Some More News - Some More News: Why Does "AI" "Art" Suck So Much?

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Hi. Today we're looking at AI-generated images, why they look like that, why fascists love them, and how corporations want to use them to cheapen the valuable work of creatives. Hosted by Cody Johnston Executive Producer - Katy Stoll Directed by Will Gordh Written by David Christopher Bell and Erik Barnes Edited by Michael Swaim Produced by Jonathan Harris Associate Producer - Quincy Tucker Post-Production Supervisor - John Conway Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales Graphics by Clint DeNisco Head Writer - David Christopher Bell Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UoquS5uXOKs PATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenews MERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.com AG1 is offering new subscribers a FREE $76 gift when you sign up. You’ll get a Welcome Kit, a bottle of D3K2 AND 5 free travel packs in your first box. Check out https://DrinkAG1.com/morenews to start your new year on a healthier note. Over 2 Million Butts Love TUSHY. Get 10% off TUSHY with the code SMN at https://hellotushy.com/SMN Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code MoreNews at https://Mandopodcast.com/MoreNews! #mandopod Get 50% off a new SimpliSafe system with professional monitoring and your first month free at https://SimpliSafe.com/MoreNews Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 04:00 - Why Does “AI” “Art” Look Bad? 08:17 - The Creative Intent Behind Art 24:56 - “AI” “Art” is Lazy 34:20 - Conservatives love this stuff 45:09 - “AI” Sucks Energy (and just sucks) 49:47 - Corporations just want cheap stuff

Well, I'm all hoed out. Hey, hi, happy new year. Did you win? Did you win New Year's? I hope you kissed the ball or whatever they do. Did you summon Santa? How many candy canes did you consume? A hundred?

I'm doing good by the way. I mean good relative to everything bad that's happening. Like a flower growing in a corpse filled with turds. Still a flower though. And speaking of a corpse filled with turds, did you catch those AI Coca-Cola ads they introduced before the holidays? Here's one.

["Coco-Cola"] The sun's just coming, coming to town Coming to the ocean Oh, it's cool, cool, cool, it's a lot of fun It's a certain magic in the night Can't you see it shining bright? Wow. Here's some news. That looks bad. I wonder if we could even show you a lot of the ad there since they might have quite ironically, pinged us for copyright issues on something

that was surely made from stolen images. But yeah, that sucked. Boo! Did you notice that none of the shots are more than like a second? I'm guessing the AI couldn't handle it past that. But it makes the ad feel oddly paced and frantic. Also, nothing in it really edits together cohesively.

None of the eye lines match. Sometimes the trucks are going right to left and immediately left to right. It's a mess. Then we see a polar bear in the sun, like the rising sun, even though most of the other shots are during the night. Like they just go back and forth randomly.

And what is the actual premise of the ad? It's a line of Coca-Cola trucks driving to this abandoned town while random animals look vaguely startled and then get cozy when the trucks arrive. Do the animals run the town? Also, this Coca-Cola bottle is freaking gigantic. It towers over the gifts.

Look at it! That window is presumably like three or four feet above the curb, and the glass Coca-Cola bottle reaches it. It's twice the height of that step in the foreground. And since it's farther away, that makes it even larger? It's almost like... it's poorly made.

And it took three different AI companies to make it. This was one of several AI ads they put out and they all look bad. Here's one with a quote, person in it. ["Shining Red"] Zero expression, neat. Why didn't they show the actual handoff of the bottle to Santa?

That's the Christmas money shot, right? You wanna see it, but I bet the computer couldn't do it. Also, what's wrong with Santa's hands? They're like cartoon hands, but everything else is realistic. This can't be our entire video, but it could be. We could spend the whole video talking about these terrible ads.

So why did they make these? It doesn't make me want to drink their soda. It just makes me want to hurl a bottle of soda. Well, I guess they don't have to pay anyone. I mean, besides the AI companies, to actually animate or shoot an ad. Still, these are throwbacks to a 1990s Coca-Cola ad. So just play the old ad instead.

But I guess they would have to pay residuals to the people who worked on it. I mean, is Coca-Cola the billion dollar company made of money? Come on! They got shareholders to think of. Anyway, welcome to 2025. Let's talk about how AI art sucks and is basically evil.

Why does AI art suck so much? Sorry, I actually need to answer that question with a question. Address to me, I guess. What part of AI art sucking are we even referring to there? Great question. Me? The answer is all the parts, starting with why it, at least for now, looks shitty. Like that Coca-Cola ad is presumably the best version of AI art that money can afford. And it still looks really bad.

