It’s the end of summer so I give you a light hearted experiment in the application of Generative AI.
My quest to recreate the cinematic masterpiece The Battle of Britain, but with a twist, has hit a slight snag. The twist, you ask? Cats. Yes, I wanted to harness the power of GenAI to create a feline-filled tribute to the classic war film.
Think Spitfires with whiskers, air raid sirens replaced by meows, and a stoic Winston Churchill… also a cat.
The results, as you might have guessed, were not a complete success. Just take a look at the video.
My first discovery was that generative AI, bless its digital heart, has a very… interesting interpretation of “important elements.” I tried to get specific. I wanted to see brave pilots walking out to their planes, but with a squadron of cats alongside them. What I got back was a lot of things. Pilots. Planes. Cats. But putting them all together in a cohesive, logical scene was a different story.
As you can see, the cats are simply… there. They’re just following the men, doing their own thing (well they are cats I suppose). The AI seems to get the gist of the individual components but struggles to grasp the relationship between them. It’s like the cats and the pilots exist in the same frame but not the same reality (deep eh?).
The real comedy gold came from the images that were almost right. My favorite moment has to be the black cat, trotting along, seemingly completely uninterested in the magnificent Spitfire in front of it. Of course for the Aviation Buffs amongst you, that Spitfire is just weird isn’t it !
It’s like the AI got an assignment, did its homework, but then forgot to read the instructions on the back. It knows the keywords—”cat,” “Spitfire,” “battle”—but the context is all a bit… fuzzy. It feels like the models are trying their best, pulling together a collage of what they’ve been trained on, but they’re still missing that spark of creative understanding that connects the dots in a meaningful way.
My experiment wasn’t a total bust, though. I discovered a secret: GenAI absolutely thrives on the generic. A simple prompt like “A London street scene” works much better, although it suffers from the Hollywood problem of over reliance on London Buses and Taxi’s to create a sense of place.
So, while my epic film saga, The Battle of Britain (Starring Cats), remains unproduced for now, I’ve learned a valuable lesson. GenAI is fantastic for creating beautiful, generic scenes, but when you try to get too specific, too creative, or too… cat-tastic, it might just show you the limitations of its training.