At a time of polarization, when everyone seems to have become an expert on artificial intelligence, it’s worth starting by explaining our perspective:
Carlos F. de Vigo and Lorena Ares, have been researching audiovisual AI for nearly a decade. Carlos is the CEO and Principal Investigator at Professor Octopus AI Lab, a non-profit AI lab with an anthropocentric philosophy, founded after more than 25 years of experience in film, animation, video games, engineering, teaching, and applied research. Carlos and Lorena are screenwriters, film directors, members of the Spanish Film Academy, three-time Goya nominees (winners for Cafunè) award winners at the San Sebastián Film Festival, and two-time Oscar shortlisters. Carlos has also directed internationally recognized video games, winning awards such as 2nd Best Indie Game at the Unity China Awards and being selected for Game Connection San Francisco. Both have served as professors and academic directors at the Public University of Navarra, working in the field of Computer Engineering.
Through Professor Octopus, they design, develop, and reflect on custom tools, models, and pipelines for real-world creation and production processes. Their work is based on a simple yet increasingly urgent premise: AI should not force art, artists, or creative companies to adapt to the logic of generic tools designed by third parties. Technology must be designed to serve human expression, artistic judgment, data privacy, technological sovereignty, and the specific needs of each team. This vision also includes a legal and labor dimension: how to train, implement, and use AI in professional contexts in a traceable, committed, and fair manner, recognizing the authorship, work, rights, and responsibilities behind each creative process.
About 50 people from very different fields participate in Professor Octopus’s projects: art, film, animation, production, engineering, sociology, history, law, design, cultural management, and other profiles necessary to interpret the disruption caused by AI. From this perspective emerges an anthropocentric and ethical philosophy.
The talk will showcase concrete examples of pipelines designed and implemented by Professor Octopus under these criteria: systems created to solve real production problems, protect artistic identity, avoid unnecessary dependencies on external platforms, and keep creative control in human hands. It will also address the risks of uncritical adoption of AI: cultural homogenization, loss of social and artistic identity, technological concentration, biases inherited from third-party models, arbitrary changes in prices or terms of use, environmental impact, and the energy limits of exponential growth.
And yes: they will also present some findings from the experimental project “film button”. Because it is coming, and it is urgent to engage in dialogue to decide what we want to delegate, what we want to transform, and what should not end with just a “click.”
