Pink Floyd goes dark side and chooses AI video for Dark Side Of The Moon anniversary competition
3D artist Damián Gaume's AI-generated video for "Any Colour You Like" was one of 10 winners in a video creation contest for the album's 50th anniversary
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Pink Floyd’s classic 1973 album, The Dark Side Of The Moon, was basically milkshake-ducked in 48 hours this week, which is an impressive way to spend a 51st birthday. Yesterday, album closer “Eclipse” proudly rang out amongst the sick-of-Bonnie-Tyler crowd in parks and Instagram stories across the nation (for obvious reasons). Today, the band is in the news for selecting an AI-generated video as one of the ten winners of the album’s 50th-anniversary animation contest. Hello, Pink Floyd’s conscience and sense of artistic preservation… is there anybody in there?
The offending video comes from Argentinian-Australian artist Damián Gaume, which he created for the song “Any Colour You Like.” Guame’s winning entry was one of ten videos selected—one for each of the album’s tracks—by a panel of nine judges, including Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason. “Pink Floyd has had a history of collaborating with up and coming filmmakers since our early days. In many cases, the visuals that accompany the songs have become synonymous with the music itself,” Mason said in a video introducing the challenge, which is undoubtedly true and just makes this whole thing that much more disappointing.
Independent animators and other “up and coming filmmakers” around the world are currently staring down the barrel of a gun, wondering when their services are going to be rendered officially obsolete by much more powerful artists and studios continuing to embrace the growing influence of soulless artificial intelligence. Indie horror film Late Night With The Devil drew intense backlash from some of those artists for their use of the anti-human technology, and now Pink Floyd is attracting the same, especially considering how many hand-crafted videos weren’t chosen by the esteemed panel of judges. (A selection of those entries, which also includes original Monty Python illustrator Terry Gilliam and The Lorax and Minions director, Kyle Balda, was compiled by Twitter/X user @skymightdie, and they’re definitely worth a watch.) While the continued proliferation of AI is unfortunately inevitable, it’s consistently frustrating to watch people with actual power to stand up for art refuse to do so.
In a behind-the-scenes look at his video, Gaume announced that the “technique that I used for creating my animation is AI.” “As a 3D artist myself, I tried to go a completely different way and try something new,” he continued, explaining that he used Stable Diffusion and Blender to create some trigger images and used prompts to “get some fresh ideas from the AI.” Actually watching the video, however, those ideas clearly aren’t that fresh at all. Not even lingering the fact that AI is always just regurgitating someone else’s work, the whole thing has the alien sheen we’ve all grown accustomed to at this point, and the guitars have way too many pickups. (That seems to be the point of the video, but it still looks stupid!)
It seems like Pink Floyd themselves might be just another brick in the wall now. You can watch Gaume’s video below. Or, you can watch a few of the winning entries that were actually created by humans instead. The full selection of winners is available on Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel.
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20 Comments
I think you mean “artist”, in quotes
Well fuck, Pink Floyd is choosing to side with the capitalists who are going to use ‘AI’ to take all of our money and then our jobs and then our houses and cats and dogs and finally…OUR MINDS!
That’s just very disappointing, I never thought Pink Floyd would be fans of ‘AI’ taking our children and playgrounds and the brains directly from our sliced open skulls but I guess now they have to be first against the wall when the revolution comes.I mean, come on, an ‘artist’ using ‘AI’ as a ‘tool’? Don’t give me that shit, his work sucks and he’s literally stabbing humanity in the back every second that he’s alive. How can a mere person use artificial intelligence as a ‘tool’, doesn’t he know that he’s the tool being used by Elon Musk to steal all of our money? Just pressing ‘play’ on that video sucked $5 out of my pocket!
“That seems to be the point of the video, but it still looks stupid!”Yeah, it’s stupid and has a poo poo ‘AI’ face!
We get it, you love ChatGPT because it helps you cheat on your homework, calm down
I’ve never used ChatGPT and I haven’t done homework in over 20 years, dad. I like it when people make silly shit up about me to help justify their own feelings of impotent internet outrage.
