AI farts stink up your art

Purely as a matter of aesthetics, on an emotional, instinctive level, I reject the use of generative AI in the creative arts.

When people were playing with Craiyon a few years ago, I found something interesting in the disturbing, woozy, weird images it generated. I experimented with taking its lo-res outputs, blowing them up, and blurring them to all hell to create what felt like snapshots taken with a camera I’d somehow smuggled into my own nightmares.

But as the images these tools could generate got ‘better’ – sharper, cleaner, more convincing – they slipped across a line into a kind of creepy I didn’t like. Oily. Rubbery. Like fairy treasure that turns to shit when you see it in broad daylight.

At what concentration do you start to discern the peculiar tang of AI in art you’re consuming? Setting aside ethical concerns, and arguments about solidarity between creatives, there’s an amount of AI I can just about deal with on an aesthetic level.

The Brutalist contained some background prop imagery, seen in passing, generated with AI, and used AI to massage some of Adrien Brody’s Hungarian dialogue. I wish they hadn’t done it, I don’t think it was necessary in either case, but it didn’t outweigh the vast bulk of human effort and brilliance evident throughout the film.

Late Night With The Devil, a trashier, sillier film, also used AI-generated imagery for a few onscreen graphics. Again, these were seen in passing, and made up about 0.05% of the film’s running time. They were bad, like someone dubbing a little fart noise onto the soundtrack three or four times during the film’s running time, but David Dastmalchian’s dominating performance was real enough that I could waft them away.

Watching the latest installment of British Cryptids yesterday, I was charmed by the typography, the music, the authentic 1970s patrician voiceover, and the invented folk mythology. It reminded me of Look Around You and The Day Today but with an added Fortean thrill.

Then a question occurred to me: how on earth had the creator managed to source or create all the incredible vintage images? The video was crammed with old photographs, engravings, paintings, and illustrations. Some appeared, to my eyes, to have been adapted from real archive images. Others, however, seemed to have the telltale signs of being generated with AI.

It was like biting into a delicious pie and, after taking several bites, finding a wriggling maggot.

I then began to worry every mouthful had maggots in it.

I doubted the voiceover, for example, which was too steady and repetitive in its rhythms. Where had they found a performer able to deliver this on a YouTube creator budget? I’m not 100 per cent sure, perhaps it is a voice actor, but I now think that was generated using a service like Speechify, whose ‘Russell’ voice is quite a close match to my ears.

When two brief video clips appeared I was certain they were AI-generated. They had the unstable, slippery quality of moving images generated with something like Sora.

I felt that lurch in my gut, that sense of having been pranked, and stopped watching.

When I talk about this emotional reaction to AI-generated text or visuals – when I say I don’t enjoy consuming things created with it – one counter argument is: “But what about CGI?”

To which I can smugly say, well, I’m not keen on computer-generated imagery or digital post-production either.

I tolerate it if it’s not intrusive and doesn’t outweigh the narrative and performances. But if I never see, say, another digital matte painting of the London skyline with too much detail and digital smoke, but which is also somehow completely unconvincing, that’s fine by me.

This is probably the reason I mostly watch older films and haven’t seen anything from Marvel since the first Avengers film. The finale of that film left me cold, with its digital characters being flung around a digital city, battling digital monsters, surrounded by digital smoke and digital flame.

But there’s no point in counter-arguments. This isn’t about logic, it’s about feelings.

I manage to read about 50 books a year and watch around 200 films. I want each of those to be an opportunity to connect with the creativity and craft of other human beings.

That has to go beyond having an idea and pressing a button to generate the end product.

Even if you press the button many times, and choose the best bits of whatever gunge is extruded to stitch together into a slightly less stinky, repellent object, you still haven’t made anything.

At best, I don’t care and won’t engage with it. At worst, I will hate it, and resent your attempt to feed it to me.