If you’ve been watching YouTube, walked into a film school, or even if you saw a poster for a film festival, the chance is, you have been subjected to Artificial Intelligence (AI).
I went to a speed filmmaking course recently, and this is how I saw AI being used: First, we watched films by full-time students. One of those films, which used AI, had two annoying flaws. One is when the characters were sweeping leaves together at the end of the film; they were sweeping the leaves all wrong. (That wasn’t an AI mistake, these were humans who just weren’t sweeping the leaves, but shoving them with a broom.) The other is that when they were walking to see each other, the live action was interspersed with bits of AI. The bits of AI were inconsistent. As there were only two characters, we could keep track of their AI-anime counterparts. But AI has made me start to hate Anime. (At least AI anime.)
AI was also used for film planning, because it was quicker. And it is now included in most professional (and student) film editing software, whether you ask for it or not.
Now, the first time an AI tool turns your friends or favourite celebrity into a muppet or an Anime character, it is pretty fun. It is like “blinking text” in the old Netscape webpages was, or speeding-up songs to sound like chipmunks, or the animated GIFs that Gen X created when they first accessed MySpace. Maybe you played around with images or sounds, and played your voice backwords, for a laugh.
AI has replaced copy-paste. In many cases, it has replaced stock imagery, and it has replaced some forms of direct piracy. (Although you could argue that AI is a new form of piracy that uses a sophisticated form of copy-paste.)
AI exists because it has the illusion of being fast. When we were looking for the perfect stock image in the past, we were fed images that used keyword spam, or couldn’t find the good ones because they failed to add relevant keywords at all. So, SEO (and lack of quality control in the SEO space) has made traditional stock photos pretty useless. But AI is even worse.
A.I. film posters
According to Hey Cluj, the recent TIFF (Transylvania International Film Festival) film festival is being promoted with AI posters. We have seen bad AI being used to promote banks, but when artists themselves are resorting to AI, that is a significant sign of cultural decline. In past years, TIFF didn’t even use stock footage, but the festival promoted itself with original imagery. Perhaps the images were based on classic films, but new models and actors replayed the old favorites.
Now, perhaps TIFF has an artistic message behind the AI choice, and it is not just a money saving measure. The problem exists when major banks and other institutions that have money to pay professional designers, or at least pay for stock images, use bad AI instead.
While this might not effect the films we see in the cinema in the short run, small ads are often a starting point for actors, photographers (or cinematographers) and others to join the creative industry.
Creating or posing for stock images might not have ever been a complete career plan, but it was a first step toward a career for many photographers and actors to start their trade.
And if AI is being used in education and advertising, and is replacing stock footage, how will we train the next generation of filmmakers to make better films? They will have less talent, less brain capacity, and just know how to create slop.
AI used to complain about AI
AI is even being used to complain about AI. A YouTube channel warns us that one in four job “candidates” are AI-generated. And it warns us that AI is creating job postings. But that same channel regularly uses AI-generated images to spice up its appearance.
How AI will change art
Our theory is that we will see two developments. One, we will see a lot of people go full blown AI, able to express themselves instantly with powerful images that basically just repeat their words. (Like when someone says the elephant in the room, we will see a literal elephant in the room. Yawn.) Some of these may lead to interesting uses of technology, as people can try out hundreds of different complex images in a matter of hours.
It could level the playing field a bit for smaller production companies.
But when big companies who can hire people to do a better job use AI instead, we do not see their corporate use of AI as a good thing. Quality might rise for no-budget sci-fi productions, but it will continue to fall for big budget films.
The second development is we will have artists who not only reject AI, but reject what AI can do. Painters embraced more abstract work and invented odd techniques when photography made realism tedious or even redundant. Some of that is silly modern art, but we also have the nice style of Van Gogh and surrealness of Dali.
Through trying AI, skilled artists will find what AI is weak at and focus on that. The next Van Gogh and Dali will break the limits of AI.