AI makes it worse

Last week an Irish filmmaker released a 15 second AI generated clip of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting in a liminal gray void. Some notable members of the entertainment industry, including the writer of Deadpool and Wolverine, responded by declaring Hollywood dead, creativity commodified and world cinema doomed. I’m reasonably certain he didn’t actually watch the clip. It was, as so much “generative” AI content is, crap. The clip was just some reskinned footage pirated from another subpar action film. In the same way I have never been fooled by meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger, I was not fooled by a poorly made video of two A-listers slapping each other around.

There are thousands of companies deploying trillions of dollars in capital trying to make AI generated entertainment the future and they are banking on you having low standards. They know none of this stuff is any good—hence the slop moniker— and they don’t care. Their goal isn’t to create something good or creative, it’s to create content in bulk. They are banking on you lowering your standards. These people sat through Pixar’s Wall-E and failed to recognize it as a cautionary tale. They would love to hook us all into floaty chairs and turn the content spigot so far to the left our collective eyes glaze over.

This brings us to a topic I’ve written about before, enshittification. Enshittification is the gradual, or not so gradual, tendency of consumer goods and services to become awful once big corporate interests become invested in the economic outcome. Creativity, originality and innovation take a seat in the trunk while profitability calls shotgun. It’s the reason Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and a myriad of other once fun and engaging services are now pockmarked hellscapes full of white nationalists and Belarusian bot farms, it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter if it’s bots rage baiting other bots, it all counts as engagement and engagement equals revenue.

The good thing is that as of right now, participation in the slop fest is still completely voluntary. You don’t have to listen, watch or read any of this poorly plagiarized garbage. It’s not going to be easy to opt out because opportunistic companies flush with venture capital are going to flood the zone with algorithmically generated liquid crap in quantities that will boggle the mind and pucker the sphincter. But, real painters and musicians and filmmakers will always produce compelling art. It may involve some curation on the part of you, the viewer, but I urge you to keep those standards high. Artists need your support and you deserve good things.