Imagine please, pizza.
Not an ordinary pizza, an exotic pizza. Pizza looks distorted in a way that makes your eyes drift in and out of focus. Like MC Escher’s drawing. Except for the endless stairs and people walking upside down, it’s pizza.
Now imagine that pizza moving towards a hard-to-read human mouth. However, instead of entering the mouth, it is heading towards a deformed human nose. Children in horror movies beam vacant smiles as their eyeballs stare somehow in opposite directions.
This infernal atrocity I just described is an AI-generated trailer, designed to show the potential of AI-generated content. It is, in no uncertain terms, an abomination. It’s also very funny.
Over the past week or so, I’ve seen a lot of this kind of content. AI-generated trailers for stunts or movie ideas. It’s unclear if it was designed to be taken seriously, or if it exists as a parody designed to highlight the limits of artificial intelligence.
Sometimes they come up with mocking tweets like, “This came straight from the guts of some Lynchian nightmare.” On other occasions, they seem 100% sincere, with posts equivalent to… “HOLLYWOOD BEWARE, you have two years until the AI sucks the marrow out of your dead, decaying bones.”
As is always the case on the Internet, it can be difficult to know who is in on the joke. These videos can be deliberate interaction bait or a game of deep 10-layer irony. But we seem to be in the midst of a very fleeting moment. I think we should enjoy it for what it is: sheer madness.
We live in a mess of AI-generated content, and I love it. I love him because he is stupid. I love him because he’s obviously awful. I love him because he leads a crazy discourse about what AI can and cannot do. I love him because everything about him is just so tuned.
I love it, but it won’t last.
As I see it, one of three things will almost certainly happen.
1. The tech bro is right. In two years, (futurists guys always say two years, because that’s generally long enough for everyone to forget you made a terrible prediction) we’ll be seeing AI-generated movies and TV shows that are completely indistinguishable from real things and — wow, what Who turned! Who could have seen that coming, etc.
2. AI movies/TV shows as a concept are locked into a virtual reality niche and never transform into anything. Everyone gets bored and tech bros move on to push any web 3 technology into the headlines.
3. It all goes away, and we live happily ever after.
Regardless, this golden period — in which people vomit up the ugliest atrocities of artificial intelligence known to man and describe them as worthwhile and important — is a period of time. It will undoubtedly end and we cannot take this for granted. It is our sworn duty to enjoy it while it lasts.
And there are so many things to enjoy.
Mao gaping, complete with rows of terrifying human teeth, struggles to excel against barely perceptible beer bottles. The horror show Yodas in a Star Wars parody is designed for one note, always for the guys of online movies. Spider-fingers weave their way around champagne flutes, faces shift and twist in disharmony until it transcends the uncanny valley into something strange and distorted. This nonsense can make you dizzy in the car. something amazing.
Here’s a WWII movie trailer I made this weekend, created entirely with AI text-to-video!
Text written by GPT-4, voiceover by Michael Caine @employeeand video generated by artificial intelligence @employee Gen 2 😮
We still have a ways to go but the potential is very exciting! pic.twitter.com/uUUTICMunE
– Ammar Rashi (@ammaar) May 1, 2023
It’s hard to tell if these AI trailers are the beginning of something or the logical end point. Twitter’s tech-infused posters believe that artificial intelligence has the power to destroy everything in its path. Devoted haters like me think nothing will change. But the future is rarely clear. There is no common ground here. The crystal ball is broken. Nobody knows anything all the time.
There is no rational way, say, that a human could look at an iPhone in 2007 and expect Uber Eats or TikTok. There’s no way anyone can look at a black and white TV and expect Netflix. The prism by which we filter our predictions will be something different in 10 years. Everyone looks stupid in hindsight – this is a story as old as time.
So for now, I’m going to live in the moment and enjoy these hilarious horrors while they’re still around. While I still have a shred of humanity left in the marrow of my dead, decaying bones.