They often fuck up in horrifying ways. But they’re usually about what you asked for. Especially if you asked for very little. That’s quite useful where small changes are wildly complex, like ‘make this guy look like another guy.’ The robot won’t do it as good as a team of human professionals, but I don’t have a million dollars to hire a team of human professionals, and I’m betting you don’t either. You can still consider projects that involve making one guy look like another.
I am an artist so I understand when I have the shallow desire to make something into a copy of another thing and my artistic capability fails me, or my lack of resources confines me from reaching my initial vision, that this is the true beginning of my artistic journey and all of that stuff before was just a way of backing myself into wanting something new or changed when I couldn’t get the perfect thing I wanted that was in my head. AI is more than anything else an attempt to seduce human beings into pushing this artistic genesis point of humility, listening and growth further and further away, which is in a way another way of explaining why AI so often leads people into Psychosis.
I have also done lots of community theater so I understand the foolishness of thinking that the important part of making one thing look like another is aesthetic mimcry and not capturing the minimal potent essence of something so it can be received as far more intense of an experience for the audience than a perfect copy could. Theater is a memory not a photograph and you are pointing to how amazingly AI can fabricate high quality fascimiles of photographs as if that doesn’t insult the complexity of how the human brain approaches something it is invited to interpret.
The human brain was designed to see a vivid memory of a hunt through a couple of paint marks on a cave wall, the whole approach of AI and AI cultists deeply insults that magical relationship the human brain has with the most mundane, minimal arrangements of sensation.
Do you think for all these years everybody watching Shakespeare plays where two actors played characters supposed to be easily mistaken for one other as a key part of the plot, that audiences of these shows were getting a suboptimal experience because the two actors didn’t look perfectly alike?
Do you care that in Hamnet that two siblings that are supposed to look so alike that they are frequently mistook for one another, even by death itself, don’t actually look that similar? No, they are child actors who did an amazing job, to care about that in the context of the achievement of Hamnet is shallow and misses the point. You could presumably use AI to “fix” this part about Hamnet (and see Hamnet as Death experienced it and how AI would undoubtedly portray it) and everybody would hate you for it if you did…
My point is that even when AI is good at particular things, often the whole approach is hollow to the Why? with AI. This is something artists could have explained easily to techbros if they ever listened, because the Why? is the whole point.
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Should audiences be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
Your lack of media literacy is wild, film is entirely a honest fabrication of obvious fakes, that is the basis of cinema, the fundamental concept of the movie screen being itself simply a fake window that is honest to you about the speculative nature of the world revealed beyond.
Movies don’t convey impossible things by actually creating them, they present destabilized artifice from perspectives that invite us to see the mundane everywhere as a facade disguising something quivering underneath.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
You almost make a coherent point here but then you topple your entire logic.
The first lesson you learn as a writer is to show not tell and the first lesson you learn as an artist working with video is that to tell is actually something that is desperately hard to avoid doing with a video camera because at the heart of it that is all moving images can do moment to moment, unlike words untethered from direct sensation.
Thus the true skill of an artist working with photographs or video is how they continously subvert the tendency of images to exhaustingly tell instead of show.
This is kind of a basic aspect to an exploration of movies as art…?
Whether it be documentaries having to grapple with the inherent paradox of the production of the documentary affecting and telling upon what it is attempting only to honestly show a picture of, or movies about fictional things having to constantly avoid the catastrophe of the audience only attending to the literal quality of the thing presented to them scene to scene, it is all the same existential question.
I am an artist so I understand when I have the shallow desire to make something into a copy of another thing and my artistic capability fails me, or my lack of resources confines me from reaching my initial vision, that this is the true beginning of my artistic journey and all of that stuff before was just a way of backing myself into wanting something new or changed when I couldn’t get the perfect thing I wanted that was in my head. AI is more than anything else an attempt to seduce human beings into pushing this artistic genesis point of humility, listening and growth further and further away, which is in a way another way of explaining why AI so often leads people into Psychosis.
I have also done lots of community theater so I understand the foolishness of thinking that the important part of making one thing look like another is aesthetic mimcry and not capturing the minimal potent essence of something so it can be received as far more intense of an experience for the audience than a perfect copy could. Theater is a memory not a photograph and you are pointing to how amazingly AI can fabricate high quality fascimiles of photographs as if that doesn’t insult the complexity of how the human brain approaches something it is invited to interpret.
The human brain was designed to see a vivid memory of a hunt through a couple of paint marks on a cave wall, the whole approach of AI and AI cultists deeply insults that magical relationship the human brain has with the most mundane, minimal arrangements of sensation.
Do you think for all these years everybody watching Shakespeare plays where two actors played characters supposed to be easily mistaken for one other as a key part of the plot, that audiences of these shows were getting a suboptimal experience because the two actors didn’t look perfectly alike?
Do you care that in Hamnet that two siblings that are supposed to look so alike that they are frequently mistook for one another, even by death itself, don’t actually look that similar? No, they are child actors who did an amazing job, to care about that in the context of the achievement of Hamnet is shallow and misses the point. You could presumably use AI to “fix” this part about Hamnet (and see Hamnet as Death experienced it and how AI would undoubtedly portray it) and everybody would hate you for it if you did…
My point is that even when AI is good at particular things, often the whole approach is hollow to the Why? with AI. This is something artists could have explained easily to techbros if they ever listened, because the Why? is the whole point.
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Should audiences be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
Your lack of media literacy is wild, film is entirely a honest fabrication of obvious fakes, that is the basis of cinema, the fundamental concept of the movie screen being itself simply a fake window that is honest to you about the speculative nature of the world revealed beyond.
Movies don’t convey impossible things by actually creating them, they present destabilized artifice from perspectives that invite us to see the mundane everywhere as a facade disguising something quivering underneath.
You almost make a coherent point here but then you topple your entire logic.
The first lesson you learn as a writer is to show not tell and the first lesson you learn as an artist working with video is that to tell is actually something that is desperately hard to avoid doing with a video camera because at the heart of it that is all moving images can do moment to moment, unlike words untethered from direct sensation.
Thus the true skill of an artist working with photographs or video is how they continously subvert the tendency of images to exhaustingly tell instead of show.
This is kind of a basic aspect to an exploration of movies as art…?
Whether it be documentaries having to grapple with the inherent paradox of the production of the documentary affecting and telling upon what it is attempting only to honestly show a picture of, or movies about fictional things having to constantly avoid the catastrophe of the audience only attending to the literal quality of the thing presented to them scene to scene, it is all the same existential question.