Here's a shot from the ad on their YouTube page. I set it to 1080p. So why does it look so blurry? Why does all AI art look like an insect's dream? It's actually really hard to find out. The Atlantic reached out to multiple companies and got the silent treatment. Weird. You'd think they would want to explain this really exciting new technology

and not be silent about it. Unless they perhaps want to hide something. But after talking to outside experts, they concluded one of four possibilities, or perhaps a combination of reasons. And it links directly to how generative AI images work. I won't go into details, but it's a process where a series of images are fed into some kind of magical mechanical contraption. That contraption does something called forward diffusion, where it takes each image

and slowly breaks it down into static. Static is something computers are very good at making, probably because it's random gibberish. And by breaking down images into static. Static is something computers are very good at making, probably because it's random gibberish. And by breaking down images into static, the machine is actually learning how to take static and turn it back into images. Reverse diffusion. Fucked if I know how.

But what that means is that, because it first starts an image as a random assortment of static, every image it generates is always different. It creates sets of static based on a text prompt, and then forms the image from there, which is likely why these images look, um... spotty.

They're literally produced from spots! A previous model found that AI was averaging together the images they were given, and then producing an amalgamation of them. And then of course, it's a question of which images they were even given. If they are given all stock photography with flat lighting, then that's what they will create. That's the second theory. The third and fourth theories have to do with human error. Basically, the people making and consuming the images gravitate towards specific ones

that self-perpetuate the problem. Like if everyone is asking to see a picture of that Muppet beaker, but with tits, the computer is being trained to favor sources that produce that result. And maybe over time, it realizes that people prefer the pictures where he has like the biggest milkers possible. And so it draws on even more specific sources and so on.

Meep meep indeed. Meepy milkers. And when you hear that technical and unnecessarily erotic explanation, it really doesn't sound like art, does it? It's a person typing in a series of words that the computer absolutely does not comprehend, and then the computer assigns those words

to bits of static that form an image. Static that was created from other people's work, perhaps and most likely without their permission or any compensation. By that design, it's a plagiarism machine. What is the purpose if not to steal work? If you own the art, then why would you need the machine? That's probably why AI has been caught stealing data

from places like Netflix and YouTube. And that's just the people who got caught, mind you. Or even more haunting is the realization that a lot of the corporations making AI models simply own the sites like Netflix and YouTube. Companies like Google and Meta, for example, are absolutely using your data to train their AI unless you jump through a bunch of hoops to opt out. This video is probably being used to train some kind of AI monster mash of me and Katie and

Warmbo all gloop together like we're in John Carpenter's The Thing. Can you picture it? Can you picture Carm Bode? Can you draw Carm Bode as fan art? Can you? Can you? Can you actually draw it? Don't just fucking ask Grok to draw it.

You draw it. Oh, Grok. Fun fact about Elon's ex's everything apps, Grok. It was designed to refuse to produce any image that might be copyrighted material. But only if you ask it point blank to make an image that violates copyright laws. It will heroically say no to that. But if you just reword your prompt to ask it to make a copyrighted version of something, it'll do it no questions asked, even if that's, of course, Nazi shit.

Or misinformation, or fucking deepfakes, garbage site. He bought a website someone else made and turned it into a garbage dump. What makes this even more infuriating is that not only is AI doing a lot of plagiarism, but it's very good at hiding plagiarism. It's advancing plagiarism technology, making it harder to define and detect.

In terms of academic papers, for example, AI can be used to paraphrase someone else's words, which in turn makes it harder to spot as plagiarism. With AI images, it's even more complicated. Going back to that Coca-Cola Christmas ad, it was likely made from thousands or millions of other people's artwork. It took from so many sources that it's hard

to actually pin down any one person being ripped off. And ultimately, it's impossible to know who truly owns those ads. But you know who definitely doesn't own it? Coca-Cola. Like they might own it on paper right now, but unless they trained in AI exclusively using their previous ads, they don't really own that.

And unless a company is specifically using an image library they own, it should all be considered public domain, right? If you're wondering what the people who created these AI programs think about all of this, well, let's ask Mid Journey's creator, David Holtz. Like, I mean, the art community already has issues with plagiarism.

I don't really want to be involved in that. Like, I mean- I think you might be. I might be. Oh, okay. He doesn't think about it. It doesn't seem like it even occurred to him to think about it. Or maybe he just wants us to think

he doesn't think about it, you know, for plausible deniability later. Very grok of him. Because make no mistake, they're trying to keep AI out of federal copyright discussion by any lobbyist necessary. And this is why a lot of creatives are starting to fight back against AI use from major companies.

The directors of Heretics stuck in an actual end credit statement assuring people that no AI was used in the making of their film. I'm guessing we'll see more and more of that. Because while AI art looks like shit right now, someday it will inevitably look photo real. In fact, it's already kind of getting there. And while that will be devastating for misinformation and deep fakes and plagiarism,

I still don't think it's going to ever surpass human art. In fact, even if it's photo realistic and actually nails human expression and movement, AI art will still look like shit. Let me explain. I'm going to show you how to kill a god. You cannot alter your fate, my prince. I should not have said.

However, you can rise to meet it if you choose. That there is a fan-made AI generated remake of the Princess Mononoke trailer. What's immediately striking is that it doesn't look terrible, not amazing, but like you could see a CGI artist making that and posting it. And maybe people might praise them for making it, but it's not that.

