It's increasingly clear that the people who make generative AI don't like films, don't like books, don't like art of any kind, and don't understand why anyone else does.
They seem to think that people who read find all text interchangeable—a novel with advertising text on the back of a cereal box, for example. And yet I have never met a person who goes into a bookstore and requests “some words in a row, please.”
It often feels like the problems they're trying to "fix" are just the reasons they don't like things, but those reasons aren't problems you can fix. If you don't care about a real human experience told by a real human being, you certainly won't care about a fake one made up by a machine.
They see art as content, and they see people who enjoy art as customers who want content. When the question is “what if the AI content is utter shit?” the answer is always “just make more”
It’s a pretty wild to toss hundreds of billions of dollars at such a fundamental misunderstanding.
"Invent us a Happiness Machine!"
The men laughed.
"Don't," said Leo Auffmann. "How have we used machines so far-to make people cry? Yes! Every time man and the machine look like they will get on all right-boom! Someone adds a cog. Airplanes drop bombs on us. Cars run us off cliffs."
Ray Bradbury
The Sex Pistols don't break up. Sid doesn't kill Nancy, and die of an overdoses. They finally shed themselves of Malcolm. Glen rejoins the band and they become the most popular band in the world!
Greedy bastards just want the job done fast and with no need to spend money, this way they just cash in and get richer while the people working on things we all love end up jobless
I think they like the idea of it. And of being able to actually make it. But they are desperately incapable of understanding that art, by its nature, is made by humans. A machine is incapable of making art. A machine can only make simulacra.
And yet these thieves are desperate to get the attention, praise, and $$$ they seem to assume automatically comes from creating something. *cue cynical laughter from actual creatives*
I don’t even think the people making this crap want it, but they’re pawing at possible use cases and hoping to get rich. It’s the app economy all over again.
Admittedly, I don’t think it’s that they don’t like these things. I think it’s that they want to ‘create’ but don’t have the patience to cultivate a craft, and don’t have a discerning enough eye. Laziness + a bad eye is a deadly combo. They won’t understand until they’re continually dissatisfied
It’s increasingly becoming the case where nobody running any industry understands why people like that particular thing. They’ve all got MBA brain rot to the point that they cannot understand the world outside of finance.
Hey, remember when everyone lost their shit over talkies, and how monstrous it was, and then TV, about how monstrous it was too, both times predicting the end of the art of making cinema?
This is exactly how ridiculous and nonsensical you all sound.
I noticed that too. I have yet to see anyone get really excited about actually experiencing AI art.* The people who are excited picture themselves selling it.
*Exception: a handful of people who want very specific kinds of cheesecake. Porn is always the easiest application of any technology.
the fact its a documentary about brian eno gives it some pretty solid grounding in the historical origins of ambient and generative artworks
one of the OG artists engaging possibilities of aleatoric creation and a "generative documentary" is kinda faithful to the themes explored through his career
Yeah, and just analyzing the premise also makes that clear. Computers can't abstract experiences. Computers don't even experience anything. The whole point of art in any medium is to express the human condition and the abstract ways we interpret our experiences.
I think it’s a little more banal. I think they don’t understand what they are seeing or hearing. They can’t grasp the concept that art is a projection of the being that created it, faults and all.
They only see lines and colours in paintings. Or words in books.
They don’t see beyond the facade.
I would think that they like those. They just don't understand, or appreciate, what makes them good. They see them as simple labor rather than coming from creative minds.
Nods. And they tend to bluster a lot plus do weird stuff to try to convince people that they aren't boring. Art, films, and books are what make people interesting.
I remember GenAI people getting crazed about image generation last year and to me all the things they were excited about looked like 90s dorm room posters. Which has its place, and is art! But it's like reducing all of poetry to limericks. (And then not being able to count syllables.)
This is shit by suits for suits laundered by the media. There's no production and there's no consumer, just conmen trying to fleece one another before the hammer falls
If they appreciated art they wouldn't steal it to begin with.
OpenAI admitted stuff like Sora isn't even generative and just "swaps" out image data applied to stock content. That said, diffusion etc is just photomorphing stuff, so animated diffusion always has a photomorphy puppet warp effect.
I think also they don’t understand how art is made: they think you “just write it” or “just draw it”, which reduces making art into a simple task that can easily be offloaded to AI.
And can't understand why they aren't popular even though they have a ton of money.
They hate it that all creative artists are more popular than they are.
These folks keep creating insane use cases that solve no previously existing problems, because if the technology actually solved problems that justified the apocalyptic water and electricity usage, they wouldn’t need to shill for it.
Same as it was with crypto & all the other fictional gold rushes.
I like talking about books and movies with my friends. That only works when we’re seeing and reading the same stuff. “Did you like the part where I saved Obi-Wan?” just doesn’t cut it.
There’s this scene in Mad Men where the Accounts Man, Duck Phillips, where he tries to get Don Draper to report to him. He dismisses Creative by saying anyone can write a poem to a potato chip.
AI proponents are the same, no respect for things they don’t understand and can’t do.
What they like is money, and they are trying to come up with the next thing that can make with as little effort as possible to constantly remove you of yours.
