Let’s be real, western cultural dominance in pop culture will collapse because of AI, there simply doesn’t exist a correction mechanism so the problem will continue to get worse as execs double and triple down on this ego driven malinvestment
Ten years from now, popular culture will be unrecognizable and most likely predominantly Asian
That still leaves the question of Western social media, which seems to be where most of their pop culture is coming from nowadays. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch have the youth of the global south glued to them. Ishowspeed drawing the crowds he has across the world shows this.
Will AI effect these platforms as well?
ABE: “French? Why the fuck French?”
JOE: “I’m going to France.”
ABE: “You should go to China.”
JOE: “I’m going to France.”
ABE: “I’m from the future. You should go to China.”
Absolutely agree. Even before AI, the corporatization of Hollywood over the last couple of decades was shifting the winds that direction, at least as far as I have observed. This will just accelerate that fact even faster.
Damn if only someone could have told them that human labor is the source of all value
If AI weren’t a part of the capitalist slop machine it could be used for indie artists to embark on bigger, more elaborate, indie projects.
For example, an artist using AI to automatically color hundreds of frames of animation at once, or to help with inking/tweening/color correction etc. The tedious shit that isn’t very fun.
But no, AI is replacing the fun stuff. The writing, the composition, the character designs. I think in the long term indie projects will continue to take off as corporate continues to morph into something homogenous and dull. It’s already happening.
Incorrect. If it wasn’t part of the corpo slop machine, the corpo slop machine would ‘remember’ about copyright and sue AI indies into oblivion to kill it or take it over.
For example, an artist using AI to automatically color hundreds of frames of animation at once, or to help with inking/tweening/color correction etc. The tedious shit that isn’t very fun.
The problem is anyone who does do something like that gets crucified by people who think “local program that’s only as intensive as a modern game, running on consumer hardware” is the same thing as “giant datacenter eating multiple cities’ worth of power to run a chatbot that’s always wrong”. I’ve seen people malding over just the thought of a modder using text to speech that’s slightly less bad than traditional text to speech, like a hobbyist making a free piece of art using something that now also runs locally to fill in gaps in their skillset is the same as a corporation cutting down on voice acting.
Like the water’s been so muddied that people who are rightfully disgusted at all this obscene waste to make shitty chatbots that are awful and are being pushed by the literal worst people alive to replace workers (despite not actually being able to) and make everything worse, and annoyed by people spamming low effort slop that’s the equivalent of talking about a weird dream they had mixed with that shitty 3d CGI slop inexpertly made in poser or daz3d and presented as poorly framed single images that flooded everything when those were new and that’s still around in annoying quantities, and extend that to anything that’s been so much as touched in any way by any sort of AI-related system.
Random aside, but I just realized the other day how generative AI has ruined the whole vibe of any genre where part of the conceit is just going for vibes over internally consistent logic, like classic sci-fi and fantasy art or anything trying to evoke dreamlike nonsense vibes, because now anything that doesn’t line up or make sense or is just there to evoke a certain vibe becomes a smoking gun that an entire piece is empty nonsense.
I don’t see how stuff like that could ever give a leg up to independent productions. It’s making media production more capital intensive.
Someone said early on “It would be great if AI was used for creative people to skip tedious stuff. Instead, it’s used for tedious people to skip creative stuff.”
This is great stealing this.
Forgive me father for I have libbed
tweening
That shit was a godsend when animation started being made digitally and is something you’d think would be priority #1 with AI sloppers. But of course, they’d have to understand how things actually work to make something useful.
Not just AI, Hollywood’s Netflixisation is destroying the standard of writing of both TV and Movies.
Netflix Writers can’t write too good or the viewers won’t be able to stream slop in the background which is more important on corpo Spreadsheets than real viewership. This is also bleeding onto other non-Netflix studios slowly and with the WB acquisition, I expect the same to happen to HBO and all WB IPs.
Add to this the atrocious wait times between sequels which kills interest overtime. Pluribus S2 has not even been written yet, Severance S3 has not begun filming and so on. Same with Movies like Spiderverse and Batman which were far better received than standard Capeshit but the sequel situation is bad.
most TV shows aren’t TV shows anymore, they are episodic movies.
