YouTuber @ The Little Platoon/LostChord | Video game writer | Business Enquiries to [email protected]
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The Mandalorian & the Death of Star Wars will premiere today from (probably) 7:30pm UK / 2:30pm Disney LucasFilm's Eastern Time. Link below.
On a purely technical/technological level, compared to where it was even a year ago, this is impressive.
As a work of art it is not — encouragingly, because it lacks human talent.
It needs a better script, a better director, and better acting, all of which requires artistic judgement, which is the thing AI can only guess at.
Shigeru Miyamoto recently drew the distinction between creation and labour. AI is to be cautiously welcomed, he said, like earlier technological shifts, for its application to labour.
The entire history of technological progress is in boosting creative productivity by handing over the drudgery of labour to machines.
Everyone today, even people with anti-AI neuroses, benefits from this. Theirs is the first anti-algorithm movement that is spread entirely by algorithm. They just take Twitter for granted. It doesn't count as AI, despite being powered by it.
There was a time when many things we take for granted today - word processors, DAWs, computer-generated graphics - were derided as the enemies of art and creativity.
Miyamoto also points out, correctly, that people mistake labour for value. Working hard on a thing does not make that thing good, or even creative.
(I would draw a less polite analogy: just because you work hard on OnlyFans doesn't mean you're hot enough to succeed.)
He argues that removing chunks of labour burden frees more people to be true creators. But if you over-rely on it, if you hand it the task of creation itself, you will just get mimicry, and mimicry seldom stands the test of time.
I fancy myself reasonably creative: I use a typewriter for fiction, but Word is much more efficient for editing, and faster for non-fiction. AI is a useful search function. I might, if it ever matters, get it to correct spelling mistakes.
I use AI to classify clips for YouTube - by character, action, prop, expression - but I choose which ones to use. It can create a sorted, searchable library of hundreds of thousands of clips, it cannot tell me what I should use or when. The choice is creation, the categorization is labour.
I sing and play a variety of instruments. I know some music theory. If I ever have time, I'll write, play and record songs. But I will absolutely use prompt-based mixers and mastering tools.
(I've also used it for a looping 4-second animation of my YouTube avatar solely to confuse YouTube's own copyright AI. I do this because it saves days of labour in the most ironic way possible.)
As with everything that gets democratised, the result of lowering barriers is an increase in "slop", because people will continue to mistake labour for quality.
"I made this with AI," without thinking about what "I made this" means, recreates an eternal Labour Theory of Value error.
In that sentence, "with AI" doesn't particularly matter.
But there will also be an increase in quality offerings, as talented people previously excluded from creative industries (by money, access, contacts, technical specialism) gain the power to make things that would once have been impossible.
The key role for humans is precisely the role of conscious creator that AI cannot yet (and perhaps will never) completely fill. Its job is to replace buttons, not imagination; labour, not art.
AI cannot write or direct a good version of The Odyssey. But it can cut the cost of making it by 95%.
Lots of talentless people will thus be able to make their version of that story. But lots of very talented people, probably in collaboration, will as well.
The difference will be between those who know how to write their own scripts, and those who say "hey Grok make me a script for this movie"; or, for visual artists, between those who know the intent behind expression, and those who ask their computer to emote.
It would be hard to do a worse job than Nolan. The only people capable of that are those who lack the imagination to see a use for this technology.
Watch Episode 1 of our Odyssey series made with Grok Imagine.
Let us know in the comments if you'd like a full breakdown of how it was done!
Creative collaboration with @WonderStudiosX and director Dev Walker @glumlot_
Needless to say, you should be wary of those who claim too much of themselves when it comes to AI "creation".
I would not claim my looping 4-second copyright shield is "creation," or that I animated it. The creation was the artist's, who I commissioned to design and draw the character. I just applied a tool to it. It was a split-second afterthought experiment (which is how most of my decisions are made). It worked, so I will probably end up commissioning the artist to do it properly.
Miyamoto's point is that you must consider precisely what creation means. "Hey Grok, make me a thing" is, without further direction, commissioning, not creating.
It's that that will (understandably) upset many people who consider themselves artists, because they're exposed to the subjective theory of value, and many of them will lose. The consumer and the artist do not have the same definition of, or put the same value on, art.
It does not stop you labouring out of love, which is how most of us got started, or from using the same tools for your own ends. Nor will it stop people who value creation from commissioning entirely. Were I to need an entirely new character for my avatar, I would commission the artist again. He sees things that I do not, and thus couldn't ask an AI to reproduce.
