My Boyfriend Left Me for an AI Girlfriend

My cool new animator friend Jordan Minkoff whom I met at the super fun Ottawa International Animation Festival, showed me his super cool blog and I was like this is amazing, I want to and I am going to STEAL your TOTALLY original idea of BLOGGING.

Blogging feels much more like my speed than vlogging or substacking or twitching or podcasting or keeping all my thoughts bottled up inside me and never saying anything to anyone ever again. I like the idea of having a space to document my process and share all my crazy thoughts and current happenings. And I like the idea of using my website as the space to do it.

I made “My Boyfriend Left Me for an AI Girlfriend” (hereafter referred to as AI GF) for the Hellavision Track Attack Open Call but I had the concept of an “AI Girlfriend” rattling around my brain maybe since graduating from my grad program and being constantly reminded that eventually thinking machines will take over the world and we will become nothing but batteries in pods of goo hooked up to the Matrix.

‘Artificial intelligence’ is and was and will always be a reflection of its counterpart: Organic intelligence. We use artificial tools to make up for the organic skills we lack or we believe we lack. Humans love using tools, it’s part of our human nature. “Artificially intelligent” tools are sold to us as magic cure-alls by capitalist scammers who want to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible, and as cheap as possible.
We can’t define what “artificial intelligence” is because then we would have to define what organic intelligence is. We can agree that humans are (maybe...) the only “intelligent” species on this planet, but what sets us apart from every other species then ? It boils down to the eternal question: What makes us human ?

And that’s a difficult question to answer with words, but not so difficult to answer with art.

I do pretty much all my song-writing in the shower.
The bathroom is my studio and the shower is my sound booth.

I was listening to a lot of The Beaches and No Doubt and wanted to write an angsty angry indie/alt song about feeling jealous for your man’s new girlfriend but that girlfriend is not a real girlfriend, it’s a robot. (( Karen Hao talks about the anthropomorphism of ai in her book “Empire of AI” please read it please please please please please ))

I started with the titular line “My boyfriend left me for an AI Girlfriend” and tested out different melodies until settling on a rhythm that gave weight to the “A I” part of the “AI Girlfriend”.

My boyfriend at the time helped me out a lot with this project even though it’s a made-up story about how he left me for an AI girlfriend. You can tell this song is made-up, because in real life I’m actually really good at chess. My boyfriend at the time helped me record a demo and he played all the instruments on the track plus sang backing vocals. I based the character designs off of us and he was a great sport about that as well. I’m super grateful to Nick for lending his talents to help me out on this project and for being so supportive !

My friend Margaret Sohn sang vocals, I really love the melancholy tone they bring to the lyrics. I HATE listening to recordings of my own voice, so I really appreciate Margaret for providing their voice for AI GF and other upcoming projects !

Thank you Margaret and Nick for their great help !

Usually I will sketch thumbnails in my sketchbook, redraw the boards in photoshop, and then build out an animatic in aftereffects.
 

The characters are made up of super simple shapes with the humans being made up of round, soft, natural shapes and colors and the AI gf very angular and sharp.

As previously mentioned, the human characters are inspired by my real life ex and me. When you spend so much time staring deeply into another person’s face, you become deeply attuned to all their caricaturable features because you’ve drawn them about a hundred times in your sketchbook and a maybe a million times in your mind.


The AI girlfriend design is inspired by the Robot royalty from the Saga series written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples.

I built, rigged, and animated the characters using Duik Angela in AfterEffects. I think in the future if I need to rig a 2D character again, I’d want to learn how to use Moho or just use Blender because Duik Angela is quite clunky and slow. Maybe I’m using it wrong, maybe AfterEffects just sucks !

I built most of the environments in Blender, using very simple shapes and shaders, nothing too crazy.

For the montage with footage of my friends, I used a quick geonodes setup on a 3D model I had made of my character when I had thought I wanted to 3D animate the characters.

I composited in AfterEffects and used 3D lighting and cameras for basically the first time which was a great way to get some good experience with it.

For the subway ad shot, I took a picture inside the Steinway R station and photoshopped in fake AI girlfriend ads.

These ads have now been replaced by ads for the ai surveillance collar and the hyper sexualized ai sneaker ads :////

You can watch AI GF over here , and listen to it over here.

A couple weekends ago, AI GF won BEST ANIMATED SHORT at the WIA NYC Animation Festival !! Participating in the WIA mentorship circle last year gave me a great deal of confidence and motivation to keep pushing forward with my creative goals, so this recognition means a lot to me !! Thank yoouuuu WIA !!

Sometimes people will sing AI GF to me and I’ll be like omg I know that song !

You can read about how Jordan and I met in Ottawa on HIS bloggawa and also watch his super sick award-winning animated music videos while you’re over there as well.

I myself have been working on a new animated music video about cats with jobs which I hope to finish this November if all goes according to plan….

In the meme time, definitely look out for the Hero’s Journey Halloween episode dropping this Halloween , it’s going to be sooo spooky ooky !!

Thank you for reading my first blog post. I hope you enjoyed it, or sorry if you didn’t.