It was a series of prompts given to a computer to spit out those images, made through trial and error, until they got what they wanted. And while I don't really want to pick on the fan doing the prompts, it's wild to me how they talk about it in terms of how much money they spent to make it. Like, that's the metric to measure the work put into it.

Not time, not inspiration, but money. And a waste of money at that. Not only does the creator of Princess Mononoke super hate AI, but this AI remake seems to change a bunch of details. Shots that were during the day are suddenly at night. Makeup and props and camera angles are different. The main character looks like a porn AI model

for some reason. Now, if a human made those changes, we could ask them what their creative intent was behind it. Maybe there were good reasons and those choices are actually good or interesting. But there is no human. There is no creative intent. I'm guessing the AI could only pull

from the limited images it had, arbitrarily made those changes, and the fan prompting it didn't want to spend more time and money fixing it. No one in the process was thinking about the creative intent. It's an excited fan who wanted to make a tribute to something they liked.

And while I can't be mad at someone for that, I can be very frustrated. Because you know who else started as an excited fan? A lot of filmmakers, a lot of famous artists started by going out in their backyards and making their own version of films they loved. That's how artists are made. That's how we got such great films

like Jaws and Star Wars and of course, Fifty Shades of Grey. Because when you go out and make something yourself, pick up a pencil or camera or musical instrument and try to recreate it, you start to wonder why it was made the way it was. You start thinking about intent. Because there was a reason Princess Mononoke had those specific shots. Every shot was a specific choice that the AI version seems to completely ignore. It's just pulling from a database of stock images

that are likely not shot for artistic purposes. You know how chat GPT keeps making up a bunch of fake facts that seem like they could be true but once you dig into it, aren't? Well there is an artistic equivalent of that, of shots and sequences that might seem creative until you think about them a little harder. Most people might not notice this, but the majority of AI images are often produced from the same eye level angle and have flat and unmotivated lighting.

There is a way to spot an AI image just from the cinematography. I don't mean to get all film school on you, but movies like Mean Stuff and Junk. There are people whose entire jobs are to think about just the lighting or just the sound or just shot composition. The way a director physically frames a shot completely changes a scene. Is the character feeling trapped or do they feel free? These moments are iconic because of that intent. Movies like The Shining make us feel uneasy because of very specific decisions,

down to the lens being put on the camera. This isn't just in classic or artsy films either. You know why that Michael Bay 360 shot is so awesome? That comes down to the lens. Does a computer know that? I'm guessing it doesn't. This is a language of film that gets copied and built upon for generations by people.

There's a vast difference between a person making, say, an extension of Flash Gordon or Adventure Comics and feeding those things into a computer. The computer can certainly grab random images and compile them to look similar, but it has no idea why it's doing that. It's not a fan of that work. It wasn't inspired by it.

It doesn't know why it's fun, but why listen to me explain it? Let's hear from a true master of the arts. Look, AI is a craftsman at best. Craftsmen can learn to make you know, make stickly furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That's how large video models, ours language models, basically work. A library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret in context, right? But

they're just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created. Not yet. Not yet. Yeah, not yet. And really in order to do that, look, craftsman is knowing how to work, art is knowing when to stop. That modern day Orson Welles is right. I think for people who perhaps see film as a product, AI doesn't seem much different,

especially in an era where a lot of live action blockbusters are just bloated corporate products. But even going beyond the film school stuff, AI doesn't just kill art, but it kills entertainment and the humanity that makes it. Like, let's say that instead of Spielberg and Lucas making Raiders of the Lost Ark, they took those old serials and B-movies and gave them to AI. Well, for starters, we wouldn't get Harrison Ford, would we? It would be some rubber-faced version of a bunch of other people. The idea of the lovable robe is almost completely

based on the personality and performance of an actor. But without that, the art stagnates. It's now a creative dead end. We probably wouldn't get The Mummy or The Librarian or anything else inspired by Indiana Jones. We wouldn't get the moment where The Librarian or anything else inspired by Indiana Jones. We wouldn't get the moment where Indy shoots the guy with the sword because that was improvised on the day due to Harrison Ford getting sick. AI models don't get sick. Would we even get Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark, another lovable rogue character? Hey, did you know that the line, "'I am Iron Man' at the end of the first Iron Man' was improvised on the day?"

That single ad-lib spun the MCU into a completely different direction. AI wouldn't have improvised that. AI would have just said the line as it was scripted. With AI, the shark in Jaws would have worked perfectly and we would have seen the shark all the time. The movie Apocalypse Now wouldn't have been an acid-fueled nightmare.

That doesn't just change the art itself, but even art made about the art. But I guess it would be cheaper to make, which is the actual goal of AI, to make art as cheaply and easily as possible in order to maximize the profits of the people funding it, until no one wants to watch it because it sucks. But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that someday someone creates a real AI android that is capable of true creativity, a robot that dreams and aspires

and has a working penis and fucks real good and also owns a cat. But as the series progresses, it really seems like a different cat later, and you have to wonder if he's just killing cats. But let's say that exists, and that robot likes to play music and act and role play as Sherlock Holmes with his incel friend.

