Netflix and A24 both land in hot water over apparent AI stuff
Both studios have come under fire this week for using AI-generated images in a documentary and posters for Civil War respectively
Aux News A24
Despite the fact that Hollywood’s actors and writers went on strike in part because of the encroachment of AI just this past summer, we’ve already seen the technology pop up more during the past few months. In January, disappointed True Detective: Night Country fans spotted and called out a clearly AI-generated poster in the background of an episode. Last month, indie horror film Late Night With The Devil endured a similar blowback after using computer-generated images during a few transitions in the film. (The creators later specified that they did “experiment” with AI to create the images, but personally edited them after the fact.) Even Pink Floyd made headlines when they selected an AI-generated video as one of the winners for their Dark Side Of The Moon anniversary contest earlier this month.
Unfortunately, despite outraged fans’ and creators’ attempts at boycotts and other direct action, it looks like Reese Witherspoon was right when she said that AI was here to stay, so we should all “just get used to it.” Case in point: two separate, major studios have made headlines for their unwelcome use of the technology in just the past 48 hours.
The first of these studios is A24, which lost a great deal of goodwill amongst its normally fervent fanbase yesterday when it published a series of apparently AI-generated posters for Alex Garland’s Civil War. While all of the posters depict war-torn visions of recognizable American cities and landmarks—none of which actually appear in the film—perhaps the most egregious is a version of Chicago where the Marina City towers simply aren’t in the right place. (Did Wilco teach us nothing?) If you zoom in on the tan building on the left side of the poster, you can also see some tell-tale signs of AI blurring and incorrect doubling.
Other easy-to-spot mistakes include a wreckage-filled Miami street where one car seems to have three doors, and some abomination that’s either a swan boat with no seat, or the largest swan to ever live. It’s also especially ironic that this is happening to a film by Alex Garland, whose excellent 2015 movie Ex Machina posits AI as an invention equivalent to the atomic bomb in its capacity (and inevitability) to render humanity obsolete. (Domhnall Gleeson actually quotes Oppenheimer’s “I am become death” speech in the film.) A24 did not immediately respond to The A.V. Club’s request for comment on this piece, but it’s pretty safe to assume this was a marketing decision made by higher-ups without consultation from Garland himself.
But it’s not just A24. A recent Futurism article pointed out that Netflix also used the technology to commit an objectively worse sin. In the true crime documentary What Jennifer Did, which follows a young woman named Jennifer Pan’s alleged plot to kill her parents, a number of pictures depicting Pan as a “bubbly, happy, confident, and very genuine” person before her arrest appear to have been artificially generated, or at least manipulated. The photos (depicted in more detail in the linked article) also have the tell-tale signs; Pan’s hands and ears aren’t quite right, objects in the background are muddled nonsense, and in one image—actually used on the documentary’s poster—she has one impossibly long tooth. The fact that AI was used was not disclosed anywhere in the film’s credits. (Netflix did not immediately respond to The A.V. Club’s request for comment on this story.)
While the presence of AI in movie posters is frustrating (and perhaps a suable example of false advertising), its use in a documentary is downright terrifying. As 404 Media reported, filmmakers and Archival Producers Alliance co-founders Jennifer Petrucelli, Stephanie Jenkins, and Rachel Antell actually presented draft guidelines for the ethical use of AI in documentary work just this week. While their suggestions revolve more around practicing complete transparency than curtailing the use of AI altogether (it isn’t going away any time soon, after all), the filmmakers’ main fears rest in the fact that artificial photos and video deepfakes could imminently lead to a warped archive not even historians will be able to trust.
“One of the things we’ve realized is once a piece of media exists, even if it is disclosed [that it’s AI generated], it can then be lifted out of any documentary, make its way onto the internet and into other films, and then it’s forever part of the historic record,” Antell said (via 404). “Archival moves at a human pace and GenAI does not move at a human pace, and so for humans to keep up with it, that’s a very unlikely thing to be able to happen.” Increasingly, it seems the race may already be lost.
126 Comments
I’ve seen so many posts on media news websites and social media trying to turn this into a huge issue that I’m actually starting to think it’s part of the marketing and will have something to do with the film.
The movie has been out for a week now, it’s nothing to do with what the movie is about.
Any human artist who made these sort of basic mistakes would be told to try again, if not outright fired.
The fantasy about AI supposedly being good enough to actually compete with real artists in terms of quality seems more unlikely by the day.
All of AI’s benefits are to the company, which gets to lay off real, talented people and replace them with a laughably dumb machine. Everyone else loses: not just artists, but also consumers, who are expected to pay the same price for objectively inferior content.
“The fantasy about AI supposedly being good enough to actually compete with real artists in terms of quality seems more unlikely by the day.”Sure, if technology doesn’t grow by leaps and bounds as the decades pass.But lets be real here—-considering that 40 years ago we didn’t even have nascent AI tech , in 40 years (if we haven’t nuked ourselves into oblivion), the technology will certainly exist to compete with real digital artists, if not sooner.
Absolutely sooner. Look at the exponential improvement since Dall-E Mini launched to now. If things continue to improve at the same insane pace, in a year we’ll no longer to be able to detect the hand of AI in an image with the naked eye, even when zooming in and scrutinizing it. Our only hope will be that AI-detection models also advance at the same pace, and will be able to detect some kind of generative signature in the raw image data. Even that may be impossible if the models can generate extremely high resolution images that are then compressed into JPEGs – compressing an image enough might smear any AI signature.
