Deepfakes or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and [Insert Your Verb] the Ai in Art

 

I'm interested in chatter about AI than the product itself. The primary problem is that there's no mind behind it. The mind behind the work is part of why I read, why I watch, why I take in any kind of media. I want to know how others think. The mind behind the writing is what makes a work powerful.

Experimental writing is vibrant if people put thought into it. If not, it's a tome/tomb of half-legible graffiti. Dear writer, please don't waste people's time pondering something you didn't time to ponder yourself. AI? Uh, no thanks.

One person did almost get me to buy into their thinking, and I was instantly riveted because, wow, this is actually a new thought, unblindered by cult politics, but it usually breaks down within a few paragraphs.

An example of non-AI that knocked me out immediately: A kid was supposedly falling off the cliff, but there was an obvious place to put your foot. Put your foot there! Good god, man, put your foot there and climb out!

Imagine a string of such incidents, idiocies--minor or major. Does AI discriminate, choose what might work well in this instance? Or will be as likely to select the problematic as the brilliant? The accidental juxtapositions might create fascinating, but will the parts connect? If what you do can be replaced by AI, then you will be replaced.

Here's the paradox. I don't oppose repurposing words. Good art could be produced by planting a mind behind the AI. However, the people who would want to use AI are not the people who can make good art. They want short cuts. Rather, to make good art out of AI, you'd have to oppose it. You'd have to be willing to put in the same amount of time to sculpt words as if you spent the time writing them yourself. It is only by critical thinking that the work of AI can have any value.

I discussed John Hughes's work here,which has relevance here. He, however, did his own selecting, so seems a better choice than leaving it to something else, but so long as a mind orders the material it might, in theory, be worthy of the term "art."

It's hard enough to order one's own words, let alone someone else's. I don't oppose art made through AI, but it will be hard to make it yours.

This is interesting, but way too long. Yet they come up with some interesting uses of AI in media, but it remains in a grey area (the interesting stuff was name-dropping famous older actors whose looks may be rewound to earlier version):