By Keith Walsh
If a recent batch of new videos is any indication, flesh and blood actors, writers, camera operators and directors may not have to worry about artificial intelligence taking their jobs in the immediate future.
As a popular new A.I. generated beer commercial demonstrates, tech has a long way to go before it can create videos that look natural. But maybe not. Chris Boyle created the “Synthetic Summer” ad for his Private Island Production company for exactly the opposite reason – to play on our fears of artificial intelligence and what the technologies are capable of. The commercial is creepy and unsettling nightmare fuel. AI platforms used by Private Island have mysterious names like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and ControlNet.
A Feint Before A.I. World Domination?
Other production companies are doing similar work, as in the “Burger Blast” and the “Pepperoni Hug Spot” ads, with similar distortions that belie the challenges involved in the production of computer generated imitations of life. “Burger Blast” was apparently created by AI Lost Media, using Runaway ML (a machine learning tool that creates videos entirely from text prompts.) These AI Lost Media Productions aim to simulate vintage video, while those from Private Island seem to emulate contemporary television commercials. Neither type evokes a nostalgia that’s authentic or in any way comforting — and that seems to be the point. The origins of “Pepperoni Hug Spot” is more challenging to pin down, but is credited to “Pizza Later” and there’s a website at too. The script was generated by GPT 4, with graphics by Midjourney and Runway Gen2.
I fear there is more to the story: what if the bubbly faces, the hands with too many fingers, the weird distorted humans consuming themselves are merely feints by artificial intelligence systems? What if A.I. knows exactly how to create a hand with five fingers, but avoids doing so, to mislead us about artificial intelligence capabilities? That way we’ll all be caught off guard when the computers make their moves to take over the world.
Private Island
AI Lost Media On Instagram
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