Uncanny Valley: AI - 1950's Super Panavision 70

May 01, 2024

Uncanny Valley: AI - 1950's Super Panavision 70

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the creative fields is a very controversial subject of which there's been much debate. Contentions arise around the ethics of it taking work away from human creatives and for mining the work of existing artists to use in its own image building. Its use in deep fake pornography and propaganda also raise important considerations and problems.

There is also the old thorny question of 'Is it Art?" - is it art that divides humankind from other life-forms? - can a machine truly create art?
I was once told in a debate upon the subject that "well, the genie is out of the bottle now, so might as well get used to it!"

So here, I am looking at just one area where the genie has manifested. Currently on YouTube now some channels are posting constructed trailers of late 20th, early 21st Century TV shows and movies re-imagined as 1950's productions. Qualms about the ethics of AI aside, I must admit I really like these videos.

Though I do like 1950's era aesthetics anyway the other thing about these early-age AI videos is that they aren't perfect - it is the flaws that fascinate me. As the technology progresses which it is doing at a break-neck pace, it will iron out all these creases and glitches and when it does I will find them less interesting.

At this stage the imagery and motion is sometimes profoundly oneiric - more-so to me than many of the paintings of the surrealists or attempts by some actual film-makers to capture the dream-state.

The glitches in eyes blinking, bodily motions, time distortions and artifacts fluidly appearing and disappearing are unsettling. The nearness to actuality but the differences that set it apart are classic Uncanny Valley - the dissonance and difference between actual people and automatons or facsimiles such as dolls, mannequins and now computer-generated 'people'. Actual animators have toiled to get smooth and realistic movements and mannerisms so as not to jar from the narration. Here, where the computer gets it wrong is what for me makes it interesting.
I like the disconcerting, anomalous, fever dream, Uncanny feelings that these AI generated visualisers unintentionally provoke.

Whilst there are many of these short films on YouTube I have selected a few that are of subjects most fitting to the general themes of this blog.

But are they Art? As a lifelong artist myself, I don't know ...