Well, I'm sure people will enjoy his art, but also it probably would still kind of suck. That's actually a plot line in Star Trek where Data's art and music is seen as too precise. According to my fellow performers, I lack soul. Pinocchio is right. This might be just a personal preference, but the Beatles, for example,

make mistakes all the time on their recordings. It's not polished, it's not perfect, and that's part of the charm. They're real people. You can oftentimes hear them laughing in the background. Ringo didn't shout, I've got blisters on me fingers, because a robot thought it would be funny. He said it because he played the song all day and got blisters on me fingers because a robot thought it would be funny. He said it because he played the song all day and got blisters on his fingers.

This is all to say that another huge reason people like art is because it's done by human beings. A computer printing out a photorealistic picture of a dog eating a birthday cake is going to be infinitely less impressive than a human drawing even the most abstract version of that same asshole dog. Because that's why we absorb art. We watch jugglers or acrobats or dancers to see human talent. And while a robot doing the same thing might be a fun novelty, it's ultimately not going to emotionally affect us. It's the same way we like to see actual humans

do stunts in movies, right? Who wants to watch a CGI car ram into a CGI wall? There's a reason why action movies that forget this tend to suck, right? Would you want to watch an AI version of John Wick with fake stunt men not doing stunts? What would even be the point of that? Who actually wants this?

Like, I'm guessing that for most of you, I'm preaching to the choir. So why is AI still this big thing? Why are companies tripling down on it? Why are a bunch of people online going hog wild for it? Maybe it has nothing to do with art or the fact that it looks like shit. Let's explore after these ads written and shot by real people and not robots.

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when you use code SMN at checkout. That's 10% off your first bidet order at hellotushy.com with promo code SMN. Wow, hi, those products made for humans and those ads seem more valid because a fellow human with human experience spoke to you with the proper emotional intelligence. And if I saw an ad that was made with AI images, it would automatically look really cheap

and mean the company involved didn't wanna pay any money to advertise and I'd assume it's a scam. Just pointing that out. For me and a lot of people, AI is repellent. It's easy to spot and automatically devalues whatever it's associated with. But for a lot of other people, it's apparently really based for some reason.

Why is that? Why do some people really like AI and pretend that even the most obvious AI images are photorealistic when they very clearly are not that? I mean, besides the people who literally have a financial stake in it. For example, Jason Allen won a digital art contest by submitting a piece generated by Mid Journey,

a program that appears to be trained with stolen art. After being accused of cheating, Alan responded by saying, quote, "'I'm not going to apologize for it. "'I won and I didn't break any rules. "'This isn't going to stop. "'Art is dead, dude. "'It's over.

"'A.I. won. "'Humans lost.'" And man, what a weird thing to say, unless you yourself are a robot. Who is this person that's apparently mad at the broad concept of art? Who wants the robots to win? And thinks that a few shitty AI photos

are going to destroy the concept of creativity. Also, this guy is an adult. I looked it up. He's a grown man who thinks this. And this attitude seems like an extension of one of the worst things the internet has given us. And that's arbitrary tribalism. Or more specifically, the kind of tribalism

that causes way too many people on the internet to suck up to and defend corporations and rich wads that couldn't give a snail's turd about them. This guy is proudly and boldly identifying himself as a sniffling henchman. Where my Renfield bros at? Like I dunno, to borrow from Manosphere speak, isn't this... Beta shit? It's peasant mentality.

They're just proudly doing beta stuff for their tech feudal lords. Maybe I'm putting too much on this RoboCuck who, by the way, got mad after a bunch of other people stole, air quote, his, air quote, art, which is delicious. I need to repeat that. The guy who made an AI image using a bunch

of other stolen images got mad when people stole it. Irony is dead dude, humans lost. But going back to that quote, that terrible quote, you get the impression that a lot of these AI enthusiasts are fighting a war that nobody else is fighting. That there's an ideology behind AI image generation. I think it's from two things. Number one, most people make fun of AI art

because it looks bad. And so people who went all in on AI have become defensive. It's kind of a chicken or the egg situation there. Because for anyone who has been on social media, you've probably seen one of millions of posts with some obvious AI image or video with the message Hollywood is finished or something similar. Sometimes it's a joke,

but sometimes you get people who genuinely claim some blurry AI video of a dead-eyed child awkwardly playing with a cartoon puppy is going to kill the film industry. Not just disrupt Hollywood, but kill it. And there are people who seem genuinely joyful and excited about that possibility, who apparently hate artists and want to replace them

while coincidentally having the worst ideas about how to use AI for art and storytelling. It really comes down to a single clip. If you think about how humans consider creativity, we see it as sort of this very special thing that's only accessible to this very few talented people out there. And these tools actually make it lower the barrier for anyone to think of themselves as creative, you know, and expand their creativity. So in that sense

I think it's actually going to be really incredible. Yeah, it could give me 200 different cliffhangers for the end of episode one or whatever. Right. Very easily. And you can extend the story. The story never ends, you can just... Oh, keep going, yes. I'm done writing, you keep going. That's OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Moradi discussing how AI will revolutionize creativity. And she points out that AI enables people who wouldn't normally think of themselves as creative

to make art, and then immediately gets excited about the idea of making a story that never ends, that just keeps rambling on and on. Like the guy interviewing her as an example of how this can help somebody be creative is that the person can type, give me 200 different cliffhangers and then the computer will do it.

