This is a screenshot from an AI-generated movie titled “Sun Day”. I’m not going to show you the short movie itself which is freely available on YouTube, because I like you too much. It’s terrible. The plot is absurd, the acting is wooden and silly, the events in the plot are ridiculous and unbelievable, and everything is cobbled together with awkward and unlikely transitions. It’s bad. This is AI if AI is a smug little child with access to daddy’s high-tech video editing deck, but no background in literature or film or even Saturday morning cartoons.
It’s from an overly-generous but still critical review of a whole set of AI-generated movies. There is a company, TCL, that makes televisions, but plans to break into the streaming services market by creating a whole channel of nothing but AI-generated movies. They were premiering a set of films that were supposed to generate positive buzz for the whole idea, so you might assume they’d pick the very best representatives of the medium.
They’re all awful.
You don’t need to see them to realize that, though, because here’s the company spiel on why their service is so cool.
Before airing the short, AI-generated films, Haohong Wang, the general manager of TCL Research America, gave a presentation in which he explained that TCL’s AI movie and TV strategy would be informed and funded by targeted advertising, and that its content will “create a flywheel effect funded by two forces, advertising and AI.” He then pulled up a slide that suggested AI-generated “free premium originals” would be a “new era” of filmmaking alongside the Silent Film era, the Golden Age of Hollywood, etc.
Catherine Zhang, TCL’s vice president of content services and partnerships, then explained to the audience that TCL’s streaming strategy is to “offer a lean-back binge-watching experience” in which content passively washes over the people watching it. “Data told us that our users don’t want to work that hard,” she said. “Half of them don’t even change the channel.”
“We believe that CTV [connected TV] is the new cable,” she said. “With premium original content, precise ad-targeting capability, and an AI-powered, innovative engaging viewing experience, TCL’s content service will continue its double-digit growth next year.”
Oh my god. The company is driven by advertising and AI; they’re thrilled with their ad-targeting capability; they think double-digit growth is a good thing. This is a nightmare fueled by the bloviations of MBAs, without a hint of art or creativity anywhere.
Die, TCL, die.
I was hoping for interesting future Humphrey Bogart films generated by perfect audio/video AI-created scenarios, instead we’ll see stupid, violent and sexually-explicit crap with embedded advertising. Over-the-air television news already has embedded advertising, and before long everything on television will feature embedded or picture-in-picture commercials that cannot be eliminated. This is the future of humankind — the race to the bottom in the name of profit, and people will be so stupid they won’t even notice. Heil Trump.
Also, I think the Sun Day story was stolen poorly from a Ray Bradbury story about living on Venus, with perpetual crowd cover that rarely broke, and a child who was cruelly locked up during one of the rare days the sun shone through. This video just made it so much worse and far more stupid.
I watch a lot of astronomy related content on YouTube. I fell asleep the other night watching one such real video made by one of the many quality content-makers. I awoke several hours later after auto-play had taken over and it was still streaming an “astronomy-related” video but it was some terrible robot-narrated, AI-generated nonsense. The narrator was talking about the Crab Nebula and every time he said the word “crab” a picture of the literal crustacean would be shown on screen.
I watched out of sheer curiosity for about 5 minutes as one would stare at a bad car accident in passing: it did not get better. There were numerous factual errors of both the subtle and blatant kind. I already have a good knowledge base to understand how wrong and stupid this content was, but a child or other person without that knowledge base could possibly be fooled by it.
We are the dead.
Wow, that is a stupid thing to say. AI is not a source of funding, it is a sink.
So, pretty much indistinguishable from mainstream Hollywood output then?
They have. In fact, I’d wager that even the dreck they’ve come up with is largely the result of human curation, selection, and tidying up of a much large corpus of even worse dreck, because to the best of my current knowledge AI video does not work. This is just a play for some of that sweet, sweet VC cash that’s sloshing around. All of the demos are faked. The ability to actually deliver is entirely optional. Hell, that’s basically the case for the entire “AI” industry – it doesn’t work, it probably can’t be made to work, but if we can keep the hype machine rolling, we can keep the money coming a bit longer. Sure, it’ll all crash and burn eventually, but for now, open another bottle of Krug and chop out some more lines.
So it’s using gen-AI to create cheap films to get eyeballs to pitch products. Sounds like all TV (and many movies) except for the gen-AI part, and there’s not a big leap from a lot of Hollywood “action movie” fair to that. And I bet somewhere, someone is saying, “Yes, the first efforts will not be great, but they will get better as we refine the prompts.
They said: ‘funded by two forces, advertising and AI.’
I’m just going to throw up (my hands in disgust). Those two elements are the worst. Couple that with the videos as PZ described them and I don’t want to be any part of such a disgusting disaster.
we missed the August 29, 1997 deadline for Judgement Day, but hey, TCL seems to be trying for something else as good.
Reginald @5:
I expect the message comes from the same sort of business “genius” who thinks cutting expenses by firing half the workforce is the same thing as profit.
@ 9
Skynet isn’t going to resort to nuclear war to wipe out us meatbags, why waste good slaves? Just keep them dumb and they’ll do whatever the AI says.
@11 i think you just figured out the republican agenda
@ 12
What did Charlie Chaplin’s character in “The Great Dictator” call fascists during his famous speech? “Machine men, with machine minds?”
That’s a lot of effort to make money without effort and other human beings. It’s the use of the instincts that will undermine what economies are. Cooperations and stock markets and money were bad ideas. We made them. We can choose to unmake and heavily modify them regardless of any individuals thinks business is for. We collectively decide that.
Maybe getting rid of money is unrealistic but I can have long term goals I won’t live to see.
