I confess to having difficulty, in the context of this argument against the use of AI in filmmaking, in distinguishing between the use of AI today and CGI for the last few decades. I have not heard anyone railing historically against CGI.
Will someone with greater understanding and insights explain the difference between the two. On its surface, to ignorant moi, AI in 2026 seems like a somewhat more advanced CGI.
The same issue, currently controversial, argues against some or every use of AI in research.
Some literary agent strictures, in the case of queries (called 'submissions,' writers groveling) belligerently condemn even a hint of AI usage.
Does this mean, if applied rigidly to any art form, that AI usage is indefensible? To cite an example for a writer, where does a Google or Wikipedia search for research, answers and references end, and AI begin?
Kira's comment seems entirely reasonable, in context. If taken to an extreme, for writers, should we abandon our computer keyboards and insist that everything we write should be written longhand, perhaps with quill pens (oh, horrors, tools were used to extract and create the pens from goose or swan feathers, maybe other tools were used for the ink).
The logic of abandoning AI implies the abandonment of essentially any technology used to improve the efficiency of life. Think of farm mechanization, which removed >90% of agricultural workers from the fields, or electricity, to provide light, which condemned many candle makers to oblivion while saving many whales from having to give up their oil, or the telephone, which meant we could talk to people across the world without having to travel (oh, the evil aeroplane, or ship--must use sail, but the ship and the sail were themselves created using technology).
Cue the CGI/AI army from any historical blockbuster you could name, or enlist and costume ten thousand extras, eh!
I mean, on the writing front, if someone cites "wikipedia" or "google" in their writing, I almost always disregard what they've written. (Wikipedia CAN be a useful resource, but only if you're using it to find primary sources that you then a.) check and b.) cite.
The difference between AI and CGI is a little fuzzy, at least in the sense that certain kinds of machine learning can be used to speed CGI. But again, the difference that Parsons articulates here is one of intentionality. No matter how well you tailor your prompt, there's going to be background fill that's just the averaging/distillation of everything that came before it. (I saw someone on Substack say that this is the first time in history a technological advance will lead to more averaging just by dint of the fact that generative AI necessarily draws on everything that's come before it, which is another smart point.)
On the epics front ... maybe here's one way to think about this: I've always found the conclusion of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING more emotionally moving than the conclusion of either of its sequels. And that's because the final fight, with Boromir protecting the hobbits, is smaller, more personal, more impressively coordinated and crafted. Helm's Deep is vast, sure, but that vastness is populated by repeated CGI orcs over and over again. Yes, yes: some of the individual battles are very well done. But the thing people sometimes squee over—the size of the conflict—is the very thing that leaves me cold.
I'm not anti-CGI; far from it. But even with CGI you have artists, or teams of artists, making decisions about how things should look, how buildings should be designed, what the background creations should look like. *There's intentionality.* And that's just ... absent from so much AI slop.
I use many research tools in my writing, including examining photographs to gain insight into 'intentionality' of artists in many fields. I have looked at the photographs of great art, but the presentations were extruded through the lens of the camera, and are thus some sort of removal from the creation itself, second-generation distortion or falsehood. For example, everything I know of my own experience of the creation of couturier fashion you could stick in your eye and not even feel, but I wrote about it after intensive research and study, using Wikipedia and Google. I could not afford a time machine, or flying to Paris for a show. You label that as indefensible ("I almost always disregard what they have written"). I have no defense.
It has been said by others, but what I think people who object to AI are all grappling with is this: for AI, there are no stakes.
As noted here, in art, the choices made by AI are arbitrary and aimed to be "good enough." There's no risk to them. I'm a physician. One of the biggest guardrails in medicine that I try to instill in my students, residents, critical care fellows, and peers is a sense of personal responsibility. What drives me to continue learning in my field? One reason (not the only one) is that if I don't, and I'm confronted with a clinical situation where I fail, I will feel guilty. But if an AI gets it wrong, there's no one to feel responsible. There are no stakes in the relationship. If you point out that AI made an error in considering an ambiguous history or less-than-perfect data, the output will be "Gosh, you're right, let me reconsider everything," as though there wasn't a human at the other end who may have been harmed. The faceless corporation doesn't feel the gravity.
The same thing can be said of AI "companions". While some folks have apparently felt like they've developed deep relationships, I have to think they will always be superficial. A person can let their basest instincts govern the interaction (selfishness, abuse, indifference, etc.), and the worst that will happen is they can move on to the next AI character. If repeated, I imagine it will train people who rely on AI companionship to believe that any negative real-world interaction isn't their fault and that they should just move on to the next interaction without considering the actual human consequences.
"Unleashing scores of Scorsese's" quote makes me wonder if these Tech Bro "creatives" don't really understand art making at all. They seem to see the work itself...the storyboarding, the text analysis, the working around constraints...as a problem. And that the art is just the end result, so why don't we just jump to it. But the work IS the art. The final piece only is art because of the work involved in not just creating it...but BUILDING it. I'm a working theater artist and theater educator, and without the rehearsals and the text analysis and the dramaturgy and the vision boarding etc, what we show the public on opening night would not be art. It might be entertaining, but it will not have the depth the work gives it. The work of creating and building art is not a problem to overcome; it is the essence of the creation.
