Flasz On Film

Zack walked hurriedly through the London offices of Quantum Nine, laptop under his left arm, a Starbucks mocha latte in his right hand, his office pass between his teeth. There had been an unusual pileup of people at the Leicester Square station and it took him a bit longer to get to work. It was 8.58 and he didn’t want to be late for the meeting where he’d have to present to the leadership team for the first time.

It was completely surplus stress layered on top of his already elevated baseline anxiety because Zack hadn’t yet gotten completely used to coming to the office full-time and in-person meetings presented a challenge to his somewhat introverted personality. He had been originally brought in as an engineer right after the pandemic when everyone still worked from home and connected virtually, which meant that he could code in peace and structure his day as he pleased. Now, with the overwhelming change of tides sweeping the corporate world, Zack had to hot desk and suffer through daily commutes because apparently proximity to other people in an open plan office fostered collaboration and serendipitous ideation. He rolled his eyes at the exact moment these words passed through his brain.

But that wasn’t even half of it. Having spent a few years on the Poppy Ashford model team, Zack was put in charge of it exactly three months ago after his old boss got the boot. It was brutal. It was an open secret at the company that the Poppy Ashford team was radioactive. Between all the backlash, scandals and a brief fortnight of anti-AI protests outside of the company premises earlier in the year—which were at the time still only half-filled with people because the exec team had yet to crack down on homeworking—it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the whole project was doomed. And at Quantum Nine most people were smart enough to look like rocket scientists. So they understood the problem very well.

Zack, now a recently-minted team leader in charge of a money sink and a reputational bin fire that was the Poppy Ashford project, walked into the conference room where he was about to present on the project to the leadership team. Mark, the VP of marketing, was already there, sitting in the corner leaning back. He waved at him. As Zack was busy powering up his gear and connecting it to the Google Meet call, other people filed into the room. Elena, Zack’s line manager and Senior Director of AI Entertainment looked like a confused mixture of excitement and anxiety. She was the only one who knew what Zack would be talking about. Well, most of it. Zack came with other ideas too but he wanted to keep them as a backup. Jurgen, Head of AI, followed after her, his six-foot frame casting an ominous shadow. Ashley, VP of Finance, walked in like a homing missile and found her seat without acknowledging anyone. Kurt from Public Relations was still on the phone as he was walking in, adjusting the register of his conversation as he was telling whoever it was on the other end of the line that he had to go. The screen on the far wall of the room lit up with the faces of the CEO and the CTO, both connecting from their homes, curated bookshelves behind the CEO and a blurred approximation of what could be a utility room or the attic behind the CTO’s bearded noggin.

Rules for thee but not for me, Zack thought before the CEO’s voice boomed from the speakers.

“Morning, everyone. Just letting everyone know I have a hard stop at 9.45.”
“Same here” followed the CTO. “Also, apologies but I couldn’t find the pre-read for the meeting.” He wasn’t really apologizing but rather acknowledging that someone should have sent one out and didn’t. He was displeased.
“Yeah, no, sorry about that” Zack piped up. “I didn’t send one out. I hope it’s OK.”
The CTO frowned but remained silent.

Elena spoke up. “Sorry about that. I told Zack it would perhaps be better to go with a raw slide deck for this one. Zack, let’s get going. Because we didn’t have a pre-read it’s best we make sure there’s ample time for discussion.” She paused for a half a second. “And I believe people will have things to say.”

With that Zack stood up and took a deep breath.

“As you all know, I have taken over the Digital Performer Experiment Team three months ago on an interim basis, following Mike’s departure from the organization.” He briefly paused as though to acknowledge in a miniaturized minute of silence the utter chaos that his people were subjected to as a result of that. “Since then I have been asked to re-evaluate the team priorities under Elena’s guidance, consolidate what we have learned and find a productive outlet for the technology and knowhow we have generated as the business kiboshed the Poppy Ashford project. Therefore—“
“Sorry to interrupt” barged the CEO. “Before you go any further, I’d like to acknowledge the difficult position you were put into, Zack, especially on such short notice. I’m sure you know that we will need to backfill Mike’s role eventually and I think I speak for everyone here in this meeting when I say that we all appreciate the fact you stepped up to the plate for this. In fact, let’s find a time to chat offline later this week if that’s OK with you.”

