AI continues to cartwheel through the arts, breaking crockery, toppling pay rates and forcing reevaluations of fundamental epistemological, ontological, and teleological truths.
Processes that began slowly with the invention of photography continued to pick up speed and today hurtle forward at a pace that leaves no time for thoughtful assimilation.
With AI, important works of art by previous generations can be cannibalized, deconstructed and seamlessly reassembled. This requires no apparent talent other than the ability to type on a keyboard. Look at how the following YouTuber can remove Cary Grant from the classic movie Charade and substitute himself as Audrey Hepburn's co-star:
Another example: a different Youtuber easily resurrects dead movie stars such as Paul Newman, Marlon Brando or Rock Hudson and makes them actors in a new movie about the Justice League:
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| Paul Newman as Green Lantern |
Just as inferior voices can be enhanced and corrected with AutoTune, inferior pictures can now be enhanced and corrected with algorithmic technologies. The roles of skill, creativity and imagination diminish as technology provides a colorable substitute.
All of which brings me to the new Fantastic Four movie, scheduled to be released on July 25:
Last week I saw an advance screening of the film, which is based upon the 1968 Galactus Trilogy (in Fantastic Four #48 - 50). Marvel Studios and its corporate partners employed thousands of people, hundreds of millions of dollars, and the latest software to enhance and embellish Jack Kirby's 12 cent comic book. They did everything technology could do to improve the original story.
The movie was bigger and nosier, sure, with plenty of attention-grabbing special effects, but as a work of art it couldn't compare with the power and quality of Kirby's comic book.
Kirby's dramatic staging has been replaced by high speed. His costumes have been updated, for the worse. The complexity of his content has been replaced by bland platitudes about the importance of family.
The movie is entertaining, but with all of its advantages it feels artistically inferior to the hand drawn comic book. So for those who say that traditional art forms can be replaced in all meaningful respects by new technologies, I say:
Not yet.