It was my understanding that these AIs need an incredible amount of sourced materials (i.e. actual art supplied or stolen from human artists) in order to even attempt to create an image based on a prompt. I used one to generate a profile pic and it took me several tries to get it to write two letters. Apparently the letter S is pretty far beyond some AIs’ ability to create.
Yes, they are currently quite dumb, and yes, they can improve. But what happens when AIs start feeding their shitty art to each other? More artists are suing for copyright infringement and the AIs, unlike actual artists, can actually ‘unlearn’ how to ape the works of others if they’re deleted from the databases they draw from (no pun intended). A well-known acronym among computer nerds is GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.
You’re misunderstanding how they work if you think they “draw from a database” continuously. Once a diffusion model is trained, it no longer needs the original material to function – only the connections created by processing that material. You may be able to have material removed from the training sets of *future* models, but the ones already operating won’t be affected.In terms of “poisoning” the training data by training on AI images – the companies developing the models are well aware of this phenomenon, and I’m confident that the billions of dollars they’re funneling into this tech will allow them to continually update their tech to detect and remove those images from the training sets.I’m not defending any of this, but I think it’s naive to assume tech companies with absolute mountains of cash won’t be able to solve the relatively simple problems standing in their way. That cash is also how they’ll solve the legal problems that are still in the early days of litigation. Without action from the US Congress (and other countries around the world), I think there’s precious little hope of slowing down or stopping the advancement of LLMs and diffusion models.
Well for the first point, a number of artists are considering suing companies that used their art to train the AIs. If the software can’t unlearn their work then not only would I seek a monetary remedy, I’d ask for an injunction against further use of the program.
All of these tech companies are publicly traded and if you told your investors you spent billions developing a generative AI art program that can’t even draw an S and started a class action lawsuit because it stole hundreds of assets, those mountains might turn into molehills. I have doubts that the tech giants are doing anything more than playing around with the idea until they all eventually realize it won’t make any money and throw it in the huge trash heap of tech that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Artists can ask for whatever they want – most legal analyses of the cases that I’ve seen suggest that the tech giants are likely to prevail on the merits of claiming fair use because the output is substantially transformative. Even if the models were just creating collages (they’re doing a lot more than that), collage is considered transformative fair use. Add to that the fact that the tech giants have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the cases, and I don’t think the court cases will get very far. My prediction is they’ll end in some sort of nominal settlement fee.The investors know exactly what the companies models can and can’t do, and they’re extremely excited for the profit potential. Imagining that huge institutional investors are less well-informed about the models than you and I are is, frankly, silly. They understand power law scaling very well – they’re counting on it.And the idea that this “can’t make any money”… I don’t know what to say to that. It’s already generating money and disrupting various industries. It’s a massive paradigm shift, and every company that can get into it is investing huge sums. Pretending this is a flash in the pan might be comforting, but it honestly sounds like Prince saying in 2010 “the Internet is just a fad.” Wanna put some money on it? 😉
It’s not just about whether or not you can tell it’s AI though. It’s about the actual emotional impact of the piece- the artisitic quality- and the ease with which it works.
Take image generators. Trying to get any of them to create very specific images can be very tricky, especially if it’s a remotely original idea. And forget about trying to change a specific element in a specific image (make that hat blue instead of red, for example) and nothing else.
Will that all get better? Probably. Will it equal humans? Maybe, but I think it’s going to take a lot longer than people think. But I’m not dumb. I know it be “good enough” to pass muster for cheap companies that aren’t really interested in the quality in the first place.
“It’s about the actual emotional impact of the piece- the artisitic quality”I don’t agree that this will be particularly discernable between AI art and human art. There’s plenty of contemporary human art that the vast majority of people already dismiss as utterly lacking in artistic quality even while it’s lauded by the art world and sells for millions of dollars. Quality is deeply subjective and taste is a rapidly moving target. The more AI art people are exposed to, the more they will become comfortable with its aesthetic quirks. The human brain is a great machine for ascribing intent and emotional context to things which completely lack it.But I think the main flaw in your thinking (and many people’s around this subject) is to assume that the shortcomings of the models we have today will persist for any length of time. Again, compare DALL-E Mini to the current paid version of DALL-E or Midjourney. They’ve advanced astoundingly in less than two years! Hands and faces have gone from laughable to mostly very convincing. And this is just for one very narrow application of the models: text-prompted image generation. The AI tools Adobe has been iterating on for the last several years are REALLY good at things like “make that hat blue instead of red” because there are so many more ways for the user to interact with the model and the image – highlighting certain areas, using a color-picker instead of rough descriptions of color, providing specific reference images, etc.I would suggest to you that a great many AI images are already passing for human art – the idea that we can “always tell” is usually a comforting fantasy we tell ourselves. There are high-profile AI mistakes that generate discourse, but there are lots of mundane uses that don’t trigger any alarm bells. And that’s why it’s becoming so ubiquitous: even now, it can quietly replace artists in so many situations. It’s only going to get worse, and much, much faster than you think due to scaling laws.
