'AI slop' or not? 2 Singapore films set for National Day release spark debate
Source: CNA Tech
Singapore's National Day weekend is doubling as a proving ground for AI filmmaking — and the internet has opinions. Two locally made films created with generative AI, Bersama Majulah and Trace Project, both premiere on Aug 9, and both have already drawn the kind of social media fire the phrase "AI slop" was...
Singapore's National Day weekend is doubling as a proving ground for AI filmmaking — and the internet has opinions. Two locally made films created with generative AI, Bersama Majulah and Trace Project, both premiere on Aug 9, and both have already drawn the kind of social media fire the phrase "AI slop" was invented for. The debate isn't really about two films, though. It's about what happens when a country that has staked its future on AI starts using the technology on its most emotional stage: the national celebration itself.
The two projects take very different swings. Bersama Majulah, from Singapore AI studio Edenstone, imagines a National Day Parade derailed by a spore outbreak that turns people into zombies — set in the fictional nation of Lionara, with Marina Bay and the Merlion standing in as familiar anchors. It is a spin-off of the studio's Spore Fall animation series, created by showrunner Joel Boh with Golden Horse-winning producer Chan Gin Kai as executive producer. Trace Project, from FizzDragon, is a full-length feature about Lin Jia Jun, Singapore's first astronaut on Mars, with a single screening at Golden Village VivoCity. Both have been greeted online with words like "lifeless", "cringy" and "backward" — one YouTube commenter wrote that films like this are "a good example of when AI should not be used".
The creators are not retreating. FizzDragon chief executive Pax Chen called Trace Project "an experiment" and "an invitation for people to decide what they think of it", while Boh insisted "the soul of the work is entirely human" — the story arcs and emotional truth were written before AI entered the picture, with the technology handling what he calls "the execution layer" of environments, visual effects and production scaling. His label for the process: "human-written, AI-realised". The pushback mirrors a global reckoning: Runway held its fourth AI film festival in July, Cannes bars AI-driven films from the Palme d'Or, and the Academy Awards now make AI actors and AI writers ineligible for Oscars.
Closer to home, the split is familiar from every other AI debate — some Singaporeans see generative video as a way to lower production costs and let small teams tell big stories, while others argue it strips out the human craft and emotional authenticity audiences actually respond to. What makes this moment different is that these films are not tech demos at a conference. They are shipping on National Day, the one day of the year Singapore talks to itself, and whether audiences show up or stay away is itself a data point for every studio weighing an AI-first production model.
Why it matters for Singapore: Singapore has spent years positioning itself as a place where AI is built and adopted seriously — through the National AI Strategy, compute investments and a push for AI literacy. A public argument about AI-made art on National Day is a different kind of signal: it is the mainstream testing moment, where the technology stops being an abstract policy topic and becomes something people have feelings about. How local studios respond to the criticism — defending the craft or dismissing the audience — will shape how comfortable Singaporeans are with AI in their cultural life, not just their workplaces.
