Audiences are often enamoured with films precisely because they aren't, in fact, the product of just one person; because they are the sum of a multiplicity of ideas and experiences.
The complete and thorough verbal articulation of an idea by one person at the beginning of the process is seldom productive or conducive to a good end result.
Even auteur filmmakers have cinematographers, production designers, wardrobe stylists and editors. The range of deep expertise and a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches is precisely what introduces substance and depth.
Entropy in the process leads to the emergence of ideas.
“You made nothing.”
I made everything.
The script. Characters. Costumes. Props. Sets. Shots. Edit. VFX. ADR w real actors.
A few X-buck grifters control the hive minds & somehow convinced them this is “like ordering from a menu & calling yourself a chef.”
I'M THE RESTAURANT
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In the context of art, this might be the first potentially exciting new storytelling tool that is being thrust upon audiences by its proponents in a deliberately hostile way, despite audience resistance.
Truly earnest proponents of a possibly useful new technology shouldn’t have to antagonize their potential audience into believing that what they’re selling is good.
The technological developments throughout filmmaking history that have persisted (digital cameras, digital projection, CGI, the Steadicam, etc.) are those that, while occasionally being met with some internal resistance from insiders, have been accepted (if not welcomed) by audiences - not rejected.
It’s an ugly phenomenon that so many of those advocating for a relevant technology in this field vocally treat their resistant audience as idiotic luddites.
You cannot win audiences over in this way. We are not at war with our audiences; we should be in dialogue. We are them, they are us.
A lot of messaging around AI (by its proponents) enthusiastically frames it as a form of destruction, obliteration even: "AI just killed XYZ" - "It's over for XYZ" (in reality, this is practically never accurate)
The way regular folks perceive AI is very much shaped by such takes. The backlash is inevitable.
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“Art is about putting tool making on display. We are unveiling ourselves as tool users to ourselves[…] A work of art is a strange tool. It is a tool which lacks what a tool usually requires to be what it is.”
- Alva Noë
If we use AI only to accelerate the art making process (rather than to generate or contribute meaning), we are not improving the art; in fact, we are robbing ourselves of our own process of discovery.
As Noë elegantly puts it, “The value of art is precisely that it gives us the opportunity to catch ourselves in the act.” By merely circumventing the difficulty of art making, we have simply used AI as an accelerant, rather than as a “strange tool”; it has not transcended its status as “tool”.
We have not “caught ourselves in the act of seeing”, in fact, we have made ourselves blind to the process.
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Beethoven composed some of the most consequential music of the last 300 years while being profoundly deaf, after almost ending his life, but there are people that believe that if music is not "infinitely customized to my tastes", it is of lesser "quality".
Yes. I am listening to it right now and want to continue doing so. It is far higher quality and infinitely customized to my tastes. If I don't like a song I can just modify it.
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Beauty is found not by correcting and subduing our animal instincts, but by embracing them, and regarding them with wonder and gratitude.
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“Ratings are asynchronous consensus mechanisms for people with no skin in the game. People who weren't there, and lust for authority from consuming the documentation.”
I haven't read a single rationalist taste essay that makes reference to an exhibition, concert or gathering attended in the past decade. "Contemporary art" is a Hirst shark or Emin bed caricature divorced from it's context, "beauty" is some kitsch reference to Michaelangelo absent any concession of centuries of narrative conditioning.
The rate-your-music/food/film conception of taste was always a lossy imposition. The map is not the territory. There is no "best" taco. Food tastes better when you have company. Clothes feel better when you feel it means something to wear them. Music sounds better when a room full of people feel its important to be there.
To frame this as a cheap trick, to suggest there is some objective metric of quality of experience, is an irrational disavowal of how culture and aesthetics emerge between people. The isolated, asynchronous, individual aesthetic experience is impoverished. Context is everything. Trying to disavow that is cope.
No matter how much you try to create an objective metric for taste or beauty, a room full of people (physical or virtual) synchronously hyping themselves up to confound it will produce more rooms of people believing the same, and frustrate any desire for a precision that doesn't exist.
Even a solitary experience with art is a construction. Your choice is between lonely delusions vs shared ones. If what you actually want is some consensus mechanism to make sense of this chaos, welcome to the contemporary art world people love to dismiss. The media is not the art. Ratings are asynchronous consensus mechanisms for people with no skin in the game. People who weren't there, and lust for authority from consuming the documentation.
Now we can generate anything to taste, alone, the solitary aesthetic experience trends to zero and rooms and narrative win even harder.
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The narrative that filmmaking is reserved for those with privilege and money is a contrived and uniquely American one that we've been trained to believe by years of Marvel. The myth that you need $100m and a crew of 400 to make a film is cope for a lack of purpose and vision.
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There are countless people for whom lack of privilege, fortune, or a safety net, fails to impede or dull the importance of making films. The purpose is to tell stories, and stories must always be told.
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The scent on a lover’s shirt, an already warm seat on the subway, the smear on a taxi window, the impressions on the top page of a notebook.
Nudging reminders of ourselves.
Are we prepared to leave this behind? To make art that lacks the very thing that reveals us to ourselves?
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Francis Pienaar retweeted
Filmmakers, writers and other creatives today treat art like it is only a material product, and that is the problem.
Art is not a material product. It is a point of interaction between human experience, methods of expression, and the deep opacity of nature and the world.
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Art is about unveiling ourselves to ourselves.
I showed the original tweet to my partner, Dominiq. In under five seconds, they said: "This is a clip from a real Monet painting, I'm pretty sure." And: "I'm pretty sure I know which painting that is."
They said: "Impressionism was partially fueled by paint becoming available in tubes that you could carry out with you into the field. The idea of capturing the light as it stood, in that moment.
"Please think of Degas and his ballerina dancers. People at luncheons in the sunshine. People dancing. A lot of my favorite impressionist pictures are people dancing. Trying to capture the light on their clothes, as they moved.
"The special thing about Monet, which makes him stand out to me, is that he was losing his eyesight. And was deeply in love with his garden. And so a lot of the style that people associate with Monet was what he actually saw as his eyesight reduced down -- to light, color, and shadow. When you look at Monet, you are seeing through Monet's failing eyes. And as you look at his later work, you can see as his eyesight grew worse and worse. Which, I suppose, looks more and more 'impressionist.'
"I've spent a long time staring at Monet's pictures. Trying to decide what was an artistic choice, to represent something, and what was him trying to express what he actually saw.
"I think part of the reason why I've stared at so much Monet is because my grandmother was also a gardener, who loved her garden. Who lost her eyesight to diabetes, and who I knew only ever in my life as blind, and obsessing about her garden out the window which she could barely see, asking me to describe it to her.
"She also only had light, shadow, and a little bit of color.
"So, yeah. Monet feels like looking through my grandmother's eyes."
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In art, it’s the endeavour itself that people find captivating. The attempt to communicate the incommunicable. It’s precisely the knowledge of what it took. It’s the knowledge of what someone or something has been, is, and could be, that they connect to.
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This is why it’s unreasonable to think that unwitting viewers would change their minds if they were shown AI art and liked it before they were told that it was AI. It's like arguing that if your lover was replaced by an identical person, it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t know.
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