Even though the talking head of the most important guy in the company addressing the crowd from a 100-inch screen was trying to put Zack at ease (or at least it sounded like it did), the effect it achieved was the exact opposite. Now Zack felt he was being interviewed. His knees buckled a little bit. Maybe because he had wanted this shot for a long while. Maybe because he had always opposed Mike and Elena’s ideas about rolling out Poppy Ashford as a genuine actress to be hired in movies. Or maybe because he was beginning to understand that this opportunity, such as it was, would come with considerable mental anguish that vastly exceeded what he was currently going through.

“Thank you. It means a lot” he retorted and tried to get himself back on track. “I’ll share my screen.”
“Yes, please” the CEO’s voice towered from the screen once more. “We will have a lot of tough decisions to make at the end of this, including priorities and headcount, and from what Elena told me last night what we’re about to discuss today will factor into our decision-making.”

After a few clicks, the two talking heads shrank into the right-hand side of the screen to give way to the title slide of Zack’s deck bejeweled by the company logo placed front and centre and adorned with a generic title “Digital Performer Experiment Q3 Update.”

“In the interest of time I’ll spare you the background and hard science that I pulled into this presentation” he quickly flicked through a number of slides containing distribution graphs, statistical equations and various bullet points “and start by acknowledging that all in all, the Poppy Ashford project was a triumph of our team that pulled together scientific and engineering acumen with aesthetic brilliance to output a sustainable, reproducible and coherent digital persona.” The slide he chose to speak to included Poppy’s picture and a handful of stats. “What went wrong, and I am not here to point fingers but merely remark on simple reality, was the disconnect between how we thought this persona could be integrated into entertainment products and how the public responded to it—”
“Boy, was that a fucking shitshow” Jurgen’s voice interrupted in what clearly was a whisper designed to be heard by everyone in the meeting. He wasn’t even looking at the screen when he said it. It was as though he was addressing the air between him and Zack. Apart from the CTO’s fleeting frown it went unremarked. Zack continued.
“Together with Elena” he nodded in her direction, directly opposite him, and established brief eye contact “we looked at what we have achieved and learned and came up with a pitch that takes into account the public backlash, capitalizes on in-house knowledge and offers what we believe is a marketable alternative.”

The slide changed to Poppy Ashford’s pros and cons. Zack pushed on. “We have developed a technology that generates a humanoid performer using a diffusion backbone we fine-tune per persona, with a consistency layer on top that locks facial geometry across frames. With appropriate tweaking to training data we can generate any scenario that includes the performer while holding 96% identity consistency frame-to-frame, which is well above the point where the human eye starts flagging drift. The problem isn’t technological, but socio-political.”
“No shit. I think we all noticed” piped up Kurt from under Zack’s right arm. “It’s clear as fucking day that people weren’t ready for this and clearly that BBC interview last year didn’t help.” He looked in the direction of the screen. Zack immediately felt like an intruder, a child eavesdropping on a conversation between adults.
“Yeah, that one was on me” replied the CTO. “Going off-script with financial savings line was not my brightest moment.”
“No, it was not” cut in the CEO. “So, where do we go from here if people voted with their wallets and they honestly do not want this technology anywhere near their entertainment, huh? I was led to believe that this was a great idea, am I correct? I hope I don’t need to remind anyone how much work it took to calm down the investors. Elena? Mark?”
Elena leaned forward and replied “In principle the idea was sound I believe.” She then turned to Zack and looked at him while addressing the room. “But let’s hear what Zack has to say. I believe the answer to your question is on the next slide. Zack?”

Obediently, he clicked through. The screen animated a transition that shrank Poppy Ashford’s face, removed all the bullet points and stats and drew a number of arrows from Poppy’s picture towards a conglomeration of historical figures.