Is the creativity in the room with you right now? And you just let the computer write the story forever? It's that classic Theodore F. Wolf quote. True talent knows when to keep going indefinitely until everyone gets tired and slowly stops paying attention to your work as it fizzles out unceremoniously. And boy, does that sum it up, even though it's not real.

There is a very funny pattern of people praising AI for revolutionizing art, who also clearly do not understand what art is, who have, dare I say, bad ideas. And a lot of those people see creatives as elitists and have grown bitter about that. The irony here is twofold. For one, creatives are, statistically speaking,

the furthest thing from an elitist. Like the majority of them are very poor and will in fact move your couch for you if you have a sandwich or maybe a pack of smokes they could trade for laundry detergent on the bus. When you say the word actor, people picture Brad Pitt or Sir Ben Affleck, but only 2% of actors actually act for a living. The rest are Uber drivers, every single one of them. The other silly thing about seeing creativity or art as exclusive is that it's literally the opposite of that. These people are promoting AI as a way to make art accessible to everyone, to democratize art.

But it was already democratized. We have the world's information at our fingertips. Anyone can pick up a pencil and draw or write a story. That's not the hard part about art. The elitist part is being able to get someone to see your art. Trust me, me and my screenplay know all too well. It's about a ghost cop. I'm calling it R.I.P.D. Pretty clever, right?

Yes, some people have natural talents, but anyone can learn an art form if they are passionate and take the time. Even if you have bad ideas, you can get feedback and grow. Everyone gets bad ideas, even talented people. Unrelated to that last sentence, did you know that when M. Night Shyamalan wrote The Sixth Sense, he didn't think of the twist ending until the fifth draft? He wrote five versions of that story

before thinking up the most important part. And if AI told him from the start, do a twist ending, the movie would be way different and potentially much worse. He wrote his drafts and then something clicked and then the real movie took form. Art is a process. It's hard, it takes a lot of work and embarrassment and humility.

And frankly, there are a lot of people who don't want to go through the effort. Either they are executives at film studios who see creatives as an obstacle, or there's some dude who tried to learn to draw, got discouraged, and then carried this chip on his shoulder about that. And these people now see AI as some kind of art hack,

one simple trick to not actually do anything. A way to cut corners and not have to pay someone to design a logo or jingle or make their Looney Tunes fan art where Roadrunner has those huge milkers. Meep, meepin' dude. Good callback, Us. Great work.

There's a reason so much AI is used for fan art. I think a lot, perhaps most of the people being really aggressive about AI and going off on how it will kill all the Hollywood elitists are really, really pissed off fans. And honestly, I get it. I watched Rise of Skywalker too. I watched Rey say those terrible, terrible things at the end, and I wished I could reach into the screen and change it. I watched Rise of Skywalker too. I watched Rey say those terrible, terrible things at the end.

And I wished I could reach into the screen and change it. Hey, JJ, earlier in the movie, you had an old woman ask Rey her name and she said, Rey, and they said, Rey what? And she said, sadly, just Rey. Have her say, just Rey at the end, but be happy about it. That makes sense for your movie that you made. Change it.

I can't, I tried. I reached into that screen and it. Change it. I can't, I tried. I reached into that screen and it hurt my hands. I can't change it. But here's where the slope gets pretty slippery. Because while movies are famously terrible and I hate all of them, there sure are a lot of toxic fans out there. People who are mad that Aloy from Horizon

dares to look like a human, or that they didn't make the child in The Last of Us hot enough, or that they made a mythical fictional creature black, the ultimate sin. Those people don't care at all about creativity or art. They just want the thing they like to be exactly the way they picture it, which just happens to be a way that exclusively erases minorities. That's interesting. They have been trained through years of corporate meddling

to see major blockbusters and art in general as a product that in no way should challenge or confuse them. Action figures banging together. And the tech and money people are more than happy to entertain this. To them, artists get in the way of making money. So they'll say stuff like, well, in the future, fans will be able to put themselves in the movies. Like that's the natural progression of entertainment.