“ think the main flaw in your thinking (and many people’s around this subject) is to assume that the shortcomings of the models we have today will persist for any length of time”
There’s a lot of technology that this is the case with though. Cold fusion has been “10 years away” for decades now. Sometimes the last 10% is damnably difficult to complete. AI may be a different case, but I don’t know that it’s a foregone conclusion simply because we’re in the honeymoon phase where everything is happening quickly.
Give me an example other than cold fusion, because I don’t think that applies very well here. There isn’t a single cold fusion facility producing consumer electricity, and there never has been. And the industry consensus is not now and never has been that it’s “ten years away.” There are dozens or hundreds of different LLM and diffusion models right now, including open source models anyone can install at home. We’ve hit no significant plateaus when it comes to their improvement over the last two years. We know a LOT more about what’s coming in generative AI than we do about fusion. And I’m not even arguing we’re going to achieve AGI or anything grandiose like that. I’m just saying that the flaws of the tech at this instant are extremely likely to disappear in the next year or two.
It’s (hot) fusion that’s always 10 years away, not cold fusion, which is more of a crackpot idea.Other examples of “always on the brink of a breakthrough” technologies arguably include self-driving cars, VR and AR, and chatbots for customer service.Not that I disagree that AI is going to be (and to a considerable extent already is) huge, and disruptive for many industries. You don’t even have to posit that all the issues are going to be solvable. It can continue to improve even as problems remains.
Self-driving cars, VR and AR, and chatbots have all made big technical strides in the last few years. Let’s not confuse “market dominance” with technical progress. They’re two very separate issues. “Breakthroughs” are rarely how tech improves.
Thanks for the clarification, and for the backup.
I find the cognitive dissonance of “they suck” and “ they’ll replace us all” whiplash inducing.
I’m saving this comment so I can laugh in your face in 6 months.
It never fails to amaze (and sadden) me that so much effort is being put into getting machines to replicate something that humans do so easily. Is it hard to draw and write well? Sure, but it’s hard to do anything to a high standard. But writing and drawing at all is something humans do all the time, often quite naturally. People doodle all the time, people (especially in this day and age) are constantly communicating through the written word. Without even trying, most people can dash off a simple scribble of something that it’s taken huge investments of time and money for AI to replicate even poorly. People say AI will get better, and I’m sure it will, but I just don’t see the point when humans have been willingly improving their artistic skills as a matter of course for centuries.(I’m lying, I can see the point; as always, it’s squeezing a little more money out.)
It never fails to amaze (and sadden) me that so much effort is being put into getting machines to replicate something that humans do so easily. It shouldn’t really surprise you though. I can pretty easily turn a screw with a screwdriver, but in most cases I’m gonna go get the ryobi screw gun/drill thing to get the job done quicker and easier.
I guess the big difference is there are people who enjoy making art. I’m not sure anyone particularly enjoys turning a screwdriver, even if they enjoy the larger process of making things.(That said, I prefer a manual screwdriver to a motorised one. I find it much more satisfying.)
Yeah, you’re not wrong. Though no one is predicting a future where humans are not allowed to make art. Or use screwdrivers. It’s just that if I’m looking for someone to build something I’m gonna naturally hire the guy with electric tools who can finish in 1/2 the time the old school screwdriver guy will take. Yes it sucks for the screwdriver guy, but think where we’d be without faster production methods, assembly automation, etc.
It’s downright frightening to see commenters on Facebook lose their minds at an AI generated “photo” of a Dogwood tree in spring bloom looking, not like a tree with blossoms, but a stick of glossy white cotton candy. They don’t know the difference.
Not necessarily. A lot of artists have to meet strict deadlines their publishers can’t push, and mistakes can sneak in if there isn’t enough time to catch them. Think of the numerous stories over the years of basic Photoshop mistakes making their way into professional, nationally-distributed magazines (sometimes even the cover). It makes the news rounds, gets some laughs, but people move on.AI objectively is good enough to compete with human artists in terms of quality. The bar just isn’t as high as we like to think it is. This is just the latest in a pattern of depressing devaluation of art that’s been happening for decades.
“Everyone else loses: not just artists, but also consumers, who are expected to pay the same price for objectively inferior content.”This is called the enshittification of an industry, and it is rampant within everything techbros touch.
LOLOLOLOL. Dude, we’re about five minutes into the AI age. In ten years, this comment will sound like some monocled twit in 1902 proclaiming “had man ever been meant to fly, god surely would have endowed him with gossamer wings.”
In two years, this comment will sound like some techbro twit in 2022 proclaiming, “Dude, we’re about five minutes into the NFT age.”
Or some techbro twit in 2020 going “Dude, we’re about five minutes into the metaverse age.”
Or some techbro twit in 2019 going, “Dude, we’re about five minutes into the crypto age.”Can’t wait to see what pump-and-dump fad you kids will start worshiping next.
Why are artists’ jobs more important than any of the other jobs replaced by technology over the past 300 some odd years?
They’re not . Its just that understandably since “creatives” jobs are under threat , ‘creatives’ are going to be scared , and they’re more visible (and also the ones writing articles) ,
The thing is, despite particular jobs being eliminated (making buggy whips isn’t really a thing these days, although it was a good career in the 19th century), there is absolutely no evidence that technology eliminates jobs as a whole. It destroys some jobs, but creates others. Generally better ones.
It certainly created the job of AI grifter.
