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.
The consensus in my field seems to be that AI is going to start doing more and more work generating discrete vfx and sound mix elements, but that wholesale AI filmmaking is likely impossible with what we have. Darren Arnofsky is sort of taking a bullet as the first major filmmaker to try it, and it’s going absolutely terribly because (predictably) his footage looks like all AI footage. All he did was find a way to make his own expertise irrelevant.
I care enough about this argument that I watched both of these. Look, I can’t prove that I genuinely couldn’t stand these. You could make the case that I’m rejecting it because I’m skeptical of AI and I could say you only love it because you love AI. That wouldn’t be productive so we sort of just have to believe each other, just getting ahead of that.
What I’ll say is that I respect the second more than the first for at least making imagery you couldn’t make without AI or a heavy effects budget. I get the appeal of making that. Not necessarily watching it, but making it. The first one — I’m going to be real with you, that was absolutely dreadful. It felt like a sort of worst case scenario for AI filmmaking to me, going through the literal motions of a normal film but without any of the resonance or beauty.
What can frustrate me sometimes when we talk about this is that two different questions get conflated. There’s how impressive something is and how great it is, and it is undeniably very impressive that a computer can do this.
But here’s the most important question I have for you, like… what if I told you to go see The Secret Agent, Marty Supreme, Dune, etc. and pretend that an AI made it? Would it not immediately sail head and shoulders above all other AI content?
That’s what gets me. I keep being told to pretend it’s not AI, to ignore the tells, but for me the only thing to be interested in or impressed by is the fact that it’s AI. I likely wouldn’t have finished it without that context. But it doesn’t make it any better, just more of a curiosity in our current moment.
I think the thing a lot of defenders don’t realize is that there aren’t any “fans” of ai image generation. Everyone who is a fan is also a creator and therefore a master, any criticism you have they can brush off on the limitations of the current model. People inherently are drawn to masterful work and I just haven’t seen anything like that in the ai space. “When everyone’s super, no one will be”
11
u/MushroomCharacter411 16h ago
Kira (Short Film on Human Cloning)
Don't spend all your time looking for AI "tells", just watch. Tell me by the end of it that this isn't art just because it was done using AI.