And the most toxic fans will eat that up and talk about how they're gonna finally defeat Hollywood. It's rich people who hate art, selling bad ideas to people who don't understand art. Or worse, see art as being an attack in this great and holy culture war, a war they believe they are losing. We've done several videos about this,

about how conservatives have lost their ability to make art and entertainment. And while we gave our reasons why we think that is, here's what Ben, I wrote an entire book about how Hollywood didn't like my screenplay, Shapiro has to say about it. They say that they are interested in conservative entertainment,

but then when it comes time to fund it, they're like, well, I'd actually rather invest in fracking. And then when it comes to what they wanna watch, what they actually wanna watch is the same stuff that everybody else wants to watch. He's talking to Jason Blum of Blumhouse, by the way, who they label as a liberal Hollywood exec, and yet Ben absolutely fawns over him,

because Ben would drop his entire network and kill his family if that dude offered him a single writing gig. But what he's saying there is true. Nearly no one is funding conservative art, because it sucks. They have no arsenal in funding conservative art, because it sucks. They have no arsenal in the culture war, until now. To them, AI is the A-bomb to end that war once and for all,

because I'm sure you've noticed that AI art is disproportionately supported by conservatives. Remember all the weird Trump AI images before the election. And there's a reason for that. It's the same reason basically every musical artist sues or gets mad at Trump for playing their work at his rallies. They can't or won't hire artists, often don't understand art,

and are mad that their side has very little support from creatives and artistic people. So it must seem brilliant to simply do away with them entirely. Trump can just have AI make his own version of Born in the USA, and artistic people. So it must seem brilliant to simply do away with them entirely. Trump can just have AI make his own version of Born in the USA, or heck, he gets to completely rewrite reality now,

doesn't he? Former President Trump posted the AI generated images on his social media site over the weekend. The images make it look as if Taylor Swift and her fans were endorsing him. We haven't really mentioned it that much, but AI images are a powerful tool for propaganda and misinformation.

And it is no coincidence that there are just so many shitty AI pictures making Trump look muscular or heroic or cool or kind or good or correct. It is quite simply the official art style of fascism. It's perfect for fascists and liars, isn't it? It completely cuts out creatives and favors corporations instead. It trivializes and devalues art over the need for profit.

And it changes the truth to whatever you want it to be. It has that grotesque fake sheen texture, an illusion of some flawless, beautiful ideal smoothed over and perfected in a way that makes you nauseous. Not to mention that thanks to who is making these AI tools, it algorithmically erases minorities and people with disabilities.

It's a perfect little Hitler machine. Don't just ask me, ask Kate Crawford, a tech researcher who pointed this out seven years ago. AI and fascism work in hauntingly similar ways. For example, take facial recognition. Crawford points to this study from China where researchers trained in AI to predict the criminality of someone based on the shape of their face.

You know who else predicts the criminality of someone based on their face? Fucking fascists. Like historically, that's what they do. Your outsides are an expression of your deep spiritual insides to them. That study, which claimed to be unbiased, was by the way, extremely biased.

It was based off of photos of either wanted suspects or photos provided by the police. Otherwise known as very biased people. That's not an objective view of criminals, but rather the people that the police, otherwise known as very biased people. That's not an objective view of criminals, but rather the people that the police say are criminals. Isn't it? Its conclusion was, quote, "'The faces of general law-binding public

have a greater degree of resemblance compared with the faces of criminals.' In other words, criminals have a significantly higher degree of dissimilarity in facial appearance than normal population. faces of criminals. In other words, criminals have a significantly higher degree of dissimilarity in facial appearance than normal population. In other, other words, it's saying that criminals are people who look weird.

But what it's actually saying is that the police have a bias against people who look weird and tend to catch the criminals that don't fit in. Like imagine doing that same study here in America with the cops that we have. Imagine giving a computer pictures of the people cops see as criminals, and then asking it to create a totally unbiased profile

of what a criminal looks like. I don't have to tell you how badly that would go. It's a feedback loop, one that confirms the thing they already wanted. And now imagine a fascist getting their hands on this AI. It is the perfect tool for taking illogical biases and making them sound logical, for justifying horrible things,

such as labeling one type of person a criminal and claiming that they did it using a totally objective method. AI can scan faces, make snap decisions, and effortlessly stick people into groups based on biases it can't possibly understand. In terms of art, it not only will stagnate it, but become an echo chamber for some of the worst ideas

humanity has to offer. People love to pretend like AI is sentient or an independent entity from us, an objective third party spitting sage-like truth from the mouths of digital babes. People love asking chat GPT really deep questions and then acting like the answers have some kind of weight to them. I think that's why they might confuse AI images with some kind of creative act. But it's just a parrot, and not even a cool parrot, like any real living parrot.

It's just taking human-created content, shuffling it around, and randomly, or not so randomly, regurgitating it in a way that seems unique. And because people don't understand that process, it feels like magic, smart magic. And ironically, there's a future where our demise won't be from the machines that gain sentience, but rather from humans who think

that machines have gained sentience and use those machines to justify terrible things. It was us, we're the bad ones all along. Man was the monster. Has anyone made an art about how man is actually the monster? Am I the first to do that? I should put that in RIPD. Let's take an ad break while I hop into final draft

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Use fade in, folks. Hey, hi, did you miss me? Probably not, since it was only a few minutes and I likely did at least one of those ad reads. So anyway, AI is bad, anti-art, fascism, et cetera. And while that's already an existential threat in itself, naturally, AI is actually two existential threats, one on our culture and one on our planet.

