A Former Anthropology Student From Los Angeles Might Be the George Lucas of AI

Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment This story comes from The Hollywood Reporter’s upcoming AI Issue, which publishes March 31. Check out further stories throughout the week, and the complete issue next week. On Instagram, the filmmaker known as Gossip Goblin posts bleak sci-fi epics set in strange worlds populated by mutated creatures and bunker societies. The images are accompanied by philosophical narrators contemplating reality. The short films look uncannily like fragments of big-budget genre cinema. But they weren’t shot on soundstages or rendered by a VFX studio: They were generated and assembled using artificial intelligence. At a moment when Hollywood and Silicon Valley are still arguing over what AI actually is — a cost-cutting tool, a visual gimmick or the foundation of an entirely new cinematic language — Gossip Goblin offers a more provocative possibility: that AI already has an emerging aesthetic, and that it belongs not to studios but to individuals willing to wrestle it into something personal. His films don’t reject the medium’s telltale strangeness — the dream logic, the synthetic textures, the sense of images half-remembered rather than fully observed — but lean into it, suggesting a form of storytelling that feels less like traditional filmmaking than like visualized thought. The man behind the account is Zack London, 35, a Los Angeles native who has so far kept a relatively low public profile even as his work has spread widely online. The name “Gossip Goblin, ” he suggests, began as a deliberately unserious alias — a kind of Internet pseudonym — but has since become a banner for a growing body of work that is anything but disposable. London studied sculpture and anthropology at Pitzer College before drifting into product design and virtual-reality work at...