I Made a Bunch of AI Garbage, and I'm Glad It's Over

I made a bunch of shitty Sora art. That era has passed.

From what the machine is telling me, this is one of the fastest turnarounds in digital media. AI video generation has grown so rapidly that comparable fields, such as the birth of filmmaking or the history of computer graphics, seem comparable but hardly competitive. 

One of the downstream effects of this rapid growth is that the tools for artists are rapidly changing. You might find a platform which gives you free generations to make garbage art, and then generate two hours of video, and then chop that up to create little weird videos.

And then the megacorporation ends its seemingly fantastically generous promotion.

The feeling at that point for me was not one of disappointment, but rather of relief. I think that happened because I could stop managing all the video files, delete the failed experiments, and just publish my half-finished projects and move on to something else.

I had a good time making a series of AI music videos which reveled in grotesquery: fat versions of myself, lasers shooting out of my eyes, dancing, (a lot of dancing), and then AI-generated music behind it.

The AI-generated music stayed terrible the entire time because it was my desire to match the grotesque energy of the generations. Because I have a natural desire to bring out the truth of the materials that I use, because I'm an experienced artist.

One of the most interesting features of Sora was the face morphing: features of characters in this generation slowly evolve. Several times this seemed to me to create images of my friends in the clips. At those times, it was as if I had commanded the machine to create a non-consensual replica. That, at least, was a recurring paranoia.

I could recreate this kind of generation, but that would require a different kind of engagement with video generation than the one that I could so easily and freely access during that Sora era.

I heard Alan Resnick said in Save It To Your Desktop that the previous AI era for image generation was better because it was more hallucinogenic. My counterargument has always been that, well, you can just use older models on your computer.

But I do concede that the ease and corporate access of this current AI generation just sucks everything in. 

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It turns out there actually is good AI poetry. The AI Poetry Review has a bunch of poetry which manages to be good, and Sam Riviere's *Conflicted Copy* showed up at my door today.

Sam Riviere's AI poems are also really good, I'm glad to report, after opening the book just now.