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This story comes from The Hollywood Reporter’s upcoming AI Issue, which publishes March 31. Check out further stories throughout the week, and the complete issue next week.

On Instagram, the filmmaker known as Gossip Goblin posts bleak sci-fi epics set in strange worlds populated by mutated creatures and bunker societies. The images are accompanied by philosophical narrators contemplating reality. The short films look uncannily like fragments of big-budget genre cinema. But they weren’t shot on soundstages or rendered by a VFX studio: They were generated and assembled using artificial intelligence.

At a moment when Hollywood and Silicon Valley are still arguing over what AI actually is — a cost-cutting tool, a visual gimmick or the foundation of an entirely new cinematic language — Gossip Goblin offers a more provocative possibility: that AI already has an emerging aesthetic, and that it belongs not to studios but to individuals willing to wrestle it into something personal. His films don’t reject the medium’s telltale strangeness — the dream logic, the synthetic textures, the sense of images half-remembered rather than fully observed — but lean into it, suggesting a form of storytelling that feels less like traditional filmmaking than like visualized thought.

The man behind the account is Zack London, 35, a Los Angeles native who has so far kept a relatively low public profile even as his work has spread widely online. The name “Gossip Goblin, ” he suggests, began as a deliberately unserious alias — a kind of Internet pseudonym — but has since become a banner for a growing body of work that is anything but disposable. London studied sculpture and anthropology at Pitzer College before drifting into product design and virtual-reality work at tech companies like Oculus. Four years ago, he relocated to Stockholm after meeting his Swedish partner. While experimenting with early image-generation software after work, he stumbled onto a new way of visualizing the stories he’d long been writing.

Since then, Gossip Goblin has quietly amassed more than 1 million followers on Instagram and millions more views across platforms. London recently quit his tech job, raised a small round of funding and launched a studio to produce longer AI-driven films with a small international team. His first major effort, a 20-minute short titled The Patchwright — set in a grungy, Blade Runner-esque world populated by flesh-and-metal hybrid characters and featuring a full cast of voice actors, a foley artist and an original score — is set to be released in the coming weeks after roughly five months of production.

The approach puts him in a curious position within the fast-moving AI landscape. While social media is flooded with one-click AI videos (often dismissed as “slop”) London insists his projects still involve many of the same steps as traditional filmmaking: scripts, shot lists, voice actors, foley artists and extensive editing.

Whether that process represents the future of independent filmmaking or simply a transitional curiosity remains an open question. But Hollywood is already paying attention. London says he has fielded calls from studios, actors and directors curious about what AI storytelling might become.

The Hollywood Reporter spoke with London about how his films are made, why most AI content fails to stand out and whether a legitimate blockbuster could someday emerge from this new medium.

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You’re from Los Angeles originally. How did you end up doing this from Stockholm?

I grew up in the Valley and studied sculpture and anthropology at Pitzer College — two very lucrative disciplines. I thought maybe I’d go to law school after, but I ended up doing a Fulbright in Malaysia and spent almost two years traveling around Southeast Asia. After that I moved to the Bay Area and started working in tech as a product designer at startups and eventually at Facebook on Oculus doing virtual reality work. I moved to Sweden about four years ago after meeting a Swedish girl — it was either she moved to the States or I moved here, so here I am. Filmmaking was never really part of the plan. I’ve always illustrated and written stories, even self-publishing some small books of travel writing and short fiction, but it never occurred to me that making films was something available to me. AI kind of changed that.

How did you first start experime

How Gossip Goblin Is Becoming the Auteur of the AI Age