But by the same token, you should be wary of those who make extraordinary claims in the other direction.
The most common anti-AI arguments are by far the worst, the least examined, and the least accurate. They are, objectively, fantasy.
They are, almost invariably, economic uncertainty dressed up as aesthetics — and they know nothing about economics or aesthetics.
My worry is that this becomes self-fulfilling.
Old people are supposed to be the most sceptical of new technology.
It's depressing to see people younger Miyamoto, and even younger than me, siloing themselves off in a digital circle-jerk of doomerism and denial, and trading both fascination and opportunity for short-lived, faux-moral social credit points online.
It won't change the world, but it will leave you unprepared for the world you live in.
We should restore Douglas Adams's rules for technology:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The Miyamoto stuff courtesy of: videogameschronicle.com/news…
The final part of The Odyssey video series premiere tonight from 9pm UK / 5pm Eastern, after which I will never think about the movie again.
youtu.be/O4BnWGZYq4Q
The Little Platoon retweeted
Friday Night Tights #429 w @Vara_Dark @PlatoonPod
@DDayCobra @RealLifeFakeWiz @OMBReviews @ComixDivision @KinelRyan @QTRBlackGarrett @ShadMBrooks and @disparutoo
#FridayNightTights
w/@GeeksGamersCom
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Maybe you're not the best person to write on this topic.
Can We Finally Agree That Dragon Age: The Veilguard Was Actually Terrific? polygon.com/dragon-age-the-v…
ALT Can We Finally Agree That Dragon Age: The Veilguard Was Actually Terrific?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
User is engagement baiting, which is against X terms of service.
help.x.com/en/rules-and-p…
Adjusted for inflation, the budget for the ENTIRE original trilogy is about $280M.
And they did things that had never been done before.
‘STAR WARS: STARFIGHTER’ reportedly has a current budget of $226M.
(Via: forbes.com/sites/carolinerei…)
I have finally started editing the book I wrote in the 6 months before I got distracted by YouTube, way back in 2022(?)
So far my main question for my past self is why the hell it's 680 pages long.
But if I set myself the task of genociding my darlings a chapter at a time, I will be done with the second draft in 47 days.
(Technically it's the third draft, but the second one just transferred it from the typewriter it was written on into Word. Google Docs, it turns out, has a character limit.)
I'm also running chapters through an AI text-to-speech to see if the jokes still land when they're read by an overly dramatic robot.
You're not allowed to go on Rotten Tomatoes and say "I paid to see Clayface and it was shit," but you are allowed to go on Twitter and say "I was invited to see Clayface and it was so good I want to gargle James Gunn's balls in my mouth 20/10".
Embargo rules are ancient and silly.
The prideful, stupid narcissist is easily corrupted, cucked and radicalised by a cynical old politician playing on his ego— the only character who shows an ounce of intelligence.
Like all children, he is told he is special. Like too many children today, he refuses to grow up.
He blames systems he does not understand. He is too self-absorbed to contemplate a single way they might be redeemed.
He is too fragile to sustain loss or misfortune. He believes he alone has a right to not be failed.
He embraces moral relativism because he is selfish. Rather than use his prodigious talents for the good of others, he complains that he is not rewarded simply for being himself.
He loves his wife as his possession, and turns on her the moment he thinks she's anything more.
He murders children. He embodies what he creates: a lost generation.
He overthrows those old systems, and becomes an embittered tool of the new regime he stupidly believed he would rule.
He must eventually be redeemed by his son, who remembers the old virtues of charity, friendship, and self-sacrifice, and who fights - guided by his father's teachers - to rebuild what his father destroyed, as it should have been.
We need much more of Luke, and much less of Anakin.
Gen Z love the Prequels because they relate to Anakin.
A sensitive young man, an autistic savant, who has everything taken from him by alien savages, and has natural desires like fraternity, having a family, and aspiring to heroism proscribed by a sclerotic political order that refuses to acknowledge and solve problems.
Young men today find the state of their nations intolerable, and just want to use power and competence to fix things.
When Anakin responds to Padme warning, "That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship," with, "Well, if it works," they agree.
The Jedi Order and Galactic Senate are as hypocritical and unsustainable as the institutions in their states which coordinate to constrain their potential.
For them, the tragedy is not Anakin was corrupted by Palpatine and became Darth Vader, but that he failed and lost everything in pursuit of things they want and can't have too.