Because of course, of course, of course, of course, generative AI uselessly eats up a ton of energy. According to a chief executive of the chip design company ARM, AI data centers could consume up to 25% of all power in the United States by the end of this decade. A January report by the International Energy Agency claimed that a single chat GPT request, let's say,

a story about an elephant magician with huge milkers, consumes enough energy to power a 60 watt light bulb for three minutes. That's almost 10 times the amount of power to do a simple Google search for a story about an elephant magician with huge milkers. Can't even imagine how much power it would use if it ended in 200 cliffhangers.

And if you wanted to make a picture of that elephant magician with huge milkers, well, according to a study done by an AI startup, making a thousand AI images emits the same amount of carbon dioxide as driving 4.1 miles in a gas-powered car. And when 34 million images of things with huge milkers are generated every day, you can see the problem. And speaking of huge milkers, AI, of course, also consumes a bunch of our water. Let's say I ask 10 to 50 questions of ChatGPT. The hugely popular chatbot would need to gulp

about 500 milliliters of water to provide me with the answers. What exactly is the point of creating an artificial intelligence that drinks more water than us? Pretty much every AI company requires a stupid amount of water to cool the servers at their data centers, and they know it's bad. There's a reason why Google and other tech platforms are expanding their data centers

to Latin America and other developing countries, since it'll be less of a legal fight there. This is sprouting protests in places such as Uruguay, a country that's going through such a terrible and historic drought that they are actually rerouting seawater into the drinking supply. And yet, Google wants to make a data center there that would go through two million gallons of water per day. Hey, that sounds evil.

In an attempt to compromise, the company has said that they'd use air conditioners as their primary cooling source, but that just replaces Uruguay's water problem with an air pollution and toxic waste problem. That plan is predicted to produce 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 86 tons of waste from oils, chemical packaging,

and quote, ''electro-electronic residues among other hazardous materials''. Per year! All so Google can maintain a search AI system that no one wants, doesn't work and everyone hates. Everyone hates this shit. Everyone! But of course AI isn't for us,

the same way Google expanding into a country where they don't have to pay taxes isn't for us either. Or how multiple AI tech companies are using cheap overseas labor, paying $2 or less an hour to scrub through and moderate their chat bots. Because it turns out that you still need people to operate the miracle artificial intelligence.

Does everyone realize that? Do people realize that a lot of companies have had a history of hiring cheap laborers to pretend like they are AI to make their tech seem more impressive? I cannot stress enough how unimpressive AI is and how the only people who seem to like it are sycophants with weird ideological hangups

or large corporations who want to save money. That is, after all, the big answer to why we're seeing more and more AI infiltrating our media despite no one liking it. The big boring reason we all knew going back to that Coca-Cola ad, it's money. Of course it's money. In spite of an overall recession in the tech industry,

investors are flooding billions of dollars into AI startups. It's the big short-term fad that corporations adore. Everyone has their own AI now and are desperately trying to keep up with each other. In the next five years, investment in AI is predicted to surpass a trillion dollars and people don't even know what to do with it.

There's a big report out Friday from Goldman Sachs in which they make the point that the amount of capital investment in this sector, which is billions of dollars now, is so large that it's almost unimaginable that we're going to get a rate of return on it. But make us assumptions about what this technology can do that we haven't proven yet. And as a consequence we're applying it in places where it may not work. And if that's true, then the mania is gonna come to an end

and the largest stocks in the S&P 500 are all going to be very heavily affected. There are so many rich people who have so much money dumped into AI that they are going to cram it down our throats. Despite consumers rejecting it time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again. It is vital for them that the general public accept AI, not just for search engines and

customer service, but as artists. They need a world where making an entire ad or movie from AI isn't poison for the company that's funding it. And so ultimately, AI art is a corporate pushed ideology powered by the sunk cost fallacy and all of our water. They will glom onto whoever is willing to accept it, be that fascists and dummies or whoever. And if creatives and journalists stand in their way,

then they will simply push those people aside. And lucky for them, they also own the algorithms deciding that. You've probably noticed that social media sure has been filled with a lot of AI slop lately, either as political propaganda posted by very stupid people, or just random posts of sad cats, or those pictures where if you squint,

it makes a secret image, usually of Jesus. Well, you can probably guess that the reason they are suddenly everywhere it makes a secret image, usually of Jesus. Well, you can probably guess that the reason they are suddenly everywhere is because the algorithms themselves are pushing them. Facebook and threads and TikTok and Twitter are going out of their way to thrust these AI images upon us, giving them an artificial sense of popularity.

