The Reviews are in on Darren Aronofsky's AI-Generated Show, and May We Just Say: "Yikes"

[highplainsdem]

Article in Futurism - https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/aronofsky-ai-show-reviews - with no paywall, so I hope you'll read all of it.

Aranofsky directed Black Swan, The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream, and a lot of money and tech help was put into this slop by Google’s DeepMind lab, Salesforce, and TIME Studios, working with Aranofsky's AI studio Primordial Soup.

Called “On This Day … 1776,” the show, which consists of several-minute “episodes,” is meant to cover notable events that took place in the American Revolutionary War, but has instead mostly drawn attention to how awful its AI visuals look, on top of its persistent anachronisms. Colonists living in houses with modern vinyl siding? Sure, why not.

The reviews, predictably, are brutal. In one titled “Requiem for a film-maker,” The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage blasted its faux-photorealism aesthetic as “ugly as sin,” and called out its overreliance on center-framed, back-of-the-head shots. “This is, after all, because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face,” Heritage wrote.

“‘On This Day … 1776’ is genuinely very horrible to watch,” he concluded, “and everybody involved should be ashamed. It is by far the most disturbing thing Aronofsky has made, and I’ve seen the last eight minutes of ‘Requiem for a Dream.'”

It’s hard not to agree. The entire show operates in the mode of meaningless montage, because stitching together a collection of barely-related, aesthetically generic shots is the only mode of “filmmaking” that AI is suited for. The effect is like watching an extended advert. But whereas a commercial usually has the good manners to wrap up in less than a minute, Aronofsky’s monstrosity slogs on with its cavalcade of quick-cutting but slowly-moving close-ups, as if to demonstrate to maximum effect how utterly inane this all looks.

-snip-

The Hollywood Reporter review called it depressing slop, despite being "gussied up," and said it was just "shoddy, TikTok-length clips that would barely pass muster as animated illustrations for a high-school history lesson, let alone coherent pieces of storytelling in their own right."

[cachukis]

1. Yeah, but if it's going to get better it has to start

somewhere, eh?

[highplainsdem]

2. Even if it gets slightly better, it's still AI slop from unethical tools trained illegally on stolen work.

[WarGamer]

3. Just a question about this concept

Using this logic, isn't every person on the planet learning from "stolen work"?

Maybe an art school student gets really into a specific style and studies works by artists of the period... emulates their use of brushstrokes and shading... angles and light...

Just because LLM can study 1 thousand pieces of art in the time a human can glance at a piece of work, is there a difference?

Couldn't one make the argument that AI is the great tool of democratization? Instead of hiring a mechanic to fix you brakes, follow AI prompts... or paying someone to remove the ex-girlfriend from the family portrait... or putting a piece of art in the den?

Example:

Gemini create a piece of art reminiscent of the Dutch Masters

https://gemini.google.com/share/ea0b948f51cd

[highplainsdem]

5. The only thing AI democratizes is plagiarism. There is zero talent, creativity and artistry in giving a

prompt to a machine to have it generate something that exists only because the unethical AI companies illegally trained AI models on stolen intellectual property.

What AI takes from a photo or painting is what a photocopier takes, which is a mindless copy, and not a human's perception of it with individual impressions and emotions.

What you generated there using Google's Gemini is AI slop. Gemini has no awareness of what was generated, and you had no real control over what it churned out. Even if you gave the AI a detailed prompt, you still don't have an artist's conscious control, and AI users sometime generate hundreds or more images until one pops up that they like, and then they claim it as if they'd actually created it and all the options they were offered earlier didn't exist.

Using AI can never make anyone an artist. They'll still be only an AI user who wants to pretend to be an artist but never bothered to learn how to create art.

AI "art" is kind of like online shopping with keywords for color, brand, etc. The shopper doesn't create what's found. I've also seen it compared to ordering from a menu and then pretending to have been the chef.

It's meaningless pretense at best, a waste of time, electricity and water. And it's fraud if the AI use isn't revealed.

[cachukis]

4. Don't disagree, but we watch computerized special

effects now, that has captured huge audiences don't we?
They are not the Clash of the Titans or Godzilla of the recent past. Flash Gordon?
While ethics plays a large roll in my life, I can't say the same for the money chasing members of our world.
I have Luddite sentimentalities, but I take with a grain of salt, progress.
I prefer hand thrown bowls, but I appreciate cans.
I really like vaccines over less chances of immunity.
Didn't Picasso say something about good artists copying and great artists stealing?

[highplainsdem]

6. I like vaccines, too. That doesn't mean I should like genAI, the most harmful non-weapon tech ever developed,

which
exists only because of the theft of the world's intellectual property,
dumbs down and de-skills users,
enables and encourages all kinds of fraud and disinformation and data gathering and surveillance,
harms education and the economy,
pollutes our information ecosystem,
damages the natural environment,
threatens users with what is sometimes called AI psychosis,
and is intended to transfer wealth and power from society at large and individual creators to tech oligarchs.

Generative AI has no benefits that could ever begin to outweigh the harm it's already done.

[cachukis]

7. I find no fault in your argument. Can you give me

guidance as how to avoid or ignore it without suffering my ignorance?

[highplainsdem]

8. We shouldn't ignore it. We should oppose it because it's a threat to humanity.