Well, at least after Elon Musk gets sent into space, we know what the worst movies we can find to send to him will be.
They made you look.
@#4: [iron voice from the telescreen] You are the dead!
@#7 Robro: so…kids animated teevee for the last 55 years, then https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/first-cartoon-made-for-existing-toys.htm#:~:text=From%201969%20to%201971%2C%20a,for%20an%20existing%20toy%20line.
#18, Cont’d…Actually it kind of makes sense, anyone under about 60 more or less grew up watching those cartoon commercials, so we have multiple generations all primed for watching AI generated dreck that’s a long advertisement for the dreck featured.
brucej. @#18 Yes. Pokemon is the prototype. Digimon the really cheap knockoff. Awful stuff over and over.
Their TVs are good, but the AI movies look dumb. Much like the early days of the internet, we’re sure to see a lot of bad ideas in the coming years.
I recently looked at doing an online editing job which turned out to be editing dross produced by AI as away of “training” AI programs. I failed miserably at it because the final exam in the preliminary training involved answering questions about the correctness or otherwise of AI generated information.
I got 4 out of 5 questions wrong because the program in question was using outdated information. In one example I was asked if including a particular restaurant in a tour itinerary was correct. My yes answer was marked wrong because the program decided that the restaurant had closed three years ago. Except it hadn’t really closed. It had been planning an expansion involving a relocation so when Covid hit it closed down and began fitting out new premises and reopened in its new location when life returned to relatively normal. The intelligence in AI is definitely a poor substitute for the real thing. As for AI movies I’d rather go back to the silent era where the actors really had to act.
I recognized “Sun Day” as a Bradbury ripoff within the first few seconds, and it was a confusing mess from there on out.
The woman turning into a slug was decent body horror, so the uncanny AI worked in its favor. But when they showed a brief x-ray view of her arthritic knee, I realized she was in so much pain because she had waaaay too many bones in her leg. :) Also she needed better friends, since her apparent bff responded to her panicked “help me!” call with a cheery, “Sorry it took me so long to get back. Kids were sick. Wanna go for a walk sometime?” No wonder she looked happier as a slug.
Despite what it portends AI-wise, I did like “The Audition” (which used live actors), since it highlighted the absurdities of casting directors looking for reasons to turn you down.
“Best Day of My Life” was called a “docufiction” so I don’t know if the story was real or not. It was pretty harrowing regardless, enough to distract from the blatant AI elements. But I’d hate to think what a normal production of it would put real actors through, even with CGI effects.
It feels appropriate that TCL wants to show AI films, with no creativity or imagination in their making, to viewers who are passively sitting on the couch, not paying attention, just letting the pixels wash over them.
We’ve almost managed to eliminate conscious thought from capitalism. Just think how much money we could make if we could go the last mile and cut human beings out of the loop completely. Here’s my proposal: show AI-generated films to AI-generated viewers. We’ll make billions!
@ 17
Finally, someone got it!
As a fan of God Awful Movies I suspect some really bad “real” films will be compareable to AI films. So we will just automate the process to generate trash for Pureflix.
Wossname the dude who once played Hercules will be out of a job.
(Lightbulb moment)
We can automate the process of making pseudoscience “documentaries”. We will put the Flat Earth crowd out of business!
I nominate the cosmology of the Japanese Happy Science cult to be first for this treatment.
robro 20 No, Pokémon and Digimon have completely separate origins. The latter just gets accused of ripping off the former because they came out around the same time (to really oversimplify it, Pokémon is primarily an RPG game series while Digimon is more like Tamagotchi).
While the Pokémon anime is part of the multimedia created after the games were (since it does help market said games, that’s not in question), comparing that to the cheap advertainment of something like 1980s He-Man or implying that its audience will mindlessly consume generative AI content is honestly the sort of scapegoating that news outlets used against the franchise all the time in the 90s/early 00s, claiming it was evil/scary/inscrutable/worthless, etc.
The original head anime writer Takeshi Shudo fought very hard to adapt the games into a show that tried to actually develop its original cast and have more interesting sympathetic characters aimed at all ages, but this was overlooked because the franchise would often be judged by its shittiest parts (and the shitty way it was advertised in the west when it debuted). There was a big media frenzy early on when the franchise came to the US because about 2.5 years’ worth of stuff came over from Japan all at once (which is probably what you’re recalling about it), but that doesn’t reflect what people enjoy about it and why it’s endured.
This ramble isn’t to say it’s flawless or anything like that and nobody has to like it if they don’t want to, but it’s far from being awful. The franchise is quite poorly-understood and shat-on, but it has a very creative fanbase who invent and improve upon the source material all the time (the romhacking community in particular is amazing), so it’s really not a fair argument to peg them as a default audience for AI of all things.
Its like the AI generated HFY videos on youtube. Yeah, once in a while I peek in one them to see what is up, but you can already tell which ones may be written by people, or at least edited into something sensible, and which ones are likely AI. Hint – they are all almost the same stories, they all have the same weird set of aliens, they all have almost the same story, often minor details shift through out the story, slightly contradicting themselves, and even the alien names are ( or are nearly) identical – oh, and often the plot makes jumps that range from odd, to pointless, to just plain, “How the F does this make sense?” lol
This, of course, comes from the AI having no “memory” of their own past, no clue what they said more than a few sentences/paragraphs earlier, and all of them, unless they hallucinate something, spewing out the same, “statistically likely story lines, based on all the crap someone fed into them from almost as bad scifi, probably input from reddit.” (Given they don’t seem to have any scifi that comes from actual books, movies, etc., which isn’t generic, “Some space marines in a ship, with human sounding names meet an alien whose name in made up of numbers and letters and is apparently crystalline.”