Earlier this year, several feature-length films made by directors who got their start creating video content for YouTube hit theaters, displaying the creativity and ingenuity of the next generation while also flashing real potential for mainstream financial success.

Unfortunately, the next wave of this new indie wave feels significantly more cynical and more creatively bankrupt. “Gods Don’t Give Gifts” is the latest production of the YouTube-to-cinema pipeline, and it’s a largely AI-generated effort from YouTuber Gossip Goblin. The film is set to hit theaters later this year, and it is leaning hard into the AI-adjacent hype bubble. The latest effort to get the folks who spend way too much time on X to come out to the theater: the promise of a cameo from musician Grimes.

Grimes has been an AI art booster (or at least optimist) from the jump, which likely shouldn’t come as a surprise that she’d pop up in a project like this. Per the trailer description, Grimes (also known as Claire Boucher) is playing Zaynith Alda, a disaffected aristocrat who pops up in the film’s post-apocalyptic dystopian world. She appears in the trailer alongside YouTuber Mike Majlak, who is apparently a Logan Paul hanger-on.

According to Variety , Grimes ended up in the film because she followed Gossip Goblin (the online moniker of director Zack London) on X and expressed excitement and interest in some of his AI-generated outputs. London asked her if she wanted to star in one of his projects, and she apparently said “yes,” because here we are.

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