Die Antwoord’S New Video, Age of Illusion, Created by AI
retrofuturista.com
retrofuturista.com
The subtle inaccuracies that are often present in AI-generated images really work for the creepy/trippy vibe here. Pretty awesome stuff.
We should modify their video's audio as a publicity stunt.
This is going to get very interesting in the coming months. So many teams are running at this with full speed.
The whole world is about to be shaken to the core, and most people don't see it yet.
But let's be clear: there is a huge amount of human artistry in the prompting, coaxing, blending, and editing, in order to make something that works as a video for a song.
I'm sorry but I just don't think you can say a (single) human was fully responsible for this.
I've made some things I consider beautiful, but when you consider the utterly immense breadth of human artistic output that's been subsumed into the model, and the huge amounts of intelligence, inspiration and effort that go into building the software in the first place, the person entering the prompt is just not the biggest part of that.
They enter some words, choose from some output and build from there, maybe with a 'vision', maybe not, DALL-E and other tools will conjure one up for you. You can't try to make out as if they are acting alone in realising it, to put that person on a level with someone who realises their strong vision through a camera or a paintbrush or even photoshop...
Nah.
I made the most beautiful art of my life in 30 second increments over the course of about half an hour while I had to wait for unit test runs to complete.
You can call it art if you like, I'm not gatekeeping that, that's a dead end of a philosophical argument that I'm not going to get into. But the game has changed here, and it's not the same, creation has become ... trivial with these tools. I should know, I get great joy from using them!
I'm going to watch the video here, I'm not sneering at it, but I will view it through the lens of just how simple it is to describe a scene and build it now.
I agree with you otherwise.
After you've watched the video, tell us if you think creating that music video, as a cohesive piece of art with beginning, middle, and end, complementing the tone and texture of the song, was actually "trivial".
In emphasizing the role of a human ("Sagans") in creating the video, I was reacting to the glib headline "Created by AI".
You and I agree on how none of these AI models would be doing anything interesting or useful were it not for the vast human effort that went into creating all the training data. I'm just pointing out that there's human artistry on the output side too, especially to create something that works as music video.
That said, humans will leverage these technologies to reach even further heights.
I'm excited in both senses. This is really going to push the envelope of what we're capable of, enable more of us to be creative, and supercharge those of us who really want to hone these capabilities.
That plus dopamine plus deep personalization will make the last thirty years of tech and content look like the stone age.
But I think that compared to creating a similar thing previous to these tools cropping up, it is now vastly easier and I also think that quite often the tool will provide the style and the look as part of its interpretation of the prompt, so one doesn't even need to have much in mind when starting out.
I think "Created by AI" is quite reasonable, but yes a(nother) human has put in a lot of effort there as well. But even with this video as good as it is, I'm not convinced that "Sagans" can be said to be the main creative force here.
Perhaps I reacted too strongly, and that's probably in response to seeing swarms of people out there on the net claiming 'artist' status for writing a few words, while telling the world that AI is 'just a tool like photoshop', which I find a bit sad and self-serving.
Their adopted child has claimed child abuse. And the lead singer has been accused by multiple women of abuse. Of course they are innocent of a crime until proven guilty of these charges. But it seems to be odd timing to release a new music video.