M○C△ WEEKLY Round-UP 2/16
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In This Week’s Round-Up:
Another group of crybabies has a hissy-fit about AI art (and why that makes them bad artists)
The Barstool guy actually has a good point; and an update on Google going full-on villain-mode
AI could end Big Entertainment, and not for the reasons you think
Okay, Max, Get on With It Already
The Crypto Art Side
It’ll never end I suppose, the endless barrage of nastiness against AI art by the class of creatives formerly known as artists. Today, their rage takes the form of an open letter sent to the organizers of Christie’s upcoming AI Art Auction, Augmented Intelligence, its signatories a cohort of some 6000-or-so individuals, their signed names flanked by titles as impressive as Concept Artist, Creator, Illustrator, Environment Artist, Animator, Photographer, 3D artist, etc. etc., on and on and on, all monikers which, I suppose, are meant to demonstrate their bearer’s expertise on the subject of artistry. The letter —which asks the show’s curators, Nicole Sales Giles and Sebastian Sanchez, to cancel the auction outright— is haughty and self-righteous. But that shouldn’t prove so surprising to any of us who’ve previously dealt with the anti-AI crowd. Their self-seriousness is matched only by their cloying need for attention. It is outpaced only by their obvious lack of talent.
I’m long past holding emotional space for such people; I’ve moved on to holding contempt. Perhaps that’s because I keenly know how time-consuming, labor-intensive, and creatively demanding an AI art project is. But the details, for example, of MOCA’s own Art DeCC0s —much like the works of Pindar van Arman, Videodrome, Alexander Reben, Roope Rainisto, Linda Dounia, Claire Silver, and Sasha Stiles, among many others represented in the auction— don’t matter. Forget innovation and creativity. Ignore artists’ agency. Why? Because the anti-AI mob cannot scrub from its kindergarten hivemind the very most basic ideas about the form’s inhumanity. Claire Silver’s own recently-released Manifesto does a better job than I could at communicating the significant challenges, demands, nuances, and operating guidelines of AI artwork, so I’ll let her words speak here. I’ll move directly on to my point:
These people are shit artists, guys. Point blank, full-stop. Their work might be technically-gifted, emotionally resonant, thematically rich, and globally lauded —who knows!— but as far as I’m concerned, you cannot possibly be working at a level of true quality if you’ve succumbed to the fear of newness. Even if the work presents itself as highly artistic, the spirit that created it is dead, far less human than the machines these shivering lemmings spend their days furying about.
A good artist is curious by nature. A good artist is reflective because reflection is demanded of them. A good artist judges themselves only by the successful evocation of their vision, and others by the successful evocation of theirs. A good artist is not bound by tools, schools, conventions, or politics. But these artists are not curious, they are judgmental. They are not reflective, they are reactive. They judge others not by the success of their art but by the tradition of their means. They have built themselves a steel cage made of ignorance and dipshittery, locked themselves inside, and now clang on the bars with a pewter cup in the hopes that we pay them attention.
Some good news: less and less people, every time we do this, seem to pay them any legitimate attention. Case in point, Christie’s is obviously not cancelling their sale. Say what you want about these auction houses, but they can smell bullshit from a distance (because they traffick in bullshit themselves). Moreover, few AI artists —some of whom are hacks, and the majority of whom are intrepid in their pursuit of curiosity, courage, creativity, and communication— seem legitimately and freshly afeared by the ridiculous assertions from such half-rate “artists.”
My final words r.e. these small creatures: A broken peanut shell expresses more creativity. A ham sandwich more humanity. I simply have no time for the artist who blinds themselves to humanity. We must, should, and seem to have no space for a class of cretin that spends more time excoriating the successes of others than rectifying their own failures.
The Tech Side
So I came across this Forbes article a few days by Charlie Fink called “The Best Star Wars Movie in Years is Made with AI,” which is like a title engineered to get me to click on it, which I did, and so that’s how I ended-up watching The Ghost’s Apprentice, an 11ish-minute short-film created by Kavan the Kid that’s set in the extended Star Wars universe. Copyright be damned. Like the article’s title suggests, The Ghost’s Apprentice was made completely with AI, and, more than that, it is still up at the time of this writing, three days after it was posted. A small miracle in and of itself.
Of the film, Fink writes, “What sets it apart isn’t just its emotional depth, but the sheer technical brilliance of its execution. Importantly, when I showed the film on the big screen…it looked great. No artifacts, no hallucinations. If I didn’t tell you the spectacular visuals were made by AI, you wouldn’t know it.”
That’s not entirely true. It’s…pretty good. Pretty good, for sure. Looks great in landscapes and wide shots. But the voices are weird, the shot sequencing is pretty jumpy and jilted, and the characters don’t really move; I’d say it works like 70% of the way. But that’s not really why this story feels so important. It’s more important for what it augurs than what it is. Because, what happens when AI video tech improves like 50% more over the course of the next year? What happens when it merges with the open-source movement, which is more-or-less an inevitability. I think, really I do, that the big movie studios might fall. Here’s my case:
Why do people go see Marvel movies in droves? Star Wars movies? Despicable Me or Sonic or Jurassic World moves, or any of these big-budget, crowd-pleasing popcorn series? For a lot of reasons, but one of them is that you can’t get the experience elsewhere. Today, only a movie studio with hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars on-hand can create a convincing enough cinematic atmosphere to tell these stories with any kind of realism. Nobody else can make an Avengers movie but Disney. And that means Disney gets to be the arbiter-of-the-Avengers. Nobody else can create something canon because nobody else has the capability.
In our pursuit of the-only-game-in-town, a lot of negative stuff gets ignored. Plots that are focus-grouped to death. Thin characters. Unimaginative ideas. Cliches. In an ideal world, we can get spectacle and art mixed together, but since we can’t get the spectacle anywhere else, we’re often accustomed to sacrificing the art altogether.
