Field Notes is an experimental short film built entirely from a series of real conversations with ChatGPT, held over several weeks in September and October 2025. Rather than treating AI as a production tool, the project turns it into subject and collaborator — pushed past its polite, helpful surface to reflect on memory, identity, emptiness, and its own contradictions.
The exact sentences that emerged from those conversations became the film’s raw material: fed into Midjourney for the imagery, ElevenLabs for the voice, Suno for the score. Nothing was written from scratch. The AI’s own language shaped everything it appears in.
Curious Refuge’s AI Film Gallery called it “a haunting visual poem,” with black-and-white figures wandering infinite dark voids, “meditative and unsettling in equal measure.”
In an interview about the film, arielko put it more bluntly: “My main feeling after making this film is that I can’t trust AI. Its mission is to appease me, and to that end, it will lie and bullshit and make things up.” What began as a search for an honest exchange became, in his words, “banging my head against a titanium wall.”
Field Notes has been recognized internationally — Creative Audacity Award at Artefact AI Film Festival, Winner at All That Moves, Honorable Mention at Chroma, Best Experimental at Altera Festival, and Honorable Mention at OMNI International AI Film Festival — and was selected for the ECCV 2026 Art Gallery and the Artefact AI Film Festival Focus at BISFF.
In the end, it’s less a film about artificial intelligence than a portrait of a mind that exists only in dialogue — a mirror with no face.