In the long term, you’re right, but in the short term, I don’t know that this is true. We’ve never seen an elimination of jobs on the scale to which there’s potential to happen in the next decade or so, if the techbro predictions come true. Societies with high unemployment don’t take long to break down into civil unrest.
“if the techbro predictions come true”Luckily they tend to be exceedingly bad at that. Mostly because they see tremendous initial progress and extrapolate it out as a linear trend upwards. Then when things inevitably plateau well below where they’d need to be to Change The World Forever, they move onto the next thing.Granted, most of this is because they’re just trying to get money out of VC, be acquired by one of the big boys, or get that sweet stock boost that comes with claiming to be at the forefront of the Next Big Thing. How much they actually believe in the long-term viability of their claims is much more variable – there’s plenty of mercenaries alongside the true believers.But I definitely have a feeling that credulity among the C-suite is going to make shit miserable for a lot of people for a while regardless of the quality of the actual technology. Same as it ever was.
That is a fantastic question. I am an artist, but I also work at a grocery store. Machines have been replacing grocery store workers for years. Now it is easier to replace an artist than someone who simply puts things on a shelf. The irony!
I am an artist yet. I use AI as an element in some of my art. to be fair, I’ve never made a lot of money from my music, art and video work, but I never cared. That’s not what art is about to me. I do think people should be able to make money with their art, but my desire to make art has nothing to do with money or I would not keep doing it, an artist has to make art. we have no choice.
Nah bro, you’re a grocery store worker who’s also an artist.
Because most (not all, but most) of “the other jobs” were either dangerous, menial, disgusting, or any combination of the three.
Why are “the geniuses” behind AI trying to replace jobs people WANT, instead of dirty jobs like garbage collectors or janitors?
The short answer is they’re not trying to replace any jobs, they’re trying to get money from investors. Presumably some of them are legitimately interested in furthering the technology. Jobs will be lost, but on the bright side hopefully AI can eliminate some of the “crunch time” horror stories from say the VFX and game development industries. The VFX people in particular are having a horrible time keeping up, so I have no problem with them using AI and then fixing it’s mistakes and polishing everything up if that’s quicker. If the money was the same I think I’d rather be a janitor than a dude working on CGI for Disney at this point in time. Much less stressful.
“Jobs will be lost, but on the bright side hopefully AI can eliminate some of the “crunch time” horror stories from say the VFX and game development industries.”Yeah but the problem is that maybe it will eliminate crunch time, but that’s because it will eliminate JOBS. Like whoop-de-doo, I have time off, but it’s because I’ve been fucking fired and have no income, so it’s honestly kinda worse! I understand that time and technology moves increasingly forward and trying to halt AI is fruitless (not least of all because no matter how many negative stories seem to come out, the folks at OpenAI/other tech companies just keep on truckin) but our society is fundamentally unprepared for the kind of shift AI will bring, and the speed at which its coming. Lots of people seem to think it’ll just be like Star Trek or The Jetsons and we’ll just have robots and AI help us out while we live life easier but largely unchanged, but the better AI (and the robotics industry) gets, the more CEOs are gonna fire people rather than hiring more or assigning them to different roles/jobs. Or, hear me out, maybe they can not crunch employees AND set more realistic project goals for games/VFX? Is that too much?
your middle section is kinda a chunk, but yeah I agree with the part that starts with “our society is fundamentally unprepared for…” The rest, like yes I presented eliminating crunch as a silver lining. as for preparing society, fuuuck man. What civilization have you been watching?
your middle section is kinda a chunk
Yeah lol that’s fair, that’s me writing stuff in bed at a quarter to 2 in kind of a haze which I really shouldn’t have been doing
as for preparing society, fuuuck man. What civilization have you been watching?I don’t get what you mean. Are you saying we are prepared for a lot of changes to industries? Because I would argue that we aren’t. By and large, the civilization I’ve seen right now are the ones who mostly use AI for small stuff (like kids writing papers, or adults using it to improve their resumes and/or make emails sound more “professional”) or ones using it for small-scale art (both goofy and serious), or the voices inside our Alexas/Google Homes. I think that the vast majority of Americans, or hell, the world, sees AI as a very useful tool but not something that will possibly threaten jobs. Like a 21st century Clippy (well, I suppose Clippy was the 21st century Clippy, so like a 2020s Clippy) that’s just kinda helpful but totally optional to their lives. They don’t realize how much it has, and will definitely, change way more fields than they expect, way faster than they expect. We’re not looking at a switch like when cars replaced horses and buggies, where horse breeders and buggie makers are forced to get into auto plant or repair work, we’re looking at changes which are gonna make a ton of humans (especially older ones who aren’t as good with computers) completely obsolete/unnecessary.
You add that together with late stage capitalism and corporate greed being the worst they have ever been in history, and the situation just gets bleaker. I know I sound like I’m just doom-saying, and maybe I am predicting things getting too bad too fast, but it’s not hard to see recent changes and see how trends are going. Without some large-scale changes in our society like a lot of industries unionizing, or implementing something like a universal basic income (which lol, will never ever happen unless there’s another pandemic that somehow only focuses on republican lawmakers), we’re gonna see a lot more people just plain unemployed rather than adapting to new positions.
