Zomkie

On a purely technical/technological level, compared to where it was even a year ago, this is impressive. As a work of art it is not — encouragingly, because it lacks human talent. It needs a better script, a better director, and better acting, all of which requires artistic judgement, which is the thing AI can only guess at. Shigeru Miyamoto recently drew the distinction between creation and labour. AI is to be cautiously welcomed, he said, like earlier technological shifts, for its application to labour. The entire history of technological progress is in boosting creative productivity by handing over the drudgery of labour to machines. Everyone today, even people with anti-AI neuroses, benefits from this. Theirs is the first anti-algorithm movement that is spread entirely by algorithm. They just take Twitter for granted. It doesn't count as AI, despite being powered by it. There was a time when many things we take for granted today - word processors, DAWs, computer-generated graphics - were derided as the enemies of art and creativity. Miyamoto also points out, correctly, that people mistake labour for value. Working hard on a thing does not make that thing good, or even creative. (I would draw a less polite analogy: just because you work hard on OnlyFans doesn't mean you're hot enough to succeed.) He argues that removing chunks of labour burden frees more people to be true creators. But if you over-rely on it, if you hand it the task of creation itself, you will just get mimicry, and mimicry seldom stands the test of time. I fancy myself reasonably creative: I use a typewriter for fiction, but Word is much more efficient for editing, and faster for non-fiction. AI is a useful search function. I might, if it ever matters, get it to correct spelling mistakes. I use AI to classify clips for YouTube - by character, action, prop, expression - but I choose which ones to use. It can create a sorted, searchable library of hundreds of thousands of clips, it cannot tell me what I should use or when. The choice is creation, the categorization is labour. I sing and play a variety of instruments. I know some music theory. If I ever have time, I'll write, play and record songs. But I will absolutely use prompt-based mixers and mastering tools. (I've also used it for a looping 4-second animation of my YouTube avatar solely to confuse YouTube's own copyright AI. I do this because it saves days of labour in the most ironic way possible.) As with everything that gets democratised, the result of lowering barriers is an increase in "slop", because people will continue to mistake labour for quality. "I made this with AI," without thinking about what "I made this" means, recreates an eternal Labour Theory of Value error. In that sentence, "with AI" doesn't particularly matter. But there will also be an increase in quality offerings, as talented people previously excluded from creative industries (by money, access, contacts, technical specialism) gain the power to make things that would once have been impossible. The key role for humans is precisely the role of conscious creator that AI cannot yet (and perhaps will never) completely fill. Its job is to replace buttons, not imagination; labour, not art. AI cannot write or direct a good version of The Odyssey. But it can cut the cost of making it by 95%. Lots of talentless people will thus be able to make their version of that story. But lots of very talented people, probably in collaboration, will as well. The difference will be between those who know how to write their own scripts, and those who say "hey Grok make me a script for this movie"; or, for visual artists, between those who know the intent behind expression, and those who ask their computer to emote. It would be hard to do a worse job than Nolan. The only people capable of that are those who lack the imagination to see a use for this technology.