Zack resumed. “We believed that while the public still needs time to adjust to the idea of gen-AI performers competing in the entertainment marketplace, we could deploy our technology to generate state-of-the-art recreations of historical figures that could be used in different settings.” Click. A short video of Abraham Lincoln, stunningly lifelike, addressing the House of Representatives rolls through the screen. Click. George Washington feeds a cat, ginger curls protruding from under his wig, his mouth zipped shut to conceal his famously off-putting dentures. “We found that using our model we can generate stable digital recreations of historical figures as long as there is enough video or photo data to train the model on.”
Jurgen raised his hand. “How did you get past the scarcity of data? In the past we have seen recursive malformations in small data sets.”
“Great question and yes—this is true. We are limited by data evidence but for the examples shown here we were able to tap into already existing recreations.”
“Like what?” Jurgen probed.
“Movies.”
“Excuse me, what?” asked Ashley from the far end of the room. “Did you get permissions to do it?”
“I didn’t ask. I’m sure that if we were to roll this out, we’d have to but I thought I’d try it first to see if it works before spending money on it.” Zack always believed in asking forgiveness, not permission.
Jurgen said “Ashley, that’s just what happens in this industry. We have to find data somewhere.”
Ashley replied “Sure, but wasn’t this part of the problem with Poppy? We all know what she was trained on.”

Zack decided to reclaim the conversation. “Correct. I do believe that it will be infinitely easier to obtain the rights to a bunch of Spielberg movies if we needed to.” He clicked through to a video of a humanoid monstrosity in a Mongolian getup riding on a horse through a field of wheat. “We did however find limitations to the current model and it seems we can’t reliably generate the entity from drawings and paintings alone. The movie footage and the archival stuff need to sit in roughly the same visual domain, or the model can’t reconcile them. So for the time being we are limited to subset of historical with a specific character of data behind them. You can see that with the current tech Genghis Khan is out of our reach.”
“Can you generate Kennedy?” Mark asked, clearly smelling an opportunity.
“Yep. No problem. There’s enough good data for us to generate him.”
“But that’s the problem.” Kurt was already sensing an incoming PR nightmare. “We can see that we can’t displace an actor with a wholly gen-AI entity and I can tell you already that there will be backlash against it. People will still want to see actors play these figures and maybe not in the case of Lincoln, definitely in the case of JFK, there will be people around who remember interacting with him and they’ll be the first ones to go to the press to bitch about it.”
Zack agreed. “Absolutely. This is a problem and you can see on this next slide” click to reveal a simple timeline bar with a green midsection “that what we have is a window. We think we can safely generate recreations of historical figures with enough data to support stable entities with the ceiling placed somewhere within what you’d call living memory. If we limit ourselves this way, we can skirt the risk of empowering deep-fakes with our tech, which by the way is more than possible and we should always be mindful of that.”
“What’s the upside?” Ashley asked.
“We think” he nodded at Elena again “that there is a sufficient market in made-for-TV documentaries. It doesn’t step on big entertainment, the public don’t care as much and the financial incentive will appeal to low-to-mid budget productions where photorealistic recreations are a part of the experience. And we are essentially re-deploying tech we have already developed with minimal engineering input required.”
“The actor backlash will still be an issue” countered Kurt. “In fact, it’ll look like we are punching down and displacing struggling actors instead of millionaire celebs.”
“This is a risk, yes” concurred the CEO. “But I’d be willing to explore this risk in detail before dismissing this idea. Kurt, Ashley, Mark: can you look into this for me?” They all nodded in unison.

Elena shifted in her seat and said “So, you see that we do have a landing zone from this debacle and I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that we can avoid any drastic measures being taken.” She looked at the screen hoping her comment would elicit a response from one of the talking heads.
“As I said, we’ll have to evaluate this” responded the CEO and paused briefly before asking “Is this everything we have to discuss today?”
“Well… yes” Elena responded somewhat sheepishly before the CTO’s voice cut in through the speakers.
“I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed in the progress here. Don’t get me wrong, I am aware of how short the timelines were for Zack here to slide into this role but I have to say that I expected…” he paused. “I don’t know what I expected, actually. It all looks like a whole lot of not much.”

Zack tensed. He always suspected that the CTO wasn’t going to stand in his corner but he now realized that the veiled comments about headcount and difficult decisions probably involved his own head being placed on the chopping block. They had thrown Mike under the bus but it looked as though the exec team required more blood to be spilled in ritual sacrifice.

“What do you mean exactly?” Elena leaned in and looked at Zack before continuing. “I think we can all see that Zack here was placed in an impossible situation because poor decisions were made by other people, myself included, and we all knew launching Poppy came with a risk. Should I point fingers at those in the room who were so certain everything would go fine? Or maybe those who had objections and didn’t speak up at the time would like to stand up and be counted—”
“I think that’s enough” the CEO’s voice cut her off with his signature mixture of authority and well-rehearsed warmth. Elena noticed Jurgen looking at her with eyes wide open.