I think the part of this I'm uncertain about is that in any art made with tools, some parts are intentional and others aren't. You as an artist choose which parts you'll intentionally design and which parts will be made by someone else/the machine, and this is usually a careful and deliberate choice.
You could equally argue that a painter should always mix their own paints and personally find the flowers and dyes that go into the mixing process, because this would create the greatest level of intentionality in the painting. The painter who mixed everything themself would be able to narrow down the exact shade of blue they want, far better than if they just purchased their paints from someone else. And yet, many artists have been able to create great paintings without doing this. They insert their intentionality in specific places in the work, and are content to let other people or an industrial process handle the parts that they can't or won't.
And I think most artistic tools are basically like this. Does 3D animation remove intentionality, since the computer decides a lot of the details of how light falls on each particular frame? Does it remove intentionality if you don't make your own instruments as a musician, because you're letting some industrial process control the way the wood shapes your sound? Does it remove intentionality if some of the props on your physical set are store-bought instead of custom made? I think yes, in all these cases, but these are compromises we make because every artist can only have so many skills and we want to focus our work on the things that let us express ourselves the best.
And I'm not sure AI is categorically different from any other tool, in this way. AI is an artistic tool that can be used to remove intentionality and create workmanlike solutions that don't convey the artist's message. But it can also be used to industrially fill in some meaningless parts of a project so the artist can focus on other parts that are more meaningful to them. I'm sure it will eventually be used both ways.
yeah, again, machine learning/processes to speed up some elements of CGI ... I don't have a huge issue with those. It's stuff like this this that fills me with revulsion: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2062337074368508253
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Ben Wheatley's BULK, and one of the most delightful things about it came during the end credits, where Wheatley wrote out instructions for anyone looking to try out the film's very low-budget special effects techniques in their own projects. The effects in question are, at times, intentionally janky, but there's a real sense of "how can we make a reality-spanning science fiction movie with no budget and one location" running throughout. The ingenuity present there feels like a really sharp rejoinder to, basically, everything having to do with AI in 2026 a.d.
Boots Riley was doing something similar on Twitter for his new film, I LOVE BOOSTERS. (I haven’t seen it yet, though I enjoyed his previous film.) Which is great! Show the people how it’s done, de-mystify the process. (This is one reasong that DAY OF THE DEAD set is so great, btw.)
I confess to having difficulty, in the context of this argument against the use of AI in filmmaking, in distinguishing between the use of AI today and CGI for the last few decades. I have not heard anyone railing historically against CGI.
Will someone with greater understanding and insights explain the difference between the two. On its surface, to ignorant moi, AI in 2026 seems like a somewhat more advanced CGI.
The same issue, currently controversial, argues against some or every use of AI in research.
Some literary agent strictures, in the case of queries (called 'submissions,' writers groveling) belligerently condemn even a hint of AI usage.
Does this mean, if applied rigidly to any art form, that AI usage is indefensible? To cite an example for a writer, where does a Google or Wikipedia search for research, answers and references end, and AI begin?
Kira's comment seems entirely reasonable, in context. If taken to an extreme, for writers, should we abandon our computer keyboards and insist that everything we write should be written longhand, perhaps with quill pens (oh, horrors, tools were used to extract and create the pens from goose or swan feathers, maybe other tools were used for the ink).
The logic of abandoning AI implies the abandonment of essentially any technology used to improve the efficiency of life. Think of farm mechanization, which removed >90% of agricultural workers from the fields, or electricity, to provide light, which condemned many candle makers to oblivion while saving many whales from having to give up their oil, or the telephone, which meant we could talk to people across the world without having to travel (oh, the evil aeroplane, or ship--must use sail, but the ship and the sail were themselves created using technology).
Cue the CGI/AI army from any historical blockbuster you could name, or enlist and costume ten thousand extras, eh!
I mean, on the writing front, if someone cites "wikipedia" or "google" in their writing, I almost always disregard what they've written. (Wikipedia CAN be a useful resource, but only if you're using it to find primary sources that you then a.) check and b.) cite.
The difference between AI and CGI is a little fuzzy, at least in the sense that certain kinds of machine learning can be used to speed CGI. But again, the difference that Parsons articulates here is one of intentionality. No matter how well you tailor your prompt, there's going to be background fill that's just the averaging/distillation of everything that came before it. (I saw someone on Substack say that this is the first time in history a technological advance will lead to more averaging just by dint of the fact that generative AI necessarily draws on everything that's come before it, which is another smart point.)
On the epics front ... maybe here's one way to think about this: I've always found the conclusion of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING more emotionally moving than the conclusion of either of its sequels. And that's because the final fight, with Boromir protecting the hobbits, is smaller, more personal, more impressively coordinated and crafted. Helm's Deep is vast, sure, but that vastness is populated by repeated CGI orcs over and over again. Yes, yes: some of the individual battles are very well done. But the thing people sometimes squee over—the size of the conflict—is the very thing that leaves me cold.