What, like what you just did with your little I-wanna-cosplay-as-an-artist rant?
My post was sarcasm, I’m not outraged at all. I have no idea what you’re talking about cosplaying as an artist but I don’t think I’m doing that…though I could be wrong because, again, no clue what you mean by that. I have no desire to use ‘AI’ tools to create art. I do tend to enjoy the art created by people using ‘AI’ tools though, is that what you’re referring to?
Jesus man I was making a joke
Ironically, AI is more likely to lead us into a communist rather than capitalist dystopia.To wit: Floyd are obviously commies!
(A selection of those entries, which also includes original Monty Python illustrator Terry Gilliam and The Lorax and Minions director, Kyle Balda, was compiled by Twitter/X user @skymightdie, and they’re definitely worth a watch.)AI atrocity aside, this site’s grasp of basic communication is hilariously inept. The above quote momentarily had me excited to see a Terry Gilliam Pink Floyd short, until additional reading of a coherent article stated he was one of the judges who picked the AI crap. The mind wobbles…
The judging for this competition was pretty baffling across the board. Case in point the videos for ‘Eclipse’ had some amazing entries like this one:
and the winner they chose was………this:
Never underestimate a British persons love of claymation I suppose.
I mean, if I had been a judge, any practical effect-based entry would have gotten a vote from me.CGI? Stable diffusion? Hand-drawn? BAH. I demand PEPPER’S GHOST.
Everyone knows female presenting nipples are forbidden. (But that really is a more striking video than a lot of the more on-the-nose versions.)
While I do think that AI has the potential to negatively impact the creative arts, I really don’t think that “AI assisted video submission wins contest for Pink Floyd 50th Anniversary” is the harbinger of doom you think it is.
But this is artificial intelligence! It’s smarter than us, better than us, and darn it, people like it more than us! Nothing else but to sing the doom song!
AI was the turkey all along!
Yeah, “man wins one of ten prizes using stable diffusion and common 3d modeling software” is hardly a slap in the face to human ingenuity.
Huh, I’ve seen a quite a few prog rock tracks given this specific style of AI-generated music video recently. For instance, various tracks involving Marek Arnold, such as this: Maybe it’s just a prog rock promotional trend. Even before all this AI stuff, they’ve had some pretty low-effort promotional/lyric videos, such as this one by Frost*:In any case, the music’s the main thing, as far as I’m concerned.
Weird, trippy videos set to Pink Floyd music? What’s next, going to the beach when it’s sunny out? What a world.
Ok but have you considered that ‘AI’ is going to steal all of the art and use it to take our jerbs? Why, there may not be a person making shitty wages taking your order at the drive thru or scanning a barcode for you at the store! Imagine the shear terror you’ll experience when you see a music video or a movie that uses COMPUTER GENERATED GRAPHICS!You can’t, you can’t imagine that kind of horror until you’ve seen it.
I understand there is no point beating up on the new & improved & partially AI Av Club. That said – It’s not hard to write something in grammatically sound English. There is a template. Subject, Verb, Object. So, even half asleep, I rewrote it for a laugh. Took out opinion & babble. Not great, but closer to passing a high school English exam. Ps to the author– did you recently sell your brains to buy shares in a company that produces commas? Pink Floyd’s classic 1973 album Dark Side Of The Moon is 51 years old. The album closer, “Eclipse”, has resonated with people on Instagram stories, and those sick of Bonnie Tyler for obvious reasons. The band is in the news today for selecting an AI generated video from the albums’ 50th anniversary animation contest. It was decided by nine judges, including Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason.
Australian/Argentinian artist Damian Gaume created a video for the song, “Any Colour You Like”. “Pink Floyd has had a history of collaborating with up and coming filmmakers since our early days. In many cases, the visuals that accompany the songs have become synonymous with the music itself,” Mason said in a video.The other entries are available to watch on Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel.