Imagine pizza.
It’s not a normal pizza, it’s a weird pizza. A pizza that looks unnatural in a way that the eye is focused or blurred. Like an MC Escher painting. Instead of endless stairs and people walking upside down, it’s pizza.
Imagine this pizza moving towards a barely legible human mouth. However, instead of entering the mouth, it heads for a deformed human nose. Children in horror movies have hollow smiles because their eyes are somehow staring in the opposite direction.
This hellish atrocity I just described is an AI-generated trailer, AI-created contentIt is an abomination, not a dubious word. It’s also very funny.
I’ve seen a lot of this type of content over the past week or so. Trailers of fictional business and movie ideas generated by AI. It is unclear whether these are designed to be taken seriously or exist as parodies designed to highlight the limitations of AI.
Sometimes they include teasing tweets like, “This came straight out of Lynch’s nightmare bowels.” On other occasions they appear to be 100% sincere with him, posting things like: “Hollywood be careful, he has two years left before the AI sucks the marrow out of the dead bones and lets the bones rot.”
As usual on the Internet, it can be difficult to tell who is joking. These videos could be deliberately crafted engagement bait or his 10-layer sarcastic play. But we feel like we are in the middle of a very fleeting moment. We believe you should enjoy what it is: absolute madness.
We live in the chaos of AI-generated content, and I love it. I like you because you’re stupid. I love it because it’s obviously awful.I like that What AI can and cannot doI love it because everything about it is completely broken.
I love it, but it doesn’t last long.
From what I’ve seen, one of three things is almost certain to happen.
1. Tech Brothers is right. Within two years (futurists always say two years, because that’s generally long enough for anyone to forget they made a terrible prediction), an AI-generated, real You will start watching movies and TV shows that are completely indistinguishable from each other. Wow, what a reversal! Who could have seen it coming?
2. AI movies/TV shows as a concept have been relegated to a VR-esque niche and not much in practice. Everyone gets bored and tech buddy starts pushing headlines for whatever his Web3 tech is.
3. All this is gone and we live happily ever after.
In any case, this golden age of people spewing out the most grotesque AI abominations known to mankind and disguising it as valuable and important is temporary. It will definitely come to an end and we cannot take this for granted. It is our sworn duty to enjoy them as long as they exist.
And there is so much to enjoy.
A fully open mouth with rows of hideous human teeth vie for supremacy against a barely recognizable beer bottle. Horror show Yoda’s Star Wars parody is designed for monotonous and always-online moviegoers. Spider’s fingers undulate champagne around his flute, faces dissonantly shift, twist and twist across the uncanny valley into something alien and warped. This shit can make you carsick. very.
It’s hard to tell if these AI trailers are the beginning of something or the logical end. The tech-savvy Twitter post believes AI has the potential to destroy everything. A devoted hater like me believes nothing changes. But the future is rarely clear. There is no middle ground here. The crystal ball is broken. No one always knows something.
For example, there’s no rational way a human could have looked at an iPhone in 2007 and predicted Uber Eats or TikTok. Someone watching black and white TV couldn’t have predicted Netflix. The prism that filters expectations will be another object in ten years. Everyone looks stupid in hindsight. It’s an old story.
So for now, I’m going to live in the moment and enjoy these hilarious abominations while they still exist.
Editor’s Note: CNET uses an AI engine to create personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by editors. See this post for more details.