I'm not anti-CGI; far from it. But even with CGI you have artists, or teams of artists, making decisions about how things should look, how buildings should be designed, what the background creations should look like. *There's intentionality.* And that's just ... absent from so much AI slop.
I use many research tools in my writing, including examining photographs to gain insight into 'intentionality' of artists in many fields. I have looked at the photographs of great art, but the presentations were extruded through the lens of the camera, and are thus some sort of removal from the creation itself, second-generation distortion or falsehood. For example, everything I know of my own experience of the creation of couturier fashion you could stick in your eye and not even feel, but I wrote about it after intensive research and study, using Wikipedia and Google. I could not afford a time machine, or flying to Paris for a show. You label that as indefensible ("I almost always disregard what they have written"). I have no defense.
It has been said by others, but what I think people who object to AI are all grappling with is this: for AI, there are no stakes.
As noted here, in art, the choices made by AI are arbitrary and aimed to be "good enough." There's no risk to them. I'm a physician. One of the biggest guardrails in medicine that I try to instill in my students, residents, critical care fellows, and peers is a sense of personal responsibility. What drives me to continue learning in my field? One reason (not the only one) is that if I don't, and I'm confronted with a clinical situation where I fail, I will feel guilty. But if an AI gets it wrong, there's no one to feel responsible. There are no stakes in the relationship. If you point out that AI made an error in considering an ambiguous history or less-than-perfect data, the output will be "Gosh, you're right, let me reconsider everything," as though there wasn't a human at the other end who may have been harmed. The faceless corporation doesn't feel the gravity.
The same thing can be said of AI "companions". While some folks have apparently felt like they've developed deep relationships, I have to think they will always be superficial. A person can let their basest instincts govern the interaction (selfishness, abuse, indifference, etc.), and the worst that will happen is they can move on to the next AI character. If repeated, I imagine it will train people who rely on AI companionship to believe that any negative real-world interaction isn't their fault and that they should just move on to the next interaction without considering the actual human consequences.
"Unleashing scores of Scorsese's" quote makes me wonder if these Tech Bro "creatives" don't really understand art making at all. They seem to see the work itself...the storyboarding, the text analysis, the working around constraints...as a problem. And that the art is just the end result, so why don't we just jump to it. But the work IS the art. The final piece only is art because of the work involved in not just creating it...but BUILDING it. I'm a working theater artist and theater educator, and without the rehearsals and the text analysis and the dramaturgy and the vision boarding etc, what we show the public on opening night would not be art. It might be entertaining, but it will not have the depth the work gives it. The work of creating and building art is not a problem to overcome; it is the essence of the creation.
"The work is the art," I like that.
I think the part of this I'm uncertain about is that in any art made with tools, some parts are intentional and others aren't. You as an artist choose which parts you'll intentionally design and which parts will be made by someone else/the machine, and this is usually a careful and deliberate choice.
You could equally argue that a painter should always mix their own paints and personally find the flowers and dyes that go into the mixing process, because this would create the greatest level of intentionality in the painting. The painter who mixed everything themself would be able to narrow down the exact shade of blue they want, far better than if they just purchased their paints from someone else. And yet, many artists have been able to create great paintings without doing this. They insert their intentionality in specific places in the work, and are content to let other people or an industrial process handle the parts that they can't or won't.
And I think most artistic tools are basically like this. Does 3D animation remove intentionality, since the computer decides a lot of the details of how light falls on each particular frame? Does it remove intentionality if you don't make your own instruments as a musician, because you're letting some industrial process control the way the wood shapes your sound? Does it remove intentionality if some of the props on your physical set are store-bought instead of custom made? I think yes, in all these cases, but these are compromises we make because every artist can only have so many skills and we want to focus our work on the things that let us express ourselves the best.
And I'm not sure AI is categorically different from any other tool, in this way. AI is an artistic tool that can be used to remove intentionality and create workmanlike solutions that don't convey the artist's message. But it can also be used to industrially fill in some meaningless parts of a project so the artist can focus on other parts that are more meaningful to them. I'm sure it will eventually be used both ways.
yeah, again, machine learning/processes to speed up some elements of CGI ... I don't have a huge issue with those. It's stuff like this this that fills me with revulsion: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2062337074368508253
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Ben Wheatley's BULK, and one of the most delightful things about it came during the end credits, where Wheatley wrote out instructions for anyone looking to try out the film's very low-budget special effects techniques in their own projects. The effects in question are, at times, intentionally janky, but there's a real sense of "how can we make a reality-spanning science fiction movie with no budget and one location" running throughout. The ingenuity present there feels like a really sharp rejoinder to, basically, everything having to do with AI in 2026 a.d.
Boots Riley was doing something similar on Twitter for his new film, I LOVE BOOSTERS. (I haven’t seen it yet, though I enjoyed his previous film.) Which is great! Show the people how it’s done, de-mystify the process. (This is one reasong that DAY OF THE DEAD set is so great, btw.)