People already do this (have the story change each time) in video games. I'm happy to have that *stay* in video games.. I don't want it in my films and books.
No, they like the, they just have zero media literacy. They are the right wing idiots who watch The Boys not realising it is taking the piss out of them. They are the people who complain about women in leading roles like in the Acolyte whose favourite movie is Aliens.
Clearly 'content' (hate that word in this context) with near zero cost that makes $2 is 'better' than actual human-created art that costs $1 and makes $2..
If the movie itself is created by AI, with actors bearing no resemblance to any living actor, AI can change it and twist it anyway it likes. (I wouldn't watch it anyway.) But if they start screwing with movies where human work is involved - that's theft of intellectual property, right?
People who make generative AI just don't like people. If they didn't need the people as a sort of piggy-in-the-middle to wring money out of, they'd happily eliminate them altogether.
Indeed. There are a vanishingly small number of examples where this can be used well (Clue had three endings on initial release), but when I go back to a film I might enjoy seeing something I hadn't noticed before... But not because it's constantly being edited
Uber-nerdy AI developers seek revenge on the people who tease them, bully them, and leave them out of group events like watching movies. CEOs want cheap labor and don’t want to fuss about dealing with the artists. Sadly, These two groups have combined forces.
Absolutely. I have many students going on to study Business or Computer Science after they finish high school, and the disdain they have for having to read a grown-up novel in senior English is only matched by their incomprehension of the nuances within.
Your point is absolutely right. In principle a documentary that reshuffles itself to create a deliberate sense of subjectivity and impermanence could be a pretty cool art project. But that’s a trick that only really works once. Not unlike the Clue movie’s (random in theaters) alternate endings.
@jeeyon.bsky.social and aside from the general arsery and bollocks in this, how is it a viable business model? How much will it cost to watch this given that the usual fixed costs of producing a film are duplicated on each viewing, rather than being amortised across all of them?
The IT industry has the core assumption that all things "reduce" to IT problems and are - as a matter of dogma - hostile to anything that resists this characterization. The arts have long been the symbol of that resistance and its bastion, which is why it's the first commercial target of AI.
The funniest part is that there is stuff akin to this, the game Wyldermyth is a great example. It does procedural, good stories.
And they put sooooooo much work into it to make it natural. It's art.
Media convergence. This could work. I mean, it's like the EURO championship at the moment: people are watching the games every night, although they have seen football games before, the rules are clear, you know the actors, the setting etc. But still. It's a different thrill for a different audience.
I wouldn't say gen-AI is "made" in the sense traditional software is programmed and engineered. Maybe "sampled" is a more appropriate verb: as in democratic elections and polls, where population may seem to have worrying statistics. (We are getting what we deserve?) 🤔
I think it's important to distinguish the people who make AI stuff- the researchers and programmers who tend to be hopeless romantics about technology, and the people trying to monetize AI- who are the same soulless money-extracting ghouls who have infected every other part of society.
It strange that the first film made to had a zillion variations is a documentary. Something that is supposed to be based on facts and a finite timeline.
I wonder what affect this would have on human memory in the long term. The point of telling a story is for it to remain unchanged for the most part. Variations tend to happen with retelling, sure, but is it even the same movie if it's changed every time you watch it? This makes my brain hurt.
I think this is called an anthology? If some AI came in and changed Mr Darcys/Colin Firths lake scene or proposal scene when i watched again i would be LIVID!
It definitely sucks that so much of the culture in tech looks at everything as commodity or supplementary to tech. I think there's just not enough of a culture around observation there, and so you just get rampant egos and constant rewrites because people are afraid of how shallow their knowledge is
As someone who relies on comfort shows this is a terrible idea, it would be my comfort show if it changed! The point is I know what to expect and my brain can relax
They understand that the joy of art is in the making of it (for artists). This renders most artists useless for capitalism. We certainly aren’t spending our money for anything that isn’t art related and we always have an escape. I imagine the AI pushers think we will give up? Silly! 😅🫠
The only movie that had justification for doing this was Clue bc it was based on a board game where the outcome changes every time. And I still can never remember how it ends, in any version, and it kinda ruins the story for me. If people want this, play a board game! That’s not what movies are for
In (slight) fairness to them, this feels like the latest iteration/progression of/from fungible artistic mass production. To quote Benjamin: "To an ever greater degree the work of art
reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility."
3. Smart ppl are programmers. Everyone else is lesser.
The attitudes I’ve encountered have fallen largely in those categories. (I was a technical illustrator for Motorola and I created the PowerPC user manual covers. They were painterly. And I got pushback for that.)
2. They’re dogmatists. All problems are solved 1 way. Theirs. Art is a problem to solve using programming/engineering. Everything operates the same & is created most efficiently w a program hammer. There is no other valuable way of life. They don’t get why anyone would do anything else.
Having worked in tech for 10+yrs, I've theories.
1. Programmers aren’t allowed credit for their work. It’s all collaborative like cogs in a machine. They don’t get to sign anything they do. And, I think, they’re envious of those who do.
I paid to watch Mad Max: Fury Road on theaters like 4 times. Watched it alone, then took my husband, took him again, went with friends. Bought the DVD. Part of the joy of films is sharing the experience! Geeze.