I had the chance to rewatch Lord of the Rings when it was shown in theaters recently. I’m not saying it’s high art, but the complexity of the writing and some of the more esoteric language they use did jump out at me juxtaposed to a lot of the things I’ve seen lately.
There has been a real collapse in the quality of writing on mass media TV shows and movies in the past 25 years.
I’m calling it “Netflixisation” but the real issue are corpos and the enshittification has been going on from before Netflix was this big.
I wouldn’t even put the blame on Netflix. When they were the only online streaming platform, they didn’t need to make content because they were like a digital Blockbuster. It was when studios insisted on having exclusive content on their own streaming platforms Netflix had to come up with content to fill the void so people wouldn’t cancel their subscriptions.
Recently, Netflix lost their Marvel shows they produced to Disney+. They can’t maintain the slop they made because streaming is being turned into cable. HBO even lost Raised by Wolves and Westworld, the two major tentpole shows they were relying on after Game of Thrones ended.
Netflix purposefully sabotages the writing on their shows to try and pump numbers to please suits and shareholders. This works alright for slop but it’s a problem when it starts affecting even their flagship shows like Stranger Things. Streaming itself is the problem since all services would want to do this because their leadership is full of clowns.
Just kinda curious, do tech workers even like this?
Like imagine if you’re someone really into building the future and you find you’re great at the software side. But now all of it is AI slop, overglorified MIC drivel, or digital landlording.
Ime, software devs are split between “this shit sucks so bad I’m going to become a goose farmer” and “it automates some stuff” through to tech bros who don’t seem to care how capable it is so long as they can label themselves a Founder and get VC money. Tech managers also range from “meh” to “it automates Jira ticket creation and I can look stuff up real easy”. Tech execs are uniformly the dumbest motherfuckers to ever live and universally adore AI for its worker-eliminating powers. They don’t live anywhere near the actual work and can’t see how much effort is blown on making AI do things that are half as good as a junior dev. I cannot overstate how much executive brains are a fine slurry, unable to conceptualize that the tech is only good at making emails into the perfect corporate word salad. But that’s all their jobs are, producing empty paragraphs of word salad justifying their atrocious decisionmaking, so they apply the same “understanding” to all jobs.
It’s like how those NFT freaks were categorically unable to understand why it’s not a good idea to put home deeds and medical records on the block chain.
Take it from someone who took some coding classes in college. I’ve found many CS majors to actually be some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet and it pisses me off their brilliance is wasted on tech bros.
Like imagine just how much cooler Microsoft, Google, and Tesla would be if every last chud fucker got out of the way.
I’m a software developer at a company that’s gone whole hog for LLMs. My coworkers are cool. Even the managers are alright, up through to the directors who seem to have a moderately realistic view of the thing as “C-suite says jump, we ask how high” and are making the most of it. The VPs and C-suite are broadly disrespected in side channels like off-work group chats, and even at work they’re getting more and more friction when they try and push their usual BS since everyone’s morale is especially down after layoff waves.
This, absolutely this. I work as a software engineer for a major company and it is miserable right now. The top level management are so convinced that most junior devs are no longer needed. Our department has been downsized multiple times in the last two years, IN THE MIDDLE OF A MAJOR DEPARTMENT WIDE PROJECT, and yet, they are confused why the project is struggling to meet its deadlines. Most of us left have been working what used to be the job of 2 or 3 devs. The only reason I haven’t left before now is that I had major personal issues going on in my life that took up most of my free time and I needed to have a “stable” source of income. Now that that is all resolved I plan on jumping ship and watching it burn from the outside.
I don’t care if it ever gets good though, the cost to human labor and to the environment will forever make AI a non starter for me. I think that last point is what worries me most about the way people talk about it at work, no one ever talks about environment cost. Honestly, rarely do people except for a handful of devs I am personal friends with ever talk about the labor cost.
Some true believers, some haters, and lots of scared people in the middle
Wow almost like creativity requires a human touch. Anyone can make background slop but making engaging content is difficult
