I'm starting to be bothered by AI being used as a massive umbrella term.
Those three examples have been pretty universally thrown into the "AI slop" bucket. The reaction has been very negative.
But these three examples are considered artistic VFX processes.
It's all the same kind of "AI."
The workflow is essentially the same.
There was some negative discourse regarding the idea of de-aging, but I don't think many people cared that these effects were done with a deepfake technique.
This is not the scammy kind of deepfake. This has to be photo-real in every frame and stand up to scrutiny on a 100 foot IMAX screen.
Typically they find a stand-in with a similar build and facial structure. They film the scenes as they would normally. Then they gather hundreds or thousands of reference images and train a model on someone's face. This is custom training on a local machine. They own the reference images. In the case of Sinners, they actually had Michael B Jordan wear a "halo rig" to capture an actual performance in the scene's environment so the training data would be higher quality.
And they usually build a decent CG face as well. Then, VFX artists will use a combination of techniques to project the face onto the stand-in's performance.
This is not a push button process. You don't type "make Harrison Ford look young" into a prompt. Often, they have to make frame by frame adjustments. They may need to use 20% of the CG face and 80% of the deepfake face (or some other ratio) and blend it all together. And there is also a lot of manual hand-painting and animation to fix things when the process doesn't work as intended.
To achieve this level of quality, it is a long, involved, and expensive technique. People said Seth MacFarlane was just using the "cheapest" option compared to prosthetics or CGI. But the labor involved is similar to CGI. It is not particularly cost-saving at this point in time. Prosthetics are much cheaper.
Which is why I think we need to at least start distinguishing between AI tools and push-button AI generation. Even if people decide both are problematic.
Like, the tool I use in Photoshop to make automatic selections and the tool I use to remove zits, they both use generative AI. It's the same underlying technology that generates all the slop. Does that make any photos I retouch "AI"?
Most people using Photoshop are unaware they are using AI tools. When they see a "select subject" button it doesn't really tell them it is using training data from millions of photos in order to figure out how to draw around a person and cut them out.
It's very easy to just throw everything into the AI bucket and then hate the entire bucket. But I think this discourse is already more complicated than people realize.
I'm struggling to navigate this. I am not necessarily defending every use of an AI tool. But I liked Sinners. And I feel they used a genuine artistic process. They used their own training data. They didn't replace artists.
But, on the other hand, I'm not sure I like the idea of using this process to bring back dead people.
If you try to dig into the nuance it just gets messy and it is hard to figure out a moral direction to steer this discourse.
I like all of the anti-tedium tools in Photoshop that save me tons of energy. I like not spending an hour doing a complex hair selection. And I don't think selecting hair or zapping zits makes my work "slop." But others might feel differently. I just don't think I can go back to the lasso tool and the clone stamp.
I'm starting to see parallels between AI tools and the liquify tool.
If you aren't aware, the liquify tool in Photoshop allows people to push and pull things like you are working with clay. You can make boobs bigger, waists tinier, and reshape a face to the point it doesn't look like a person any longer. Every unrealistic body you've seen in a professional photo has used liquify.
But I use it to flatten flyaway hairs. I reshape clothes that had a fold or wrinkle. If someone had their mouth slightly open, I can close their lips.
The tool can be used for innocent fixes or very problematic things.
Do we blame the tool or the choices humans make while using the tool?
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