Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Gran Turismo) has released Nightborne, a 13-minute AI-generated sci-fi short produced entirely with ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator, made under his new venture Barley Studios. Blomkamp has pitched it as a "test start" proving generative AI's potential for filmmaking, saying he hopes to make a full-length feature this way, but the release matters because it's a high-profile attempt by an established director to legitimise AI-generated cinema, and critics argue the result still looks and feels like low-quality "AI slop" despite the polish.

Loosely based on Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia, Nightborne follows a US pilot who survives a helicopter crash with fatal injuries but is repurposed by a covert military programme that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote-controlled "zombie" combatants. Like other AI-generated shorts, it's stitched together from short clips (since Seedance can only generate a few seconds at a time), using cuts to documentary-style interviews, editing by Austyn Daines, and human actors' faces and voices as templates; reviewers noted gibberish background text, oddly emphasised dialogue and a general absence of Blomkamp's creative voice despite input from real concept artists.