Bloopers & News 4/19/24

Oh, people. Get a load of this . . .

Today I was all set to write about AI art and copyright laws, but then my sister-in-law sent me this video and I knew I had to share it ASAP. It’s a trailer for a rom-com called Next Stop Paris which will be released this summer. The movie is billed as “the first short film entirely generated using artificial intelligence.”

We all know that rom-coms made by, say, the Hallmark Channel are frequently like a Donald Trump stump speech - exactly the same as the last one but with a few minor details altered. Imagine the tropes that a computer will regurgitate over and over. AI, aie yai yai.

Without further ado, I present to you the trailer for Next Stop Paris:

I mean, talk about uncanny valley. It looks very much like The Polar Express which was made twenty years ago.

“The Polar Express” infamously freaked people the f**k out.

And I can’t tell if the rom-com is about one woman or four different women competing for the same man? I sympathize with the problem of not finding character consistency within AI, but then I am not trying to pass off my project as a replacement for the real deal.

The company that has created this fascinating nightmare (fas-mare) is TCL, whose name looks (definitely on purpose) a lot like TLC (The Learning Channel) or TCM (Turner Classic Movies), but TCL is actually a TV manufacturing company that competes with LG and Samsung, and they offer a free channel of streaming content on all their TVS. So this is really a stunt to sell TVs, not movies.

The concern is, of course, that we shudder and mock this trailer but soon the tech is going to get much, much better. So much better that companies like TCL and Hallmark might stop hiring actors at all. Why not? They obviously stopped hiring writers years ago. Burn.

The press is predicting people will watch this film purely for the novelty of it. But will they watch the second, third, or one thousandth film? I think only if one happens to hit on something unique and thought provoking. And you know what they say: “An infinite amount of monkeys plus an infinite amount of typewriters plus an infinite amount of time equals Hamlet.”

I find myself thinking about this theorem a lot these days. I first heard it from my father as a teenager. At that age I understood it as some sort of lesson about infinity and luck; however, my father was a statistician and computer engineer, and I have to wonder if, with his knowledge of probability and the vast potential of tech, he already understood that when computers got smart enough they would inevitably write Shakespeare.

Until then, we will be seeing a lot of bulls**t like See You in Paris.

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NAILED IT

While writing this post I decided to create a poster for a rom-com starring Donald Trump, you know, for shnits and giggles.

My prompt was “create the image of Donald Trump starring in a romantic comedy.” This was the response:

So I tried again but added the phrase “graphic novel style” lest the program think I was trying to make a deep fake (because we all know the danger of believing Trump was actually the star of Sleepless in Seattle).

And this happened:

I got blocked for abuse!

I went to DallE 3 and tried the same prompt (I added “parody” just in case) and this is what it created.

It didn’t block me, but it altered my prompt and gave me “a business man resembling Donald Trump.” But he is too young and not nearly orange enough. I do love the nod to the insane hair.

The crazy thing about all of this is that in January (three months ago) I created this image with Midjourney.

My prompt was “a drawing in graphic novel style of President Trump grabbing his chest in pain. He is standing in front of the White House.”

It’s Trump having a heart attack, and Midjourney had no objections to creating it! Is the change because the election is approaching? Are officials getting more nervous about deep fakes? Or is it that the AI companies are starting to worry more about repercussions? Haaahahaha. Just kidding. They don’t care.

I will leave you with some other images that Midjourney made in January when I told it to “create a drawing in graphic novel style of the Oval Office. On the floor is a dead body covered in a white sheet. EMT men surround the body.”

Here Kyle MacLachlan stars as Fox Mulder as he investigates dead congressmen who finally managed to literally talk out their asses.

Next we have men in the Oval mourning a throw pillow.

And finally, Trump, as demanded in his will, has been transformed into an enormous Chinese dumpling.

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