Cult of the Snowman, Doopiidoo (AI), 2025:
Hell, Clown Core, 2019:
The first one, a sort of silly nightmare, approaches video surrealism far more closely than any absurdist play or comedy ever has. The second is reminiscent*, in a good way, of John Zorn. (As an ex-saxophonist myself I'm proud that the most bizarre cerebral work in jazz tends to come from saxophonists. See e.g. Eric Dolphy.) But what I'm most interested in, is how much more interested I am in the second one, seemingly because humans created it.
I make no argument about AI Not Being Able to Produce Real Art - I think that debate seems quite over by now, and there's no innate, essential trait differentiating AI- from human-generated art that exists outside of our skulls. If you told me I misread the date on the video, and in fact Clown Core is all AI-generated as well, I would shrug, then having learned that, my interest would diminish, with no change to the actual video and audio. It's not just the machine-vs-human aspect of it: if I found out that say, the band Carcass (one of my favorites) had for all these years outsourced their songwriting to someone at their record label, my interest would similarly decrease. When I see or hear art that appeals to me, I want to know about its creators, what kind of people they are, about their backgrounds and training and what it was like to produce the work. (Note in the case of Clown Core, they've never officially revealed their identities, which makes them more compelling still.)
There may, very soon, be a status value to "artisan novels" or "artisan symphonies" produced manually by humans. This troubles me only because I don't at all understand the appeal of artisanal products (soap, bread, bicycles) and in fact I might be a little too vocal about rejecting their value. Being honest, the people who get excited about them usually strike me as trying a little too hard to signal their taste and authenticity, and sometimes as old farts pining for a long-lost age. In only being able to maintain interest in human-generated art, I may grudgingly be joining their ranks.
Granted, I'm not aware of any AI engines that are proactively churning out surrealist videos without any human supervision, entirely motivated by their own programmed-in utility function. There are still humans involved in the decision tree to create these things, if only at a very abstract level. Not just the fact of human involvement, but the intensity, matters also. What if you found out that Dali determined what he would paint using a dictionary and dice? For my part, in fact that might deepen my appreciation - because he, a fellow human being, conceived of it, and executed it. Though I'm not aware of any such experiments, I'm sure artists have tried randomizing their art in various ways. In fact, the automatic painting some surrealists did strikes me as the opposite of random - trying to produce "inscapes" (like Vertigo of Eros by Roberto Matta, above) that were even more authentically the product of the artist's mind than something he deliberated over and sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Supposing there is some deep subconscious within the large language models that they can expose with their own products - would I care more? No, that seems even more boring and pointless. So why do I care when humans do it? The answer must be that as a social animal, I am compelled by connection with others of my species, even with someone I can never meet.
Another example: in a few more years, I think we'll be able to make movies, decent movies, from prompts to AIs. As far as I've seen, up until now, these videos suffer from the AI's inability to understand that one person should continue being the same person, and not shift their appearance in every scene. There's similar narrative drift in long stories. Two science fiction works that I think deserve attempts at a film treatment are LeGuin's Dispossessed and the extremely under-rated and aging-well Galactic Center series (especially Across the Sea of Suns) by Gregory Benford. That means not only do I not need to worry about a special effects budget, I can cast whoever I want! But wait - do I *care* if it's Daniel Radcliffe playing Shevek, when really it's just an image of Daniel Radcliffe? Why not just digitally sculpt someone who looks the way you picture the character? Already, either way this bores me; they're all just high-res cartoons with synthetic voices. (Spoiler alert for rest of paragraph) Imagine if you found out that in Tropic Thunder, Les Grossman wasn't really Tom Cruise but only an image of Tom Cruise. "Huh. Interesting idea." That bit just wouldn't be funny anymore.
*Clown Core also uses the lyrical technique of An*l C*nt, who pioneered the practice of clearly not saying any of the printed lyrics in the song and just screaming; possibly they make up the words printed as lyrics after they've finished recording.
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