Can GPT Dream of a Pink Elephant? (2025) is available for streaming at https://vimeo.com/1181984587

As part of my viewings at the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival (AAGFF), Liu Guangli’s short film left a striking impression in my mind. Can GPT Dream of a Pink Elephant? (Pink Elephant) transports the audience to the in-between state of reality and fiction, specifically that of an aphantasic person. The festival considers this film to be a resistance of our image-saturated culture through the absence of inner imagery. (“The Unconscious Expanse”) I, however, understood the film to be more than a resistance. For me, the film has a strong visual sequence that compliments the auditory narrative, which is hypocritical to say the least as the film is about the lack of imagery. Yet, it is precisely this hypocrisy that blends boundaries between the “real” and the “imagined”.

Pink Elephant imagines a hyperreal landscape that offers experimentation and discussion. According to Baudrillard, “When a system reaches its own limits and becomes saturated, a reversal is produced - something else takes place, in the imaginary as well.” (269) The “system” in the film is one that relies on visual storytelling to present “a diagnostic dialogue between an aphantasic person and AI.” For the film to be a diagnostic dialogue, there must be more than one voice. There are two narrators in the film: a male narrator in conversation with the female narrator as they remember a game from school. “I beg you. Please do not think of the pink elephant.” says the teacher. This process is an experimentation of “The Pink Elephant Paradox”. The term refers to the ironic mental process of trying not to think of something. Using this as the point of entry, the film explores a sense of excessive consumption.

Throughout the film, the elephant looms in all parts of the dreamscape, following the thinker wherever they go, unable to leave the elephant behind. Even in its skeletal form, the elephant’s most raw form, the elephant is present in the diagnostic process. The carcass is the base of the animal’s physique, without which there is elephant. The man explains people imagined how living elephants are based on the skeletal pieces found. The woman with aphantasia tries to describe the skeleton of the elephant wandering in an empty room.

Ironically, the image of the skeleton is quite vivid, as is the following sequence showing an elephant (with flesh) following the female narrator’s voice roaming the grounds of the banquet hall. Navigating through a room of people (mostly men) and their chatters. This account, though appearing realistic, is an adaptation of the described dream belonging to the female voice. In her dream, the colour red can be found on the table cloth and on a woman’s clothes. This is a significant finding as the colour pink is never identified in the film, only haunting greens and yellows. For a colour so similar to pink, red is thus highlighted.

The use of red in a film that lacks colour is reminiscent of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which famously highlights the colour as a symbol of the loss of innocence. Here, the colour red means something not entirely different. The vivid colour symbolises the danger of losing touch with our human selves in storytelling. Each time a new sequence of her dream is generated, the female narrator describes the sequence. And each time, her descriptions become more different from the dream that was shown. Colours represent imagination. The muted greys and greens suggest a distance between the imagined and imagination itself. Furthermore, it poses even more distance between reality and imagination, resulting in uncanny imagery, unable to differentiate the real and the imagined.

“The elephant is gone. My imagination has ended.” says the male voice. He continues, “My algorithm tells me it’s only noise.” And so it seems that the woman speaking is having a dialogue with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that sounds like a man. It is now clear what the diagnostic experience is meant to argue. AI can generate a series of images but would fail to generate one with details that emotionally represents the narrator’s dream sequence, much like the aphantasic condition.

The human responds, “Beauty is not visual. Maybe it is a feeling of being struck.” Perhaps the arguments against AI usage in filmmaking lies in the system’s inability to emote. Something that keeps the audience engaged. Something that makes you feel. The simulated reality is not one that is “unreal” but rather one that is materialistic- an object/space that has no meaning until someone defines it. The computer/AI cannot generate meaning. It can only generate or identify patterns. Therefore, AI cannot create art. AI cannot create a film. Take sound design out of the equation, the visual sequence would then lack a voice, as in no narrative. Filmmaking is a language born out of our senses and our creativity. It is a combination that without one element it fails to communicate. Pink Elephant makes a point of combining new technology with a human voice, proving itself to be an experimental and creative project that explores our human reactions to technology.