I’m not sure we’ve settled on a name for Artificial Intelligence stuff, probably because it really isn’t very intelligent. It’s mostly a massive version of autofill, which is useful enough, I suppose. If you don’t want to (I don’t), you never have to look at Gargle again.
Some call it LLM, for large language models, but that doesn’t encompass what the script kiddies are doing with images and video. Gargle has settled on “generative ai” for non-textual stuff, but their stuff is so locked down they’re not going to be where the action is. If you head on over to Hugging Face, or whatever Stable Diffusion is calling itself nowadays, you’ll see tinkerers tinkering with all sorts of speech to image, image enhancement and melding, music generation,and general messing around with probabilities. The Wikiup likes the term “deep learning,” Deep learning being a subset of machine learning being a subset of artificial intelligence.
Whatever you want to call it, the usual suspects are taking the ball and running with it. First and foremost, they want to use everything they can lay their hands on to have fun. This sure is fun: How about a movie trailer for Alien, as if it were a 1950s movie?
Another outfit did the same with Aliens:
The limitations of the amount of video you can produce in a single snippet isn’t a problem when you’re making a film trailer. They’re almost uniformly stitched together from two or three second images. Every once in a while, you see what has been called a “hallucination.” That’s the term for when the generative AI wigs out a bit, and just inserts any old thing for reasons obscure. They have an especially hard time with hands, but then again so did Van Gogh.
There are a hearty handful of people churning out these homages. They’re all sort of fun. But the funny thing about them is that while the kids are getting the CGI (for want of a better term) right, they don’t really know anything about the 1950s, and they get the text, voiceovers, and fonts all wrong for the era. Even the vibe is off. Here’s a real 1950s movie trailer to compare:
Movies from the 1950s didn’t have CGI, or machine learning. Hell, they didn’t always have color. But they made the chariot race in Ben Hur, and Marilyn Monroe’s dress blow up on a subway grate, among many other terrific bits of entertainment, and without much doctoring to the film. With better tools, you’re supposed to be able to do a better job. I’ll raise my hand when you get there, kids. Keep going.
2 Responses
I would go to a theater for the first time in many decades to see those two versions of “Alien” and “Aliens”. Oh my dog, those are a hoot. My congratulations to whoever put those together, and a hearty “Thank you” to you for digging ’em out of the dross on the ‘net.
Hi Blackwing- Thanks for reading and commenting.
The people who put these together are scraping against the limits of the tech. It’s bound to improve, and quickly, and what’s possible is going to be exponentially better. I’m with you, I think these are loads of fun, and people making their own versions of things they love will be a kind of democracy I could get behind. However, good luck with the lawyers, kids.