They don't care if these images are misinformation or fascist propaganda, or take eyes away from actual artists. Because to them, social media is just a big money machine that they constantly tweak to squeeze out the most profit. They don't actually have to do anything, but provide the space and siphon our data and plague us with ads, like something you'd milk. I don't know what exactly, but in that process,

the variable they always had to contend with was people themselves, trends, humor, intangible things you can't calculate. It's ultimately up to we social humans to make a social media site popular by actually posting on it and consuming each other's posts, at least for now. Because wouldn't it be neat for all those rich people, I mean, if they could guarantee output,

if they could look at their numbers and say, we need more cat memes, and then just tell a computer to generate those, make them look authentic, and then use an algorithm to boost their popularity. If you're correctly realizing that doing this would devalue their website and likely drive away users, well, good news for the rich people. Have you ever wondered what it's like to be popular on social media? Like those influencers with millions of followers. A new microblogging platform

called Social AI has launched. It's similar to Twitter, but with one major difference. Instead of interacting with other people, you engage with an endless number of AI-generated bots that only respond to your posts. So we're in hell. Now bot farms have been a thing for a while. If you, I don't know, stupidly made a social media site that paid people for engagement, it would attract a lot of these bot farms, obviously. What's interesting about this app, Social AI,

which uses AI chat bots to make you feel popular, it has nothing to do with that app at all. What's interesting is that the creator of that app is now working for Meta specifically to help build the future of generative AI. They don't give details, but considering his previous work, it's possible that this is Facebook's attempt at staying relevant by using AI

to not only create slop posts, but to engage with the slop posts. Just AI slop talking to AI slop until no one is actually on these sites. Also, they can look profitable on a spreadsheet. I think in their minds, if they make their sites look popular, then young and human people will show up. But ultimately, it's just going to be this weird,

humanless ecosystem of bots engaging with other bots to keep a company stock high until it suddenly and violently collapses while a bunch of very rich people eject themselves from the disaster. Meanwhile, actual humans who make actual art will be... I don't know, man, probably not doing great. Maybe on MySpace, who knows? And so at this point, our only hope is that someone, perhaps with an email address that ends in.gov, does something about this.

The European Union has put various AI protections into law for their citizens and appears to be adapting them and refining them over time. But this ain't Euroville, this is a Mariburg. Artists are obviously advocating for updating copyright laws, and even taking these companies to court, and winning in fact. So that's a start. There are also some individual state regulations being proposed and put into law, but most of them are focused on protecting consumers rather than addressing the copyright issues. For now, if you are an artist concerned about this,

you should look into a tool called Nightshade that will actually poison or mask your artwork so that AI companies can't use it to train their bots. This is sadly as far as we might get for a while. After all, the next president is big old buddies This is, sadly, as far as we might get for a while. After all, the next president is big old buddies with the guy who loves AI. As long as it's not, it can't be woke,

that AI, it can't be woke. It's perfectly unbiased because it's biased against your biases. Good idea, grock for president. Not to mention that Trump has already said that he would repeal the modest AI protections that Biden put into place via executive order. Because hey, you do realize that they are going to start

using AI in the government. You do realize that, that the Department of Dank Efficiency is absolutely going to replace the IRS or whatever with a chat bot that automatically audits anyone with a tilde in their name and runs on the blood of baby seals. Hooray Sound Effects.Wave. So just to recap, AI art is bad for the environment,

a tool for corporations and fascists, and not only is bad for artists, but bad for art. It stunts the creation of artists. The next Martin Scorsese or John Waters or Sir Ben Affleck might be out there right now and they might never grow into their potential and instead just waste away on mid-journey. Just typing in words to get perfectly rendered smushes

of stolen material that's ultimately stagnant and boring. I don't know, that sucks, right? My hope is that AI hype will calm down and over time, people will recognize it as just one more tool that can be used for actual art. Like people make collages all the time, right? Art is this really broad thing that includes everything from found objects

to computer algorithms. It's innovative and abstract and it's not inherently political. And in a vacuum, AI generative images are fine. Like I've seen a lot of really cool abstract art made with AI. There's probably a way to responsibly create AI art as like this niche thing.

There's a place for it. The problem is that the people supporting it seem to think that art is like this zero sum game where one art form must replace all the other arts. It's like if when they invented the keytar, everyone started saying that it was going to replace all music ever made. Music is dead. The keytar is your god now. Humans lost. Like, calm down.

It's just a tool. That's it. And tools have limitations. But when it comes to art, they all serve the same beautiful purpose, to take something, be it Daffy Duck or Cogsworth from Beauty and the Beast, and give them just great pig milkers, huge sweater puppets, maybe Fievel is there too,

the Iron Giant with a pair of iron giant boobs. You get it. Art. I like giant milkers with giant milkers. We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can watch it on this channel as a video podcast or listen to it at the podcast store. You can listen to Some More News as a podcast if you prefer. We've got merch at a merch store, shop.somemorenews.com.

Check it out, check the stuff out on it with your eyes and click on the things and like and subscribe. And I'm hoping that I can maybe get Ryan Reynolds for RIPD. I think that'd be pretty funny. He is like a like a like a ghost cop. But he's like it's like it's like Men in Black, but like with Ghostbusters. He's like you take two things are already made and kind of mash them up together and you make some crap. Good idea.