Before mobile phones, being filmed was very rare – and if you were, you acted naturally. Today, our relationship to the camera is very, very different

Not for the first time, I got something wrong. As someone who made a living being on camera, I developed theories about what it takes to be yourself on screen. My main thought was that everyone in the world would soon be able to do it, because they’d be getting so much practice.

Once upon a time, hardly anybody was filmed or videoed. When the head of my middle school announced in assembly one morning that there would be television cameras in the dinner hall at lunchtime, every child woke up. For once the headteacher had our full and undivided attention. Consternation was in the air. This would have been about 1979. Regional television news probably needed pictures to cover a story about school dinners or something. Nobody, but nobody, in the school that day missed that evening’s edition of Midlands Today. It was a big deal. I saw the back of my head, and was agog.

Billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series on a major streaming service, this Turkish show looks like the result of the prompt ‘make it cinematic’

Just as the world reels from Elon Musk’s AI-powered The Odyssey remake – though “remake” feels rather generous for a seven-minute splat of synthetic sludge – another bucket of AI gunk is dropped on to our faces. For Prime Video’s AI-generated TV series Castle Walls, produced by Turkish production studio Ay Yapım using a melange of generative video tools, has arrived, billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series to premiere on a major streaming platform.

It’s certainly more epic than Musk’s production, consisting of two 17-minute episodes. Set in the 11th century, the show revolves around the historic Alamut Castle, although it’s entirely absent of any real sense of time or place. I was briefly intrigued by the opening images, with their bold palette of blues and mustard browns and yellows – but as soon as the “people” appeared, looking like Vaseline-smeared Madame Tussauds creations slowly melting in the sun, everything came crashing down.