Slop Content Festival
Today I attended a random film festival which wasn't exactly a human-made one, but it was for the short movies made by AI. They exhibited a couple of short films that their directors (lol) used generative AI to create (?) them and as a person who has an excellent habit of watching low quality movies that Adam Sandler special 2010s run is like Scorsese's filmography in compare with them, I was disgusted by the AI slop that I watched today.
I'm a big anti-AI and for the last two years that it became a big thing around the world, I only used it on two occasions. First time was when I had to track down an absurd document about the use of porcelain during the Safavid era in Iran and the other time was when I have to find references for two essays and I still do have a lot of regrets about both cases and the fact that I asked AI to help me with my homework.
In the first situation, I told myself I'm using AI as a tool for finding sources regarding that topic as it wasn't really something I wanted to do and at the same time, the course itself didn't have any credits so technically, it was pointless to even do the homework at the first place. Nevertheless, I realized that the subject is so boring and the sources that ChatGPT (my arch nemesis) is suggesting are also suspicious so I completely ditched the whole thing and chose a new topic which was closer to my experiences and studies without any assistance from AI.
However, my second (hopefully the last) experience with AI was more complicated. I had to do a personal and a group project and for both of them, I came across some problems while searching for academic references. With the personal one, I thought I needed at least five more references so I asked ChatGPT to find some based on my text, and what it proposed was passable. Regardless, the group project was trickier. The problem was that I had to yap yap yap and I needed some actual academic references to back those yaps and I gave ChatGPT the statement I wrote and asked for some references that support my idea and fortunately, I got some. I found around 10 references for my 2000-word text and I sent them to my friend mentioning that I used AI to find them. She told me to double-check in case they might be fake sources and truthfully, only two of them were fabricated. Three days later she texted me saying your text was flagged as 100% AI and I was like wtf? I knew I used AI to find those references but I didn't use it to write. As a way to show her the issue is the AI detector and not me, I rewrote my part, and guess what? It was flagged again. We had an incredible day going back and forth with each other while having a very intense argument and at the end, she eventually approved my point that after three times rewriting those 2000 words in less than 12 hours, I'm not the problem. This conflict made me even more sick of AI and how it works because if my own writing is flagged as AI, how can I trust that AI itself might not just rip off my work and use it as a way to train itself to be more human? I promised myself that even if someone forced me to write a War & Peace-long report about the influence of Norwegian aircraft on the volcanoes in Iceland, I would educate myself about the topic and wouldn't use AI at all.
When I was using AI, I felt I was the laziest person on the planet. I was so close to informing my professors that I'm not qualified to pass their course. Even now that I'm writing this post, I feel like I prefer to reveal to the world what a fraud I am to use ChatGPT on these two occasions rather than take this truth to my grave (ok enough drama for today). This is strictly the same reason why I think any director on the planet should be ashamed of himself/herself to use AI in his/her art. I was telling one of the people at the festival that if I know somebody used AI in their movie, I can't rate that work at any degree. I don't stand for explanations like "it's cheaper", "now everyone can direct their own movie", or "it's the same as CGI" because all these bs are our shots to justify the laziness of the people behind these ugly works to sell their Frankenstein monster to the masses. After watching all the short films of the festival, I was so delighted that none of them were even close to the worst short films that I've seen in my entire life. The human art even at it's worst, is still much more promising than an AI slop where there is no soul or thought and I wish that AI Art remains the same shit as it is at the moment because we never needed it and we'll never need.