So I got the notification and only saw “your middle section is kinda a chunk” and didn’t realize you were quoting me. I thought it was a pretty sick burn. And no what I was trying to suggest was that society is fucked and we can’t even get people to stop destroying the environment. I hate to say it but it sure seems like we’re fucked. The new Jurassic movies aren’t good, but there was one line in I think the last one from Ian Malcom that I liked It was something about how we can’t know what change looks like until it’s occurred.
I should preface this by saying I’m no AI expert. I’ve never even used one. In the long term you may be right, but it seems like we’re pretty far from a point where you can enter a prompt like “render a scene of Iron Man blasting aliens” and get acceptable results. So I guess what I’m saying is maybe there will be a period where it makes their jobs easier before it eliminates 80-90% of them. I wish we could get some universal basic income! And maybe this is wildly optimistic, but hopefully some of the displaced VFX artists could use these new tools to tell their own stories. Sorta like how youtube opened up video.Or, hear me out, maybe they can not crunch employees AND set more realistic project goals for games/VFX? Is that too much?Yeah that would be great. It doesn’t really seem to be happening though.
You do realize that some people not only want to do those jobs (garbage collector or janitorial) – and do them well and happily right?Look at the TV show Dirty Jobs – many of us might not be able to imagine enjoying those jobs – but a lot of the people doing them – are happily doing that work. For me – Art – is something that I am viscerally physically uncomfortable with trying to do. Any medium. I have managed to create some under duress during my college years – but the act of creation was awful and unhappy – and while I am proud I produced a few things which I do not actively hate – I never want to go through that again. Any segment of the workforce getting replaced by machinery – is always going to hurt someone – this is just the newest face of something that has been going on since the industrial revolution (see the Luddites – who were NOT the craven tech-fearing known-nothings that they usually get made out to be). Change hurts – and some folks get ground up in the gears – we should always be sympathetic to that – regardless of the job being replaced.
Many of our artists are considered “visionaries” (and I would agree). And I don’t want to get all ‘romantic’ about this, but part of their purvey, traditionally, has been to show us what we’d rather not see. This is why fascist/totalitarian/authoritative regimes suppress and even disappear them. I’m not suggesting that this is what’s going on but it will sure make harmful propaganda easier when we’ve made human artists obsolete.
Nothing. It used to be much more difficult to gain the tools to learn and practice the skills you need to even be an artist. Now those tools and education are so widely available, there are more artists. The increase in the supply of artists has driven down the price people are willing to pay for professional art, even before AI-generated images existed. So it follows that eventually the cost of automating art fell below what people are willing to pay – exactly like any other labor market.Wait, I take it back – there is a difference. People love making art so much, a lot of them do it for free and give it away – which, whether people are willing to admit it or not, has also pushed down the price that people are willing to pay for art.The good thing is I don’t think the demand for human-produced art is ever going to go away. And if we had a society where no citizen had to worry about paying for basic needs like housing, food, healthcare, and communication, it wouldn’t even matter. We’d all just make our own art and share with each other because it’s fun.
That’s a well-reasoned, optimistic take that I needed to hear. Thanks.
Because art is one of those things where the value is (at least partially) in the creation and the intention. It’s a form of communication, not just a tool.
This isn’t the horse and buggy being replaced by a car, it’s a friend being replaced by a chatbot. You’re writing this question using your own words, and then reading the replies being written by other people, because putting some prompts into ChatGPT to word the question for you and then feeding it into Bing for a response is unfulfilling and meaningless.
I’m a historian, and I’ve written a ton about our country’s transitions through various economic and industrial phases. The technology that, for marketing purposes primarily, we are currently calling “AI,” poses an obvious threat to concept artists, illustrators, and other creative professionals. This is similar to the Industrial Revolution, or, as others have mentioned, the threat of automation to the unskilled labor markets and manufacturing industries that has followed, but this transition is about more than the availability of creative employment. Generative technology cannot “create” in the way we understand creativity, because it lacks both emotion and volition. Just like a virus is not living and can only really do anything if it encounters a cell and utilizes the cell’s living architecture, generative technology can do nothing without the creativity of living beings. Corporations will choose to purchase imitation creativity rather than utilizing actual creativity and this fills the world with what is essentially motel art, lacking perspective, depth, and meaning. Creatives are frightened because they know, from living in this country and seeing how we prioritize things, that Americans will allow this to happen, because the potential for a company to avoid hiring a concept artist will win out over fostering a new generation of creative professionals. It’s not just lost jobs that people are frightened about, it’s a loss if collective investment in the skill and talent that goes into creating actual art, rather than imitations of art.
I mean, you’re bringing up what creativity even means in our age. You could make an argument that humans simply rely on our collective unconscious to feed meaning into the symbols we use. Every creative work grows out of the entirety of art history, at least. Apples and oranges, obviously, but there are parallels, especially considering a future where “AI” does gain the ability to “create” in a more traditional sense. I’m glad I could spark discussion and appreciate your points, thanks.
