So, ChatGPT and the various AI art generators that have caused so much fuss over the past few months have implications for creative work that I don't have the capacity to try and address. We're still in the very nascent stages of this kind of technology. However, I do want to put down some kind of response and reaction, so I'm going to start small, with the AI images from films that never existed.
Back in January, there was a fascinating New York Times article featuring stills from a 1978 version of "TRON" directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky that doesn't exist. The images were created by Midjourney, which seems to be marketing itself as a tool for artists and designers. Their Facebook page is full of examples of jawdropping artwork - ranging from photorealistic Deepfake style images to pastiches of famous artists to wild experiments like designing Medieval armor for your housepets. The "TRON" article seems to have kicked off a trend of creating stills from other imaginary media. Most of the ones that I've seen gone viral come from either Abandoned Films, responsible for "Balenciaga Star Wars," and Tenzon Tensor, which seems to be obsessed with reimagining everything as an "80s Dark Fantasy Film" including "Futurama" and "Spongebob Squarepants."
The results of mashing together the different aesthetics vary wildly in quality, and depend largely on the creativity of the prompts. I've been subscribed to the Abandoned Films Facebook page for a couple of weeks, and it's a little depressing how repetitive and limited the content is. Nearly all the generated images involve putting genre franchises into a different time period, swapping around cast members, or applying the recognizable visual style of a different franchise. PIXAR style "Harry Potter" characters are cute, and "The Matrix" style "Alice in Wonderland" has some good images, but "Game of Thrones" as a Wes Anderson film mostly just involves a palette swap, and "John Wick: Chapter 27" just looks like stills from the previous "John Wick" films with Keanu Reeves in old age makeup. Everything involving video game franchises and zombies tends to look the same. It feels pointless to do LEGO anything, because there are LEGO products for a ton of popular franchises already.
If you've been around fanart spaces, you'll know that images like this have been around for a long time. Artists have dreamed up steampunk "Star Wars" designs" and what Marvel superheroes would look like in the "TRON" universe. There was a recent "Gotham by Gaslight" animated movie that gave us a Victorian era Batman. Fancasting with Photoshopped images has been commonplace. What the AI image generators offer is a way to do this much more quickly and produce images that are more complex, including photorealistic renderings. However, the programs have major limitations and require a lot of finessing. Midjourney famously can't handle hands or certain body positions. You might be able to cut the artist out of the equation, but you have to really know your references and know some artistic fundamentals to avoid churning out generic-looking pap. And once you know what to look for, you absolutely can spot an AI generated image pretty easily.
There's legalities to be worked out involving copyrights on these images, and the debate over the use of certain artists' work for reference images, and all sorts of impacts on artists that I'm sure we haven't run across yet. However, from what I've seen of the AI image generators' output so far, I'm inclined to side with the crowd that views this as a tool more than some kind of replacement for creative jobs. The Corridor Crew recently worked out a way to turn live action footage into a pretty decent looking anime by running it through a program that made the actors look like "Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust" characters. If you know your animation history, that's essentially rotoscoping with fewer laborious steps. However, it still took the creators a significant amount of time and talent to make use of the new tools.
I'd love to try out Midjourney myself, but googling the potential prompts I'd give it, I've found that real artists have often gotten there first. It's been fun to stumble across some of the better Midjourney movie mashups, like what might have happened if David Cronenberg said yes to directing "Return of the Jedi" back in the 80s, but I think there's a reason only a few of these AI generated experiments have gone viral. The AI is faster, but so far it's definitely far from better.
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