AI is going to change everything. The rate at which the likes of writing, animation, music, and myriad other art forms fueled by human creativity are already becoming phased out thanks to complacent mimicry is heartbreaking to see. It’s a development we must pay attention to if we hope to prevent it from decimating the careers and livelihoods of millions. But as major YouTube channels, bands, and celebrities strive to show the ignorant masses its potential, that cause is bound to be lost amidst all the noise.
I have several friends and colleagues who have spent their lives honing their skills as actors, artists, or writers - and now corporations will latch onto the dystopian idea of using AI to regurgitate hollow clones of their work that lacks all the emotion and soul that allows art to resonate with us in the first place. We are responding to a canvas filled with deceitful lies, depending on the collective work of others to conjure up something that means nothing. But as society shifts towards a desire for more content regardless of its source, I fear for the day when this becomes normalised, and the average consumer never even thinks to question it.
Enter The Corridor Crew, a YouTube channel boasting millions of subscribers that specialises in the art of visual effects across film, television, and animation. Many of its videos feature professional VFX artists reacting to good and bad examples of the craft, or a group of passionate producers trying to conjure up a dream project with minimal resources. The channel has garnered a following because, at least on the surface, it understands the hard work and ingenuity required to compete in such a field, likely encouraging young people to try their hand at things and perhaps one day even break into the industry.
Sadly, a recent trend across its videos involves the implementation of AI as it uses popular programs and text prompts to produce pieces of work from nothing. It’s gross, and goes against the ideology this channel has operated on for years. You constantly provide a platform for people who have worked in the visual effects' field for decades only to then make videos that bastardise their work in ways that might eventually put them out on the streets.
It continues to blow my mind how ignorant some of these larger channels are, clouded by their own privilege to such an obscene degree that they fail to see exactly where this artificial road is taking us. Students in school right now studying animation or concept art, or children that have already ignited their own spark of creativity, will have their chances at success snuffed out because a computer is doing all the work for them. Not thanks to an ingenious new algorithm or world-changing development, but programs that bastardise the existing work of artists and writers to create Frankenstein facsimiles that will eventually put the original creators out of work. The work computers do is worse, but it’s cheaper. The Corridor Crew’s new video is unforgivable, and that’s without mentioning that the end result looks like shit compared to the real thing.
‘Did We Change Animation Forever’ positions itself as a groundbreaking step forward for the medium. It begins with the team talking about the current trajectory of processing media with AI and how visual noise prevents the technology from creating a clean image free from stark artefacts. Their solution - and one put forward by many other influencer hacks - is to turn an image back into noise and process it that way using any number of auto-generated prompts and ideas. In theory this will remove said issues, but it also feels like you’re trying to solve a problem that wouldn’t exist if you had the creative talent to avoid abusing AI in the first place. Even the model they use in the video is trained on Vampire Hunter D, a copyrighted work they don't own but are more than content with pilfering from.
The narration frames the production of this real life anime as discovering a new frontier that we’ve been missing for decades, and that artificial intelligence will enrich our creative lives and allow anyone to create anything with the right resources instead of relying on traditional media. Such a lofty fantasy is all well and good in practice, but giving this power to millions will only result in a morbid saturation of machine-learned nightmares with virtually no nuance or intention beyond looking cool for the sake of looking cool. Corridor Crew goes on to prove me right with the end result, a short animated film that resembles the boring parts of a weird Castlevania porn parody. Their technique exists to cover up bad props, staging, and acting all while pretending that they’re creating art that means anything. It doesn’t, and never will.
Even when you put aside the moral issues of potentially putting thousands out of work and training machines on the tenets of existing art, what you end up with feels like baby’s first rotoscoping mixed with a bootleg Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. That is all we’ve seen created here - it’s a thin, cynical, and artistically bankrupt pastiche of countless ideas we’ve seen done so much better everywhere else, and that would be the case whether it was made possible by AI or not. Championing this technique and promoting it to their millions of followers, is grossly irresponsible and disrespectful to animation as a whole.
I bet a good percentage of its audience are creatives themselves, and have watched this new video only to have an already lingering fear brough to the surface. Right now we are already seeing the corrupt seeds of AI spreading throughout different mediums and paranoid conversations unfolding about where this will take us and how we should respond before it’s too late. Our complacency is already fast becoming our undoing. TikTok filters, ChatGPT, and countless other programs come across as fun distractions for most people, yet they’re also the bedrock for losing the humanity that helps art achieve greatness in the first place.
Once that emotional tangibility fades away we are left with cold streams of code and nothing more. To see that descent into nothingness unfold before my eyes is difficult to stomach.