For a long time, I was trying to be ambivalent. I thought “AI is a fad, it’ll blow over” and I bore through all the pictures clogging up my favorite art websites but the recent explosion in popularity of AI videos as “memes” on Twitter and YouTube has finally flipped me. This shit sucks.
I don’t even know what kind of people are into these things. Have you tried watching an AI video? They’re very creepy. The characters within look and move very unnaturally. I can’t watch them because I keep thinking it’s going to explode into gore and viscera like The Thing. This is an asshole thing to say but people who produce those things have earned my harshest judgement.
And the worst part is that one day very soon, this technology is going to used to start making videos of people commiting crimes. Sickos have already used it to homemake CP, it’s not going to stop there. I wonder if this is what it was like to live in the Terminator universe when Skynet was starting to be developed. It’s very obvious that this problem is only going to escalate, millions of people are calling for regulation or rules, but the scumbags engineering the tech remain anonymous and completely unhindered in their efforts.
If it helps frame this, those same sicko’s where already doing this through stuff like photoshop and the like, its not really creating new creeps, just lowering the effort > outcome of it all.
Yeah whats going to happen IMO is that companies will hollow out creatives gradually by firing them/letting them go when AI advances to the stage that it can recreate the labor they would be doing to create the same product. HOWEVER what I think will happen as a consequence of this is that…the products will just be shit and no one will buy or care about them, and the companies will collapse as the shareholders/AI grifters escape with all of the surplus labor value.
You gotta remember the inherent restrictions AI generative stuff actually has; it cannot by function make a ‘new’ work of art, just regurgitate previous works of art and reshape them slightly. Truely ‘new’ art will not come from AI, and that will be the value artists will retain, as that requires abstractions, and more importantly; human experience to create.
Fundamentally all art is a story about a human being, no AI is ever going to make me shed a tear.
AI as a tool = Good AI as a product in of itself = Bad.
If there’s one thing I believe will never happen, it’s that a whole movie or TV show will be done with AI tools. There needs to be a human in the process somewhere directing the tech.