One question that is always on my mind when talking about AI generated stuff is: Do anyone actually enjoys consuming those? Or is it always on the same level as throwaway media?
I personally do not consume anything that i can perceive as majorly made with AI-generation because it strikes me personally as something the creator did not want to be completely responsible for.
What works are creators "completely responsible for?"
Most authors aren't good artists or graphic designers and will have someone else do their book cover. Is that a personal failing on their part, because they weren't personally responsible for it? Any degree of responsibility they would have over it would be identical whether they commissioned a person or asked AI, both are getting another entity to make it for you because you know you can't do it yourself. And in fact, an AI cover might even demonstrate
more personal involvement, because you don't have the interpersonal dilemma of wondering if you're bothering the artist for too many revisions, or just settling for the best they're able to do even when it doesn't totally satisfy you. With AI, you can work with it endlessly until you're fully satisfied. It also represents more of the user's own tastes and expression, because with them being a non-artist, it's likely to have mistakes, poor layout, bad lighting, which a traditional artist wouldn't have done. In other words the author is fully responsible for the AI cover with all its mistakes, it represents what they thought it should look like completely, with no one else involved to "fix" their vision.
We discussed on an earlier page of the thread that the vast majority of hit songs from the past few decades were all written by a tiny cabal of songwriters who just pass out the songs to astroturfed artists to perform. Those bands aren't "completely responsible for" their albums, right? So you ought not to enjoy them. You have to deeply research every song you listen to in order to make sure the band is fully personally responsible for every aspect of production.
Tons of game devs buy assets from asset stores, or use middleware like SpeedTree to give them serviceable trees that they don't have to build themselves. Do you know which games these are, and avoid them? What if they use tools like FMOD? You'd better not enjoy those games, the creators were too lazy to write their own sound engine and be fully responsible for their own creation.
It lacks intentional decision of the creator, who instead of looking and building every detail of something just hand-waves it as not important for the totality of what is being made. Given that the author does not think it was worthy to engage with all aspects of what they made, it just feels dumb to have myself then consume something that not even who created it put their all into it, so i would rather just go somewhere else where i know that even if not great i can safely try to gleam what the author wanted to show me knowing that in the end it was an actual real person responsible for it.
Sometimes the only part of the work that matters is the intentional part made by the creator.
I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again was the first popular AI song. Its creator wrote the lyrics, which is the important part. This is someone who knows how to come up with a funny idea, but doesn't have the means to fully realize it. A decade ago he would've sent a chat message to a few friends to say "hey guys I wrote these funny lyrics, what do you think" and that would be the end of it. Who has the money to write a stupid-ass song like this and then hire a group of singers and musicians and master it as if it was an old 50s song? It's not meant to be deep and moving, it's meant to be funny, and the humor is increased by the fact that it has an air of authenticity, to imagine that people back then would've actually sang this song. It only exists as it does due to AI.
NeuralViz's creations were the first popular AI video series. The creator actually puts significant work into it. If you know anything about AI video generation, you know that you can only get 5 to 10 seconds from it at a time, which means you have to generate a lot of individual parts and then edit it together. He also uses a program to capture his head and face movements and casts it onto these weird aliens, also performing all the voices himself with a voice changer. Above all, he's good at writing comedy. Every word out of his character's mouths and every bit of comedic timing is fully designed by him, and it shows, which is why it became popular. This is a series that would've required 3D modelers and animators, musicians, all sorts of other people involved just a few years ago. But with AI he was able to make all of it himself. Doesn't that give him
even more ownership over it? Hell, he never has to compromise his vision, which often comes from working with others. No blue-haired autist 3D modeler lady getting triggered by this or that comment, no HR or focus groups telling him to tone down the weirdness. It's unabashedly his vision.
And more like this is cropping up as more people learn to use AI to bring their ideas to life.
Are you going to stop using Kiwi Farms because Josh is too lazy to have full ownership over the forum code, and is using Claude to write fixes for him and enhance things?
