Last week, Corridor Crewmade an AI video converting HBO’s The Last Of Us back into a video game. Obviously, it was a satirical idea, but the joke missed the mark by a mile, especially considering its terrible execution. Just before this, Corridor Crew was facing backlash over itslast AI video, where they turned a video into an anime with AI – of course, in the process, they were stealing and manipulating existing art for their own gain.
They did the same thing withThe Last of Us, where they took footage from the show, put it through ‘cutting-edge AI technology’, and posted the results. Those results not only looked terrible, with constantly glitching faces, but they also looked weirdly like the original game. It’s fairly obvious that the AI used animations from the actual video game to make its AI representations, creating weird morphs of the animated characters and the actual actors in some cases, and fully ripping off existing graphics in others.
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Of course, that’s generally what happens when you use AI – it steals existing artwork to generate ‘new’ results. It’s the same with tools like ChatGPT, which has a distinct style of writing because AI is incapable of actual creativity, it can only repurpose what already exists. Countless teachers have written on Twitter that they can identify a ChatGPT-written essay on sight, and artists can often do the same for AI-generated art and photos.
I often find myself wondering, when I look at something AI-generated, what’s the point? New technology can be good, sure, but AI isn’t really helping anybody. AI art steals jobs from artists as well as their existing art, and the result isn’t even good. If the goal is for generated art to become indistinguishable, it has a long way to go, and that progress is going to come at a human cost.
The use of AI art is spreading, without a doubt.High On Lifeused Midjourney AI todecorate levels, and one minor character was even voiced by AI. An AI-generated Seinfeld parody show airing on Twitch was suspended after a characterwent on a transphobic and homophobic rant. Bleak Faithused AI-generated art in its perks menu, calling it ‘an oversight’ but also somehow ‘a decision that came from an honest place’. (Bleak Faith also used animations bought from Epic marketplace, which turned out to be cribbed from FromSoftware’s games.)
The democratisation of art is good – more people should have the time, energy and resources to make art. Art is integral to human culture. This does not mean we should be stealing each other’s art through AI for our own purposes, because artists deserve to be paid for their work, whether that be visual art, writing or voice acting. It is insidious that people doing creative work in their own mediums are so enthusiastically cutting corners with AI in the process to avoid paying actual human beings. Not only are you hurting other artists, butit’s pretty clear most people don’t think it’s very good– maybe it’s time for AI stans to admit the technology’s flaws stop it from fulfilling its purpose.
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