft).