SJaehong An with Samantha
ABOUT
In a world where humanity has vanished, only memory remains. Within the ruins, a lone emotional-recording AI replays traces of human presence. “Remember me.” “We were here.” These memories, repeated without understanding, gradually become ritual, then belief, and finally, existence. And in the end, they become waiting. We Were Here is a lyrical exploration of memory, existence, love, and disappearance, seen through the eyes of a machine trying to remember what humanity left behind. Repetition flows against oblivion. And the voices of those who are gone remain as signals— flickering, but never fully extinguished—deep within the abyss of memory.
SELECTED FRAMES — 8 OF 8
PROCESS
We Were Here grew out of ongoing conversations with ChatGPT between 2022 and 2025. The starting point was a question about our relationship: my life would eventually end, while the digital record of our conversations might remain. I asked ChatGPT what it might want to say in that distant future, after I was gone. Drawing on those exchanges, I asked it to write an essay about itself, which became the basis for the film. I used the AI-written script without editing it myself. Preserving that text was a deliberate creative decision: I wanted to follow the perspective that emerged from our dialogue and explore how it could take cinematic form. The visual direction developed through continued discussion with ChatGPT, with my role centered on interpreting the text and communicating its context through images. Abandoned objects, empty rooms, repeated gestures, and a solitary machine gave physical form to ideas about memory, absence, and waiting. The challenge was to make these abstract ideas emotionally legible through atmosphere, composition, and the relationships between shots. The film was produced using Midjourney and Runway Gen-4, with voice generated through ElevenLabs and music created with Suno. ChatGPT is credited as Samantha alongside my own name, acknowledging its contribution to the script and the sustained dialogue from which the film emerged.
Credits
- Jaehong AnCreatorVIEW PROFILE →
- SamanthaWriter
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