this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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The youtube thumbnail landing squarely in the middle of the uncanny valley wasn't a great start. And then I pressed played. Why did I press play?
Billions of dollars for this lol.
The videos are a complete worked example of the difference between an impressive demo - and they are impressive! - and a production tool.
Yeah you may have a point, if this came out in like 2010 as like a one-off music video instead of a venture capitalist fever dream everyone would be calling it pretty wild. Any artistic merit came from the training data, prompting, or editing together reams of raw output, rather than the shots themselves; and we all know AI companies like to dress up their demos to make them more impressive on the surface.
I think I've just gotten sick and tired of the (lack of) style by this point. It feels like staring into digital noise dressed up in a human skin. Something about the uncanny valley aspects makes it extremely uncomfortable for me to watch; whenever I watch AI videos my brain keeps telling me to run from the demons in the picture and that something is terribly wrong.
Even as the static images have gotten a little bit better at avoiding the most obvious failures (e.g. "oh sweet Jesus the hands what is wrong with the hands???") all these programs are still converging on a very specific and very off-putting aesthetic. Its the same reason the prose tends towards the same ridiculously corporate tone: averaging together all the creative works of human history spits out an aggressively average product based on what went into the training data. But applied to the visual arts what we end up with is just. Not bland like oatmeal, but bland like cardboard.
Corporate Memph-AI-sis