Defending AI as art

Ultimately, I've never been paid a significant amount for any of my films, and I come from the second generation of digital pirates, so I'm fairly blase about IP law. But more than that, all artists are essentially imitative at the beginning, and then one learns a voice and a style from years of experience and decisions that are seldom conscious and equally like the ubiquitous black box of generative AI. - There's still a knack to typing in the correct prompts and refining the various revisions that the software generates, as that Hofstadter book demonstrates, and what should really be happening is some kind of global IP deal that forces AI companies to pay royalties to the artists that they train their systems on. In New Zealand, we're hoping to do what the EU has done and force Facebook and Google to pay for our news content; I'd hope that SAG and the WGA consider targeting those AI companies rather than the movie studios, who are ultimately consumers rather than the people that are generating those tools. It's bizzare: I can own the copyright on images that Deep Dream Generator produces, regardless of what the underlying IP might be. I have no idea how that's legal... 🤷‍♀️ - I usually write my own skits and write my own music, but yes I use AI to bring those to life. For me, it's part of the effect that the AI is crude, can't write English properly and adds extra fingers. It still takes a significant amount of traditional techniques like reverse, speed/duration, scale and keyframing to time the loops to sync to the dialogue and produce things like those fruithead skits or my Fantasia. NotePerformer has only recently added AI, but I'm very pleased with those results. - It's a practical decision: I'd love to use a full orchestra and real animators, but that hasn't really been an option since Portrait of a Knight. To be fair, there's not that much AI in the Dakumentary: most of those are standard VFX that look better on phones than with movie cameras. Most of my AI use is for pre-viz these days, though I'm quite proud of the comic strip.