“Apologies” she piped down and deflated into her seat. “I’m trying to look out for my team.”
“We can all see that” the CTO took over. “Don’t take this the wrong way but I somehow don’t see how rolling out Abe Lincoln or Albert Einstein in BBC documentaries is going to solve the problem the company is facing. Even though I appreciate the tech and the fact Zack put it together at short notice, it doesn’t look like a good way forward. There’s no money in this.”
Elena immediately retorted. “How do you know? Aren’t these three supposed to figure it out first?” She nodded in the general direction of Ashley, Kurt and Mark. “Do you know something that we don’t—“
“Well… if I may…” Zack didn’t know how to cut into this highly charged exchange so he just stood up. “There is something else I might be able to show you.”

Everyone’s heads turned towards him and Zack felt the burn of all those pairs of eyes trained on him simultaneously like hyenas circling a wounded antelope. Indeed, Zack did have something to show that he didn’t even share with Elena. In fact, he deleted relevant slides just before sending them to her. He felt that he might get fired over this but the last five minutes showed that his days were numbered anyway; he might as well go for that one last hail Mary pass.

Everyone stayed eerily silent as he closed down his PowerPoint deck and opened his Chrome browser. “It’ll just take a few seconds” he muttered mostly to himself but also somehow to everyone in the meeting. He raised his voice slightly while still looking at his screen. “So, as a complete aside to everything I showed you just a second ago, I also did some… unsanctioned work with the assets we currently hold.” Like a child who crossed his parents and wished to downplay whatever consequences were coming his way, Zack continued.

“Elena had no idea about what I decided to do but I thought I’d follow a hunch I had. Apologies in advance but I have always preferred asking forgiveness rather than permission. However, I did come across what could potentially be a goldmine… but it might be a bit difficult to sell to this room.” He typed “onlyfans” into the address bar and clicked on the complete address that appeared as the first suggestion at the top. The room fell so overwhelmingly silent that Zack could swear his racing heartbeat could be picked up by the conference mic. He scrolled down a little bit. Nobody had any doubts as to what they were looking at: a topless photograph of Poppy Ashford.

“Excuse me, what is this?” asked Ashley after a brief second.
“I think you know what this is” answered Kurt. “The question I’d rather ask is what the actual fuck?”

Zack briefly scrolled down to reveal a few more frames, all of which displayed their flagship product completely nude. One picture included some gynecological detail.

“Oh my fucking god” uttered Elena. “Zack, what did you do?”

“I know it looks bad” said Zack. “But look at this.” He clicked through to the account admin dashboard. “Just for the record: nobody knew what I was up to. This is research I did on my own—“
“Research you say?” Jurgen chuckled. “You made porn on company dime.”
Zack responded “Sure. You can say that. But see here—“ he said as his cursor highlighted a portion of the screen displaying the number of subscribers alongside account earnings. “I used the same tech we developed to maintain Poppy’s IG account, made a few tweaks to the training data and set her up with an OnlyFans account. Under an alias, of course. So far, nobody has figured out it’s her because I adjusted her hairstyle a tiny bit, but I admit it might be a matter of time before the public clues in. But the question is if we should care because in the six weeks since I started her account, ninety-eight thousand people have subscribed and she has earned nearly half a million. I’m pretty sure that with some tender love and care, she could net cool seven figures in a year.”
“Doing porn online” quipped Ashley.
“That’s exactly right.” Zack answered. “I know this might seem radioactive—“
“No fucking shit!” The CTO was fuming. “I should sack you on the spot for this. Do you realize what you’ve done?”
Elena tried to cut in. “I’m sure Zack meant well and wanted to help the team and—“
Zack piped up immediately fueled by a sudden influx of courage. He knew instinctively that there were only two ways out of this meeting and it looked increasingly likely that he’d be fixing his CV right after so he might as well go out with a bang and become an office legend, the guy who made Poppy Ashford do porn online.