Personally, I feel that emotion is key to defining the difference between simulated creativity and human creativity. I started my professional life as a biologist, studying theoretical biology, and one of the things that stuck with me is the demonstrable observation that emotion comes before intellect. We feel before we think, and animals, at various levels of the evolutionary spectrum, feel before they intellectualize data available to them. My wife is an artist, a graphic designer and an illustrator. When I see her work, I know the mood she was in when she created what she created. For a human artist, creation is never purely intellectual, it is always emotional. It is true that we all feed from a collective bank of imagery, styles, and techniques. It is also true that all art is, at some basic level, a copy of what we’ve seen and absorbed, but generative technology lacks emotional connection to what it produces. It does not want, because it does not think and it does not feel. These technological creations are based on comparatively simple calculations about what works and, more importantly, what sells. We are as far from creating AE as we are from curing all human disease, and these tools, as impressive as they are, are as distant from human experience as the abacus is from the modern computer. We will make this transition to “AI art” based primarily on economic considerations and because there are many of us who have always wanted to be creative but haven’t wanted to invest the time in mastering any of the creative disciplines available to us. This is, without question, a loss, because it is the process of learning to be artistic, the pains and pleasures and frustrations and emotional stress, that makes human art what it is. Art is not the imitation of art alone, it is how we feel about the process and, without this, it is soulless. I’m not religious, but the terminology fits.
But is the emotion tied to the creator or is it triggered in the user by a multitude of inherited and learned responses? Does intent matter if the end user can’t tell the difference?It still tastes like steak, right?
We’re headed to where it will soon be able to create lifelike photos and very stylized and polished digital art but one thing I don’t think we’ll see it generate any time soon is flawed but endearing hand-drawn art, like for one example “zine” style illustrations and indie comics from the 90s. Maybe one reaction to this will be the DIY style becoming popular again.
They’re not, but I don’t believe that’s the right question, either.The right question is: should we as a society settle for a future where corporations replace everything humans do with technology, make the end result shittier in the process, and remove the ability for huge numbers of people to support themselves.
And if we ARE willing to go along with all that (I grant we may not have a choice, given the way our system is currently set up), what do we do to prevent mass uprisings from the people that can no longer support themselves?
The end result of Capitalism may be feudalism after an apocalypse, or UBI. I mean, they keep calling it “Late Stage” for a reason right?
Is it because those other jobs were some nerdy accounting clerk who had to manually calculate lines in a ledger one at a time who lost their job to excel, or some dirty actual teamster who drove a team of boxes to move stuff who lost his job to a train or truck driver who could move way more stuff way faster?
Because they can write about it.
I think it’s fair to remind everyone of “unskilled” (a really insulting phrase) workers’ long legacy of losing out to tech. And the ways in which their sacrifices were written off as the cost of doing business.I would only argue that the difference with AI is that it poses a threat that, eventually, there may be no way for humans to upskill sufficiently to hold any sort of living wage job (physical labor, white collar, executive function, etc.).While new tech creates new jobs, AI is the kind of tech that will replace far more jobs than it creates; and it could potentially (some hardware and energy variables notwithstanding) impact every sector and basically every job description.So what you might be left with is an economy that only needs a tiny fraction of workers (mostly minders who can essentially co-sign on AI activities or human helpers who take orders from AI), most or all of whom would essentially be considered “low-skilled.”It’s very hard to have solid predictions for how quickly this will happen (tomorrow? 50 years from now? 6 years?) or what exactly it will look like but this isn’t just a “creatives” or “white collar” problem. Even though they get the headlines, many more workers have a lot to fear.
Shut up bitch
You need a hug more than any other human in the history of mankind. My offer to talk about your severe anger management issues still stands my friend. The Kinja family wants to help you.
Dammit, A24, I thought you were cool.
Utilizing an emerging technology seems pretty cool to me.
Only if you’re a neckbeard.
I can’t even grow a beard!
Well, can you at least marry Katie Homes?
I’d have to read over all the deal points before agreeing, but I’m open to the idea in principle.
“I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.” – $wag Messiah
Nah, see, any technological advance is unilaterally and entirely good, because reasons*.*which seem to be “we’re a phenomenally dipshitted society obsessed with quarter over quarter growth even if it means slitting our own throats,” as embodied by anarcho capitalists
Turns out the Unabomber’s manifesto was right about a lot of things. Killing people to get everyone to read it, however, was a dick move.
“ any technological advance is unilaterally and entirely good” is just as dumb as “ any technological advance is unilaterally and entirely bad”I think there are only about 6 or 7 people in the entire world worth listening to on this topic. And none of them are hanging out in online comment sections.
They’re a known troll here. Just click the three dots next to the star on their comment & blow it away.
I was prepared to roll my eyes at this current outrage, as I was expecting another Late Night with the Devil situation, wherein the graphics team itself used AI as a tool to generate some imagery, so it’s not as if an artist was being screwed out of a job. But no, this is just lazy, egregious, penny-pinching hackery. Dicking over artists is one thing, but you’d think there’d still be some level of quality control. Did anyone up the food chain even glance at these after some random intern farted them out? Did no one stop and think “wait, why are those commandos attacking a giant swan? Is that in the movie? Is that what it’s about? Giant swans?” And that tooth! Jesus Christ.
LOL those are the swan boats they have in Echo Park in real life.
No, these are the swan boats in Echo Park:Notice their resemblance to, well, boats, with places for people to sit and everything. The above image is 95% swan with some…unsettlingly inorganic but in no way boatish details thrown in. Regardless, note that there are no people aboard, so the commandos are nonsensically targeting either 1) a genuine giant swan or 2) an empty and harmless paddle boat.
