[bonoboTP]

It's how people resisted CGI back in the day. What people dislike is low quality. There is a loud subset who are really against it on principle like we also have people who insist on analog music but regular people are much more practical but they don't post about this all day on the internet.

[trial3]

perhaps one important detail is that cassette tape guys and Lucasfilm aren’t/weren’t demanding a complete and total restructuring of the economy and society

[runarberg]

An excellent observation. When films became digital the real backlash came when they stopped distributing film for the old film projectors and every movie theaters had to invest in a very expensive DCP projectors. Some couldn’t and were forced to shut down.

If I had lost my local movie theater because of digital film, I would have a really good reason to hate the technology, even though the blame is on the studios forcing that technology on everyone.

[runarberg]

It is not. People resisted bad CGI. During the advent of CGI people celebrated the masterpiece of the Matrix and even Titanic. They hated however the Scorpion King.

[moron4hire]

No, I don't think most people are really against AI Gen works "on principle". Or at least not in any interpretation of "on principle" that would allow for you to be dismissive of complaints in this way.

I think principles are important. Especially when it comes to art, principle might be all we have. Going back to the crypto example, NFTs were art that real people had made. In some cases, very good art. People railed against NFTs despite the quality of the art. That is being against something on-principle. Comparatively, if my local grocery chains were owned by neonazis, I'd have a much harder time of standing on principle, giving that doing so may have a negative impact on my ability to survive and prosper.

AI Gen works, on the other hand, most often do not come with readily available marking that it is AI Gen. What people are complaining about is the lack of quality in the work. If they accuse a poorly human-written article of being AI Gen, that's just a mistake. But the general case is a legitimate evaluation of the quality of the material and the conditions under which it was made and presented.

In my own case, while I certainly have plenty of "principled" reasons to dislike AI Gen works, I also dislike it because it's just garbage. Oh yeah, sure, it's impressive that a computer can spit out reasonable content at all. It would equally be impressive for a chimpanzee to start talking in full sentences. That doesn't mean I'm going to start going to the chimpanzee for dissertations on the human condition.

[Gigachad]

Not really. The scale is entirely different. I think less of someone as a person if they send me AI slop.

[andrekandre]

  > I think less of someone as a person if they send me AI slop.

n=1 but working on side projects for others, i could easily generate ai images (instead of using stock photos) for a client, but i resist because i also feel this but as the sender...

there is the fact that such images 'look ai' but even if it were perfect, idk somehow i feel cheap doing that.

[Gigachad]

Agreed. Even in low value stuff I’d so much rather use basic stock images, ms paint drawings or almost anything over AI images. Seeing them is almost like being near someone who stinks or is sick/coughing. It’s a very visceral reaction.

[gunsle]

I think literally everyone could agree CGI has been detrimental to the quality of films.

[Levitz]

"Literally everyone" can't even agree on whether Polio is bad.

I myself would disagree that CGI itself is a bad thing.

[xnorswap]

Not just in the obvious ways either, even good CGI has been detrimental to the film (and TV) making process.

I was watching some behind the scenes footage from something recently, and the thing that struck me most was just how they wouldn't bother with the location shoot now and just green-screen it all for the convenience.

Even good CGI is changing not just how films are made, but what kinds of films get shot and what kind of stories get told.

Regardless of the quality of the output, there's a creativeness in film-making that is lost as CGI gets better and cheaper to do.

[andrekandre]

it may be an unpopular opinion but i feel like that watching any of the marvel movies... its like its just a showcase for green screens and ridiculous rubber-band acrobatics cgi everywhere...

that kind if stuff might work in anime or cartoons, but live action just looks ridiculous to me for the most part.

[delecti]

I could maybe agree in the sense of "has had detrimental effects", but certainly not in the sense of "net detrimental".

[sanex]

Project Hail Mary is a great example of not relying on CGI.

[NitpickLawyer]

Anecdata-- from me. I think cgi can be a net positive.

[CamperBob2]

90% of the time, you wouldn't know CGI if you saw it. That's the 'good' CGI.

Same thing is true of AI output.

[runarberg]

Not the same. The more effort you put into CGI the more invisible it becomes. But you can’t prompt your way out of hallucinations and other AI artifacts. AI is a completely different technology from CGI. There is no equivalence between them.

[CamperBob2]

But you can’t prompt your way out of hallucinations and other AI artifacts

That's not the case, and hasn't been for some time, but it sounds like your mind's made up.

[jamiek88]

Hallucinations have been solved?! That’s great news! Must have missed that.

[CamperBob2]

Hallucinations have been solved?!

Apparently not, because no one but you implied that they had been.

There are prompting strategies that improve the odds greatly, but like the GGP, you've made up your mind, so it's a waste of time to argue otherwise.

[Ferret7446]

I guarantee you have encountered AI content and not realized it was AI. I assume you've heard of the survivorship bias?

[runarberg]

I have and I hated it.

The story is that I was getting into a new genre of music, namely Japanese City pop from the 1980s. I was totally unfamiliar with the genre and started listening to it on YouTube. I found one playlist, which I listened to a lot, thinking: “wow, this is very formulaic, and the lyrics are very generic” but I kind of thought that was just how the genre went. Finally had planned to use it for during a small local event, but when I went to find out who the artists were I embarrassingly found out it was all AI generated.

Thing is, in this instance I knew nothing of the source material, when I went to get actual songs, written by actual people, the difference was start. I would be able to recognize AI generated City pop in an instant now 8 months later. This experience kind of felt like I had been scammed. That my ignorance of the genre had been taken advantage of. It was not pleasant.

[moron4hire]

I had a very similar experience, looking for music to play during D&D sessions. Not paying close attention to the music, it seemed like it fit the bill. Once I started listening more closely, there were lots of issues that became readily apparent.

My dad has also started sharing with me links on Facebook to pop songs that have been re-arranged in different genres. This was a big area of fun for a number of folks in my family several years ago as we discovered YouTube artists like Chase Holfelder who put significant effort into making very high quality rearrangements. But I kept noticing these weird issues in the new songs.

I've gotten to where I can identify an AI generated song almost immediately: there's a weird, high frequency hiss in the mix that sounds like heavy noise getting to overcome compression artifacts but the source from which it's coming should be clean. There's a general lack of enthusiasm to the lyrics and a boring, nonsensical progression to the lyrics on original arrangements. Sometimes, the person generating the song tries to hide that last issue by generating instrumentals only or they use one of those try-to-hard-to-sound-badass Country Rock genres that are popular on Tik Tok to stick on top of clips from the TV show Yellowstone (WTF is with that?!), but then when I check the details, there's an obviously AI cover art for artists I've never heard of. The accounts will be anthologies full of these artists that have never existed.

So, I know people keep parroting "a good artist can use any tool". But I've yet to see it. All this "democratizing art" (didn't know anyone was gate keeping it to begin with, certainly have not seen any lack of talent online in several years) doesn't seem to be producing results. It becomes pretty obvious very quickly it's all just a pump and dump scheme to Get Them Clicks.

[Ferret7446]

You don't understand. I mean content that even now, you don't know it is AI.

Obviously you think the AI content that you can identify is bad. But there is content you've encountered that you think is good and not AI content, that actually is AI generated.

That's the survivorship bias.