← Back to context

Comment by thisisit

2 days ago

This is the sad reality. Because things can go the other way as well. Something can be amazing but beaten down because - AI.

Here's a video which was discussed by VFX artists at Corridor Digital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY

This is so much creative work. But once people know that genAI and ComfyUI might be involved they might beat it down.

4 comments

thisisit

Reply
somenameforme  2 days ago

To me, that is kind of the essence of contemporary AI. It's showy but lacks any point or spirit whatsoever. For instance, imagine the morphing was on beat with the music - suddenly it's actually quite neat. As is, it just looks like some fairly low effort prompts. Even the dancing seems relatively low effort and makes minimal effort to play to the scene or music in any way outside of a vague sort of liquidy theme. It just feels very disconnected.

Take, for contrast, the original Matrix. The reason the effects in that movie were revolutionary is not because of them just looking neat, but because they fit extremely well into the movie, and were supplemented by other effects that bumped them up to the next level. CG tends to age horrrrrribly (for anybody over 40, watch the original Jurassic Park again...) but the original Matrix lobby scene [1] still actually looks pretty decent, and I think that's because it had spirit. Note how so much love is put into the choreography, even small things like the footsteps being on beat with the background audio at the start of the scene, the military style marching drums when the paramilitary forces enter the scene, and more. It's just great.

There's no reason AI can't play a major role in these artistic pipelines, but that's the thing - there's a huge difference between making something showy, and making something that feels like it has spirit, like something that is art. And it's for this reason that I don't think artists are going anywhere.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI

freehorse  2 days ago

I don't know about the specific piece, but my essential problem with AI art is that it lacks intentionality. I am not sure how use of AI tools in a creative manner can be reconciled with this fact, also because I do not really use the actual professional AI tools. Maybe it is analogous to using LLMs for tab-completion vs prompting and letting them roam and write the code as agents. I would rather "AI" as tightly integrated into a process and being an actual tool without disrupting it, than something that essentially turns us all into some kind of managers.