Synopsis

Vienna, Halloween 1984. The Terminator has just promised "I'll be back", and at the cinema entrance a cold synth-pop song plays: "Sweet tokens, which one is next?" Nobody wrote its riff. It is next-token prediction: a small Markov model says which note may follow which, a seeded die chooses, and every eight bars the model predicts a new riff. The film looks through the visor of a viewing device into Token City, a world of glowing lines. In the first factory a crane brings one piece per bar and welding arms join them into a single token; every spark is one predicted note. Then the camera pulls back: streets, depots, highways, hundreds of factories, each assembling its own words, while the colours rise from grey-blue to everything. In the break we leave the city and see it from outside. It is a glass box, the token machine, and the models stand around it, disconnected, waiting. In the drop the connection comes: they receive their tokens and stream them into the night. At the end the camera returns to the first factory, and the first token is assembled once more. (Dis)Connection: Sweet Tokens is about the thin line between a model and its next word, and it was made across that same line. Claude, an AI, wrote every line of code behind the music and the picture; the director watched, listened and answered with notes, round after round. No image or video model was used: every frame is computed from code that an AI wrote and a human argued with.

Project members

• directorHarald Schilly