Has anyone noticed how dreamlike AI videos are? Yesterday, my five year old nephew visited my parents' house, where I've been staying the past few months, and while we were eating lunch he wanted to watch some Super Mario Brothers videos. YouTube's algorithm immediately offered up dozens of shorts, from various accounts, that seem to have been written, directed, and animated entirely by AI.
There are lots of these, all of them uploaded within the last five days. I assume Universal or Nintendo has these routinely removed but they're so easy to make quickly that they keep coming back. My nephew was intrigued by the idea of Peach being abandoned in the rain and so he wanted to watch the video. It turns out, Peach is never abandoned in the video but, instead, the series of short stories rapidly told are various, simplistic morality tales emphasising teamwork, friendship, and family. They generally had a more conservative quality than the recent, human created animated films. In one, Mario and the boys are trying to impress the three princesses, Peach, Rosalina, and Daisy, on the beach. AI seems to like showing characters looking straight at the camera, even if it doesn't make sense, and each shot is short, probably because if a shot lingers too long, errors start to become too obtrusive. But I noticed constant errors anyway. Clothes frequently change between shots. The length of the princesses skirts radically change from shot to shot. In one scene, King Koopa is wearing a vest under his coat but in the next shot it's gone. And there are countless other little things, like characters' gloves changing colour, moustaches disappearing and reappearing. In one of the more dreamlike moments, Baby Rosalina decides to run away from home but what we see in the shot is her house sliding away across the landscape, away from her--her home running away from her.
I found myself laughing at these mistakes, much as I'd laugh at the zippers on the Eye Creatures in Attack of the the Eye Creatures, one of the old movies made fun of on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But no-one else was laughing. My nephew was just enjoying seeing these characters he likes. A little earlier, I was showing him an episode of the infamous Super Mario Super Show from the '80s which features the unintentionally disturbing live action sequences. But he wasn't disturbed by them. He just liked seeing the characters he liked.
So I realised, or was more forcibly made to contemplate, two things. The flaws in AI aren't so different from cheesy, low budget television shows from the '80s, and both can be enjoyed sincerely by small children and the uneducated in media matters. Those of us who grow up contemplating how art is made and why art affects us the way it does are much more in the minority than we tend to think we are. And I also realised that asking people to support only human made content is like asking people to buy American made products when imports from China are cheaper. People might have some sympathy for those who will lose their jobs and the cheap labour that will be exploited. But such social consciousness is too abstract to ever make a real impact. People have enough to worry about, they have to live their lives and find respite where they can.
More and more, I think this is the future, particularly for Disney, which is already notorious for cutting costs in the writing department. They may copyright strike AI videos but they're also looking at how popular and easy to make they are. I would say we're two years away, at best, from Disney officially releasing barrels of AI content every day.
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