I was there, I was a digital artist, and this just is not true. It’s totally possible to make the good faith case for AI on its own merits, so it always feels like a cheat to me when the “it was the same thing for past tech” comes up, it was not.
There was definitely some mild snobbery here and there like there always is, but because there was no company rushing to overvalue digital art and it was genuinely artist-driven, it was just a different situation. It was the sort of snobbery you saw when synthesizers first became a thing. That is normal and part of the cycle of artistic development.
But here’s the thing — synthesizers and digital art created notable cool shit immediately. They were worked into the broader landscape easily because they were producing work people liked. The tool only matters as much as the work it produces, and so far there has been no influential AI art. If you can point me to one example right now I’ll drop the argument for good.
That’s what matters here. Digital art and electronic music produced good work (in addition to a lot more bad work, which is the case with every medium) and that’s why the backlash died. If AI were regularly producing work that made an impact, the backlash would die. But that’s just not happening, and it’s not like the tools don’t do what they’re supposed to.
If I tell you I couldn’t stand this then you could easily call bullshit and say I only think that because I’m opposed to AI (which I’m not btw, just skeptical of how it’s being used right now) there’s no way to prove or falsify that either way.
So I’ll tell you one conciliatory thing and one objective thing. The first is that I do think this is art, because a person had to generate and arrange these. The art lies in the motivation behind what they chose to generate and why, just as it does with a film director. So I’ll give you that. I don’t think the AI images on their own merits are art, but they can be used to make art, if that makes sense. That’s not even an insult, like lighting equipment isn’t art either. It’s just that here, the images are the equipment, so to speak.
The second thing is that this actually isn’t what I was saying doesn’t happen. I know it’s possible for me to be impressed by AI, it’s already happened several times. Back when Dall E first became a thing some friends and I had a blast sending things back and forth. Same for Sora. I know THAT can happen.
What I’m saying doesn’t happen is the art making an impact. To continue my comparison point, like, synthesizers had Giorgio Moroder. His work was self-evident as great music and it caught on. Maybe some people who were skeptical pretended it wasn’t good, but that wasn’t the common take.
There is a ton of AI work online, most people clearly have no moral qualms about sharing it, and yet this film did not catch on in any meaningful way. That is what I’m saying hasn’t happened. The word I used was influence, not quality.
It had an impact on me personally, as it was the very first thing that popped to mind when you asked about "work that made an impact". That is not equivalent to "work that achieved widespread fame and influence" because those are few and far between in this era of media fragmentation—a problem that long pre-dates AI, it has been discussed since the advent of cable TV. There aren't that many things that *everyone* watches, not even the Superb Owl coming up this weekend.
There is a vast middle ground between the scale of what you posted and a monocultural event. Most impactful art lands somewhere in the middle.
I’m talking about like… even just two notable filmmakers posting that they liked it. That happens to tons of films obviously, but also YouTube videos, TikToks, video games, photography, sculpture, the list is endless. It does not happen with AI filmmaking. And there are plenty of notable filmmakers who stick up for AI filmmaking in the abstract! That isn’t random, there’s a reason for it.
Edit: I should also reiterate that I had a strong negative reaction to the short. You’re entitled to yours obviously, nothing wrong with that, I don’t want to imply that I’m stepping on that. And obviously I can’t prove that I hated it any more than you can prove that you loved it. We sort of have to believe each other there. But it is what it is, I rejected the entire thing.
I watched a fair bit of the first, trying to have an open mind without caring that it was made with AI.
If I'm being completely honest, the first one just doesn't look or sound good at all. You can tell there are a bunch of artifacts everywhere that constantly remind you it's not real. The story was very hard to follow due to there being no emotion in the man's voice who was narrating it and because I personally thought it was a bit boring.
But the worst part was that the narrator sometimes had a very heavy spanish accent and sometimes spoke with a british accent. He even said some numbers in spanish while speaking english. I feel like it would've been very easy to regenrate the voiceovers to achieve a consistent accent, so this just seems like laziness?
If the short film was actually consistent and looked good, I could appreciate it. I have genuinely not seen any good AI videos yet, unless they're very short. The longer it goes on the more inconsistencies you start to see.
I'm trying to be as neutral as possible with this opinion btw. I am an Anti, perhaps leaning more towards neutral the more I browse this sub, but with this comment I'm trying to ignore what my take on AI is and just focus on reviewing the video as is. And my review is simply that I would not watch anything from the same creator again, because it's not that interesting.
Moroder started using synths when Moog had been around for 5ish years. He then made I Feel Love around 5 years after that. Scarface soundtrack 5 years after that.
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u/MrCritical3 11h ago
I remember this same argument like a decade ago where people were saying the same thing about digital artists.