But the present state of AI culture generation isn’t exactly ready to automate the whole film production process . What is called “” is a set of statistical prediction machines that jumble up pixels, words, and other data, remix them, and spit out something that’s meant to resemble whatever you ask for. OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT last year, also offers DALLE-2, one of the most popular image generators.
What these systems produce is statistically “near” the stuff we say, or the things we tell them to do, or the images we feed them. This is why, reproducing and mashing up our biases. AI watchdogs Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru have coined the phrase “stochastic parrots” to capture this phenomenon. But this remix can also be put to creative ends. Generative AI uses statistics to scan “near” what we mean by “Spiderman” or “Heidi,” and it fetches images and text from that “nearby” region that ends up feeling totally alienating. The artist and critic Hito Steyerl has called these new images “,” a play on the double meaning of that word as “average” and “cruel.” Mean genre videos, though, are just plain creepy.
AI Heidi isn’t alone. We’re entering a world where statistical methods play a direct role in the production of culture. Generative AI is already giving us glimpses of a partly automated entertainment industry, and it’s weird. Video “art” like the “