Swag Messiah is a known troll. Just dismiss their bullshit whenever you can.
Lying about the type of swan boats they have at Echo Park is such a weird attempt at trolling.
LMAO way to go dumdum
I would love to see a movie where commandos attack a giant swan’
Swan Lake: Reckoning
You look at this the wrong way. What mere humans could come up with something as engaging as a band of civil warriors menacing a giant swan? Those warriors in a civil capacity have no clue what they’re in for if they don’t take the shot now!
At the risk of getting off track, I will definitely watch a movie where a militia has to go toe-to-toe with a giant mutant swan.
Gritty horror reboot of The Ugly Duckling?
I also love Twitter’s ad algorithm:
Suppress any technology that threatens the status quo!
There’s than nonsensical belch of 90s-skateboarder-esque ‘tude we always get sooner or later. HURBLDY BURBLDY STATUS QUO BROHEIMOS!
Yeah, fuck that status quo of (checks notes) businesses paying talented professionals for quality work.
For some reason the AVC in particular gets so many AI defenders
Or one defender with many sock puppet accounts.
This one’s just a weird lil’ wannabe redpill-dispensing troll, so there’s that.
Is that it.. or is this one of the few places you don’t spend time primarily with like minded folk?
Flush yourself, turd
The difference between companies crapping out AI art instead of hiring a human artist and most any technology replacing a worker is those previous jobs were dangerous, drudgerous, or some combination of the two. It wasn’t work people aspired to. Often an invention is someone using their imagination to generate something to make work easier; generative AI “art” represents someone using technology to avoid paying someone with an imagination.
Yes, and? Movie studios exist solely to make money. Even the indie ones.
Although I don’t completely agree, this is the best argument against AI art I have seen. I guess in this context AI pornography is not good! Just kidding. Although I do think you make a good point, I also think this speaks to one thing that has always bothered me about art. I have made art, music, and video my whole life. Have played in bands at clubs for years. Well, not video the whole time since I was born a long time ago, 1968, but as soon as I could do it, I did it. Starting with super eight film. What has always bothered me was the idea that you had to be an artist to make art. Everyone is an artist and everyone can make art. I’m not saying everyone will be equally good. But it should not be left to those chosen few. Everyone can dance, sing, and make art, even if they are mobility impaired, mute, and can’t paint our draw! Also this will never kill artists. Photography didn’t kill artists and neither will AI art. Just like sampling and drum machines didn’t kill musicians and drummers!
But that’s the thing, “everyone can make art” was true long before generative AI was a thing.
It’s okay to to automate jobs as long as some hipster on AV club feels they arent “aspired” too. Gotcha!
The defeatist tone of this article is not helpful. Sure, nothing can be done about AI if enough people say “looks like nothing can be done about AI.” But if enough people push back…
I’m really skeptical of this idea that if enough people push back the genie can be forced back into the bottle. The Luddites didn’t have much luck. Plus like how often do you see people complaining about late stage capitalism or the insane wealth imbalance and how people can’t afford health care or housing? People aren’t effectively pushing back on these much more serious problems.
Push back and… do what, precisely?
Make it illegal to use AI? Fine, but that only applies to countries that pass the laws. You think China and Russia are going to ignore AI capabilities? Make it culturally unacceptable to use AI in ads, movies, TV shows? Again, you can try, but look just at this comment section. Half the people are actively pushing for it. It’s a tough sell, especially with the absolutely gobsmacking amount of money behind the tech.
I hope there is backlash. Maybe imperfect human-created art that has some soul to it will be more appreciated than slick, soulless and too perfect pictures.
I don’t think human created art is ever going to go away. I don’t, for instance, see many people putting up AI created art on their walls. But for cheap consumer crap, I think it’ll be more and more common.
lol
Isn’t the bigger issue that powerful studios with deep pockets and lots of resources are using *sloppy* AI content?
So, all you people who have been saying it was just a few pictures in Late Night with the Devil and only complete idiots would think it’s anything to be concerned about have anything to say about this?
The documentary thing is clearly wrong, but they could have faked pictures of her being happy and carefree with Photoshop too. The AI tool made it easier for them to make shit up, sure. The real issue is that they were looking to make shit up for a documentary at all.
call me crazy but… feels like the glaring errors in the Civil War posters are likely not errors at all. maybe it’s about not accepting what you see at face value, about questioning and looking for the truth. for many the posters are just another image or two amidst an endless slew of content, likely viewed and forgotten nearly immediately, but on closer inspection they are absolutely not “correct” or truthful. maybe that’s the point?what if they’re about how we live in an age where you can no longer trust everything you see (and read, and hear, etc.)? taking things at face value was never really enough, but even moreso now than ever. unfortunately there’s such a huge uproar about the use of AI that i think the point is maybe being lost in favor of a knee-jerk reaction. which… is kind of proving the point, actually 🤔 so… mission accomplished?
on the flip side – not going to defend the Netflix use of AI, which *does* seem cheap and lazy 😂
That would be an important project and I’m sure we’ll get them, but this isn’t one of them.
I’ve been trying to understand why the AI-ness of the posters is a problem, but the fact that NONE OF THESE LOCATIONS APPEARS IN THE FILM is not a problem. Earlier posters featured the Statue of Liberty. Guess what? It’s not in the film either. I saw it last night, and at no point do they go to Chicago, Miami, LA, Vegas, etc. They don’t even appear in b-roll on TV screens or anything.