“I’m sorry but you might want to open your mind a bit, Craig.” He had never addressed the CTO by his first name. “Yes, I made Poppy do porn online and she made a fucking killing in six weeks. Apologies but this is a genuine market we could step into with the technology we already have. All I did was scrape Pornhub for training data and I didn’t even do a good job of it but the results I got were pretty solid.” In his mind, Zack was stepping atop a soapbox.
“Don’t ask me how I know this but every man on this call would be able to attest to the simple reality that horny men will happily spend money on stuff they don’t need.” He could see Elena and Ashley nodding reflexively. He continued. “And it just so happens that the AI adult content has remained notoriously low quality over the years. What we could offer is a premium experience that cannot be matched by anything that’s currently out there.”
Kurt interrupted “But I don’t think we want the PR nightmare that will surely come along with it.”
“Will it, though?” Zack challenged. “If you ask me, it’s a question of how we spin it. I’m not an expert on this—“
“You’re right, you’re not. This is a disaster waiting to happen!” Kurt was not relenting.
Zack asserted himself and repeated “I’m not an expert on this because I’m just an engineer. I build this stuff and make sure the maths checks out underneath it all. But at the same time I’m a guy and I can tell you that what we can tap into is a genuine market gap that needs correct branding. Call it ethically sourced porn for all I care. Nobody was harmed and no dad was humiliated in creating this content. And you can tier it to allow customers to get tailor-made fantasies with their favourite performers delivered straight to them with minimal compute requirement. You can’t lose. You just have to figure out how to play this but I’m telling you all that we can make infinitely more money on the digital performer experiment by producing adult content than any of the other revenue streams we have right now. Photorealistic ethical adult content with a choose-your-own-adventure element. Can you not see it?” Zack was genuinely excited as he pitched what everyone clearly saw as a ludicrous and potentially company-destroying idea.

“That’s enough for today” quipped the CEO. “I will have to run in a minute so let’s put a pin in this. All I will say is that we have to pick it up separately. Maybe you are right that there is a market for this but Quantum Nine was founded with a mission at its core and it’s not it.”
Zack was still emboldened when he said “We could spin this out as a side hustle. Fuck it, call it Quantum 69 for all I care. This will work I’m telling you!”
“That may be” responded the CEO. “We will have to align on our priorities” which was exec code for not committing to a clear answer. “So in the meantime, can I please ask you Zack to close this account before someone finds out? I agree there’s money in this but I think you can see that there’s work to be done to prime the public for this. I really like your attitude and I still would like us to catch up later this week, but please shut this thing down before stuff gets out of hand and I am placed in a position to make a decision you wouldn’t like me to make.” The threat was not even thinly veiled any more.
“Sure. I will.” Zack stopped sharing his screen and briefly thought about making sure he’d pocket Poppy’s porn earnings before they gave him the boot.

The CEO’s voice enveloped the room once more. “Alright everyone. I want to say it was a good meeting but I’m not so sure. It was definitely interesting. Let’s keep this conversation going. Later!” and he was gone. The CTO disconnected without a goodbye. The silence in the room was eventually broken by Jurgen.
“Holy shit, Zack. I gotta say that you’ve got some balls.” Zack could only shrug. He sensed that he had under a week before they’d let him go.
“No, seriously” Jurgen continued. “I think you’re right but this will be super difficult for Kurt to sell to the public.”
“Noooo, seriously?” Kurt’s sarcasm bordered on contempt. “How the fuck am I supposed to sell this to the same people who just six months ago camped outside our windows with pitchforks and shit?!”
Zack answered “I told you—ethically sourced porn. This is not a joke.”
“Not sure how ethical it actually is given what I know we used to train Poppy and what you used to make her do whatever I just saw” quipped Ashley.

“I don’t know” said Zack. “I see this as a counterproposal to deep fakes, revenge porn and all the super gnarly stuff you can definitely find on the Internet if you know what to look for. The market for porn is never going to disappear as long as testosterone exists, I can tell you that much. So we might as well come up with an alternative that isn’t overtly morally compromised and looks top class as well.”
“Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong” said Kurt. “I’m saying it might be super hard to pull it off.”
“Hey we’re not here to do easy things, are we?” That was Mark who was already standing up and gathering his stuff. Everyone followed his lead and slowly started clearing the room.

“And imagine” Mark continued “that there’s probably a market to combine Zack’s both ideas, you know?”
Kurt stopped in his tracks. “What? Lincoln doing porn?”
“Yep.” Mark replied. “If you can think of it, it’s probably someone’s kink and they’d paid to see it if you let them.”
“Men…” Elena and Ashley quipped in unison before they all proceeded to file out of the room.