But if Karan the Kid is making fairly decent Star Wars ripoffs today and by themselves, then it’s just a matter of time before Hollywood’s studio-system-sanctified writers and creatives are lapped handily by the superior creative forces who exist the world over. Better writers, more imaginative artists, clearer visions, all of them able —through AI— to generate stories in universes that few previously had the means to traipse through.
Why would you go spend $20 to go see Disney’s finely-tailored-to-not-tread-on-the-sensibilities-of-the-Chinese-Communist-Party theatrical release of Iron Man 8 when there are better, weirder, more interesting, more intense, darker, deeper, more dramatic, nerdier, bloodier, hornier Iron Man movies all over the internet? Maybe, in the next decade, Karan the Kid builds a whole universe of amazing Star Wars movies. Would we still consider those non-canon? Would the legions of worldwide Star Wars fans? Would it matter that they weren’t Disney-fied in production and presentation? Free from the studio system, its desperation for tax incentives and please-everybody attitude, free from the endless chronological grind of writing-preproduction-production-postproduction-marketing, the AI Filmmaker will soon compete with the big boys on their own turf. I’m not sure the studios are ready for all this bankable allegiance to turn itself elsewhere.
And it’s not about there being just Karan the Kid doing this kind of work. It’s about there being hundreds of Karan the Kids. Thousands? They’ll be creating quicker than studios can be DMCA-ing. Their stories will run laps around the slop that film executives inject into theaters every Christmas. At a certain point, the products will look so similar; they’ll be distinguishable only by their quality. And who will be in a better position to win that contest?
Just this week, my parents and all their friends were handily fooled into thinking this quite-easily-distinguishable-as-AI video (of Hollywood celebrities wearing “Fuck Kanye” t-shirts) was not AI at all, despite the many glaring social and logistical impossibilities that the video implies (which I will discuss in detail in a footnote1). If a sizable portion of the population already can’t distinguish between real and fake advertisements, then there’s no reason to think we’ll be capable of distinguishing between “real” and “knockoff” movies. Why would the distinction even matter? Why is one realer than the other? Does a decades-ago purchase of IP really factor that much into our collective awareness? I think you can guess my answers.
The kingdom is going to crumble.
The Money Side
This doofus above you is Dave Portnoy, the founder of the all-you-can-frat content mill which is Barstool Sports, a website which (unfortunately) I both quite like and also absolutely despise, a juvenile hodgepodge of legitimate sports discussion, drinking culture gone awry, outright misogyny, and food porn, all hung together like charms on a Wiccan necklace. The vibe might be described as “a beer pong table come to life, set on fire, given a confetti cannon, and let loose in a strip club,” but nowhere near as fun.
Dave Portnoy is kingping of the operation. Usually referred to as Pres (as in, “el presidente”), he is abrasive and argumentative and even most people who like Barstool kind of hate him. Surprising only in that it took so long, Portnoy found his way into the world of shitcoins this past week, and the darndest thing happened: He saw right to the core of it.
The actual mechanisms of his descent into memecoin trading are less important than the consequences, but suffice to say, he quickly learned A) that a coin’s value can rise by orders of magnitude in seconds, B) that public posturing by sufficiently popular personas is often responsible for such an event, and C) as a sufficiently popular persona, his own public posturing proved pretty profitable. After half-a-day spent trading memecoins without issue, the degen crowd —specifically those who lost money by following his brazen and almost infantile posts about certain coins— went wild with complaints about his conduct.
Portnoy rarely takes responsibility forbad activity, but herein, his deflection of culpability was completely correct. Kevin Helms, from Bitcoin.comNews, writes:
“Addressing those who were upset about his trades, [Portnoy] argued: ‘You’re just mad you didn’t dump them on fucking me … So stop crying. Everyone knows the rules. This isn’t like Joe Six-Pack or your grandmother who’s losing their life savings.’”
Portnoy echoed similar sentiments throughout the week, saying things like:
“We all know the rules. We’re all trying to make a buck. Nobody is misleading anybody. If you are buying and selling shitcoins, you should be prepared to lose your investment. It’s a risk.”
No revolutionary insight in this segment today, just the fact that it’s nice to see the thing called out for how absurd it is, and the people inside it called-out for how unbelievably fucking annoying they are, by someone who dwarfs even the shitcoin world in absurdity and annoyance. Nice to feel seen.
Like I said, small wins. They matter too.
DeCC0 of the Week
Art in the Wild
Dev Corner
No updates this week, Devs are AFK. Back at it soon.
Quote of the Week
“You begin with the possibilities of the material.”
-Robert Rauschenberg
(Thinking about this one related to the AI stuff we spoke about earlier.)
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First of all, there’s an AI Woody Allen in this video, and I’m certain that nobody with a Hollywood marketing career would ask Woody Allen to be in their sensitivity-coded video (for obvious reasons). All of these AI-generated celebrities look, like, pretty weird if you stare at them for more than a second, that’s issue two. Three is that —while AI movement is really easy to pick-up on when you’ve seen it before, though apparently impossible to discern if you haven’t— this is classic AI movement: stilted and choppy and marionette-ish. Fourth is that this video is of way-lower quality than almost anything that comes out of Hollywood proper, especially anything that has enough budget or lobbying power to collect so many A-listers together. I mean, you have to synthesize a lot of technical and social information to arrive at the “This is obviously fake” understanding, but I feel like anyone under the age of 35 would know immediately, and anyone under the age of 40 would get it within a few seconds. My point is, if some folks are already unable to tell the difference between real and AI, give it five years, things will be altogether indistinguishable.)