The UK currently has a prison capacity crisis. We have so few open prison spaces that the government has been operating an early release scheme.
- People in prison for shoplifting have been released early.
- People in prison for domestic abuse have been released early.
- Two men convicted for manslaughter in the killing of a police officer were going to be released early, until the political backlash forced the Prime Minister to intervene.
- The mother of Henry Novak's killer, who hid the murder weapon, is due for early release.
But we're spending time and public money drafting badly-worded and unenforceable laws that make it an imprisonable offense to possess pornography in which known actors of legal age look like they might be step-relatives?
You don't go to prison for shagging your actual cousin, incidentally. That would be culturally insensitive.
Porn showing choking or incest to be banned from early November, government says bbc.in/3TF2Ijx
This Orwell quote, and the other often paraphrased as "all art is political," is one of the most abused sentences in the English language.
Orwell means it in the relatively narrow sense that all works of art will contain the political presuppositions of the artist.
Art does not have to be actively or consciously political, but its assumptions - say, about what is right and what is wrong - count as political attitudes.
This is true of everything from War & Peace to Treasure Island.
But most of those who parrot the line today use it to excuse active politicking — the very propaganda Orwell warns against.
If all art is political then it is fine that my work is about my politics, and you are a fool if you reject my politics, because all art is political.
In The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda, Orwell takes aim at precisely this sort of sloppy, motivated reasoning:
"If we look back at the English literature of the last ten years not so much at the literature as at the prevailing literary attitude, the thing that strikes us is that it has almost ceased to be aesthetic.
Literature has been swamped by propaganda. I do not mean that all the books written during that period have been bad. But the characteristic writers of the time... have been didactic, political writers, aesthetically conscious, of course, but more interested in subject-matter than in technique.
And the most lively criticism has nearly all of it been the work of Marxist writers... who look on every book virtually as a political pamphlet and are far more interested in digging out its political and social implications than in its literary qualities in the narrow sense."
Orwell thought the first position - an awareness of art's political assumptions - was good and valuable, because it reminds us that art is of our world, and this understanding helps us spot propaganda when it disguises itself as pure aestheticism.
But he deplored the second position - the conscious politicisation of art, and the view that art must be actively political to be good - "...because it caused countless young writers to try to tie their minds to a political discipline which, if they had stuck to it, would have made mental honesty impossible. The only system of thought open to them at that time was official Marxism...".
Honesty is impossible in such circumstances, he said, because making art the slave of contemporary politics makes it dependent, in the end, on grubby temporal scheming.
The bold Marxist writers who devoted their art to that vision of utopia were totally undone by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Art cannot pretend at utopian principles while it sources its morality from the real business of politics. When political art comes into conflict with the needs of ideology, the art, not the ideology, gets sacrificed.
"Just as many writers about 1930 had discovered that you cannot really be detached from contemporary events, so many writers about 1939 were discovering that you cannot really sacrifice your intellectual integrity for the sake of a political creed — or at least you cannot do so and remain a writer."
“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” - George Orwell
“All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something… My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world.” -Toni Morrison
“All art is political. In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political. Art lives in the world, and we exist in the world, and we cannot create honest work about the world in which we live without reflecting it.”- Lin Manuel Miranda
Hold up, so John Stewart is allowed to waterboard a red prisoner and that's heroism, but when I applaud him for it I get banned for Violent Speech?!
New second channel video! Digger thinks it's much smarter than you. Which is awkward, as it might be the year's most stupid movie.
youtu.be/fNidMz1wvQo
I hoped I wouldn't live to see a time in which The Day After Tomorrow could be considered subtle and restrained.
The really depressing difference is that I think everyone (even those who agreed with its message) found that movie a little bit embarrassing, whereas Digger is aimed at our new breed of educated retard.
47% of the price of petrol, and 43% of the price of diesel, is attributable to tax.
If businesses in this country wanted to lead a quiet revolt against this system, they would start listing the tax% under every price they display.
I know people are worried about fuel prices. And I get it. You get to the pump, watch the numbers climb, and wonder why it's costing so much more than it used to.
The reality is that global events are pushing up costs, and families here at home are feeling the impact.
But I won't accept that there's nothing I can do to help.
That's why from today, you'll be able to see petrol and diesel prices on Google Maps, compare nearby stations and find the cheapest option before you fill up.
It's a small change, but if there's a practical way to help people keep more money in their pocket, I'll do it.