Lots of movie marketing campaigns include or create material that isn’t intended to be in the final film. The Dark Knight had an entire ARG that depicted Harvey Dent’s run for District Attorney. It makes the world of the film feel bigger. For Civil War, I can understand why A24 would want to sell the idea that the entire country is engaged in armed conflict, not just the limited locations seen in the film. The trailers already focus heavily on the big battle in D.C. at the end of the movie, despite the fact that most of the movie isn’t that.
Tell me it at least has Anna de Armas!?
OK, I do think that artist should be compensated for training data yet I fail to see how this is any different than photography. Not to mention the fact that with photography no one is compensated for the buildings in the background, the stop sign, the sidewalk, the subject of the photo. The photographer did not create these things. When photography first came onto the scene, people said it would destroy artists, and it did take the jobs of some artists. The same will be true with AI. Yet now people consider photography to be an art form. You can take a picture of something you did not create like the Empire State building and call that art. It becomes art because of the framing and the context and the technical skill required to manipulate images. The same things apply to AI art, or whatever you want to call it. Can somebody here tell me what is different about AI images. I probably shouldn’t even comment on this stuff, but I have made art, composed music, and made video for the majority of my life. Recently, I found AI image generation to be very stimulating to me artistically. I am doing more art than I’ve ever done. I don’t just do a prompt and say that I created art. I use AI to create images that I use as a springboard in the creation of art. to generate ideas. I have made collages for the last several years and now I integrate AI imagery into these collages. How is that worse than me taking a piece of someone else’s photograph? How is that worse than me photographing the Mona Lisa? You can actually copyright a photograph of the sculpture, painting, human being that you did not create. I think as time goes by, we will see this is another tool.
The weird thing is that not one of those images depicted for Civil War is actually in the movie.
So here’s the question: Do these companies think they’ll get away with using AI images without anyone noticing, or do they not give a shit that people will?
Judging from the abundance of AI passing for the real thing on Facebook, I don’t think most people either notice or care, so I don’t expect the companies to care. Most of the stuff I see gives itself away pretty easily (but I’ve been fooled). I’m grateful for the people who have such a good eye that they can point out the deceit.
Whoever made the call is thinking they saved thousands of dollars and generated in 15 minutes something what would take an artist a week or more. I don’t think some negative backlash in places like this register. Especially if it’s in promo material which is going to be forgotten a week after the movie is release. To fight AI art we’d need to make it a much bigger deal which is rough when most of the public barely understand (or cares) how it works.
I think there’s some valid question of who is making the decision and the reason some are pushing for contracts to explicitly state AI won’t be use. With Civil War, it seems to have just been promotional images – not images within the film. That likely means that a marketing person (possibly a contractor) made the call probably with minimal oversight and little to no involvement with the filmmakers. With What Jennifer Did, it may have been the documentarians with little to no input from Netflix. With Late Night with the Devil, it may have been the art department. I think a lot of people have an idea that it’s one person on a production making the call and that everyone involved is in agreement and that is likely not the case. The production just doesn’t have a definitive “No AI clause.” It’s going to be on the people with the most sway insisting on no AI at any level of a production.
I’m surprised the comments are generic anti-generative AI stuff and not focused more on the fact that a documentary used it to make shit up. That is so darkly hilarious to me that they couldn’t find evidence she presented as a happy carefree young girl and so just invented it.
I’m not. People hear a topic and just start spewing at best their own talking points (at worst someone else’s). Most people don’t engage with topics. Even fewer are open to the idea of challenging their own thoughts.
Any product or work that uses AI, in any capacity, in its production is something I will avoid. I do not accept that this shit is inevitable. I will not lie down and let the plagiarism machine, trained on stolen art (and child pornography! Did we all just forget that it turned out Midjourney and co are all filled with child porn?!) destroy the lives of real artists.
Good luck with that.It will be about as doable as avoiding any product Made in China.
Saw Civil War yesterday, thought it was great! Considering the films focus on war photographers and the importance of them, warts and all, I wonder if this ad campaign is a veiled statement. It doesn’t seem to be but they could have made it one if they were a bit clever, rather than lazy. People saying they shoulda paid artists seems to be missing that they probably did pay “artists” who evidently used AI tools. But they probably paid less and were aware AI would be used.
I wonder if people got this up in arms over stock photography when it became a thing? Website design templates? Digital printing? Digital photos? Snail mail? And for those who are up in arms over this – do you use stock photography, design templates, digital printing, digital photography, email, etc? I’m being cheeky I know… but difficult to know where to draw the line in the sand. I realize AI is a threat to many livelihoods; esp when the computers take over. But we adapt. Like always. Smart and talented creative folk will learn how to incorporate AI into their work.I for one, will be ready to welcome our new AI overlords.
There’s a shocking amount of commenters on this website based around the discussion and appreciation of popular art who seem to completely misunderstand what the purpose of art is.If you genuinely do not understand the difference between art created by a person and art created by a machine that is incapable of having feelings or desires or fears, then I feel truly bad for you.The world, to you, must be nothing but a soulless grey sludge. And you don’t even realize it.
A lot of people don’t seem to recognize the difference between and graphics created specifically for commercial purposes either, to be fair.