My decidedly anti-AI friends won’t like this post and may wish to skip it.
As you may have noticed, I am very ambivalent about the technology. It seems to demean human creativity, burns through energy recklessly, enables new forms of deception and control … but it also unleashes remarkable new avenues for a kind of creativity that collaborates with collective memory.
The best AI image generator, Midjourney, just released a video generation system that yields very impressive results. What’s the next step? The company says:
… we believe the inevitable destination of this technology are models capable of real-time open-world simulations.
What’s that? Basically; imagine an AI system that generates imagery in real-time. You can command it to move around in 3D space, the environments and characters also move, and you can interact with everything.
An old dream of creating a real dream, now becoming real.
You can make a video from an image you’ve uploaded or generated with a text prompt. The video can be extended (currently) up to four times in segments of a few seconds, generated either purely by the AI or in collaboration with your instructions. This gives ordinary mortals the power to assemble a little movie that illustrates their ideas.
Here’s a mini-film I made. I wanted to start with a creepy atmosphere. My prompt for an image was:
A scene inspired by a story from the bizarre cult classic The King in Yellow. A small deformed man secretly controls the actions of distant victims. This is a retro vision of a bygone future. The style of the scene is low-saturation, low contrast, sickly colors, inspiring an undefinable anxiety.
Midjourney generates results in sets of four, so you can select the one you like best (or start all over again). I picked this one.
But it didn’t feel just right, so I asked the AI to create variations on the image, and I selected this one.
Then I used it as the basis for assembling this video.
We’ve entered a new era, for better and worse.
So, to get back to the official theme of this blog: Can a typewriter do this?
No.
However, there are at least two interesting possibilities for high-low-tech collaboration here.
1. Brainstorm at the typewriter, letting your words run free, until some sequences of visions appears in verbal form on the paper. Then give those words to the AI and see how it “imagines” them. Tweak the results until they satisfy you.
2. Start by making an AI video, then sit at the typewriter and describe it, finding the best words to evoke the specificities that have emerged in the film.
Whatever the evils of AI, I am sure that creative people in our community are going to find new forms of digital-analog interaction that will stimulate new thoughts and emotions.
Very unusually gullible for someone who insists on using a typewriter — presumably for the artisanal nature of the craft! Midjourney’s touted ambitions are insulting to the process of creating a film or picture, in the same way LLM-model chatbots are a monumental insult to the craft of writing. So much for freedom from digital control. This technology is on the path to ripping the artistic process out from under established and developing painters/photographers/filmmakers alike. There is always room to experiment with new technology, but there is a remarkable failure to introspect on display in this post. Seriously disappointing. Even using this crap for pre-visualisation robs us of the chance to construct our imagination on our own. You will be led down corridors that are purely aesthetic, with no theme or reason behind them. A vapid device. Spiritually destructive for the artist. It deserves nothing but scorn.
I think my other posts about AI show that I’m hardly a pollyanna about this stuff. I would argue that as someone interested in the place of mechanical technology in a digitized world, as an educator, and simply as an inhabitant of the second quarter of the 21st century, I have a responsibility to research some of the potential of generative AI. I also think it offers some culturally significant possibilities that are going to affect us all, not always for the worse. That said, I still deeply appreciate thought and creation that happen under purely human steam, as it were, and this blog will not be taken over by computer-generated “content.” Thanks for commenting.