Runet Prize 2022: an identity made with AI

One of the first ceremony identities made with generative AI — by a dozen people and several neural networks working as one team.

For the 19th Runet Prize — the award for the year’s most influential web projects and initiatives — we made the entire ceremony video design with generative AI: 11 opening and nomination films and the screens for the hall.

In 2022 generative AI was the trend that was reshaping visual culture, so the ceremony itself became a statement about it. We put a dozen human artists and several machine ones in the same virtual office: Midjourney as concept artist, Stable Diffusion on animation and VFX, neural networks on sound design and music.

We didn’t just ask the algorithms to “draw a picture” or “make music”. We took them into the team and treated them as real colleagues: learned their language, argued with them, taught them, pointed out mistakes and praised good solutions. When we needed a second opinion, we asked another algorithm. Some of them surprised us with ideas we wouldn’t have reached on our own. One was fired along the way, and a few did overtime.

The project changed how we think about working with machines. Photoshop and After Effects were tools — hammers and saws. The best AI services behave more like colleagues, and not junior ones: some can take on the work of a senior designer, a video artist or even an art director.