2 or 3 years ago, when DALL-E 2 (or 3?) was new, everyone kinda went nuts over it and even on hexbear the front page was briefly flooded with 2x2 grids of blobby Lenins high-fiving Sonic the Hedgehog or whatever. It’s funny to think back on now but at the time everyone saw AI slop as a passing, mostly harmless internet novelty on the level of something like Akinator.
Anyway, someone made a post titled Order January 66th which had melted clone troopers just kind of milling about on what could’ve been Capitol Hill if you squinted. That’s it, that’s the only funny use of AI
I’m sure that these days you could have an AI fart out an uncannily realistic and fully voiced 4k video of screen-accurate clone troopers ransacking Nancy Pelosi’s office and getting their balls tazed by cops but the only emotion it would elicit would be cringe. Aside from everyone being blissfully unaware of the full implications of what the technology would have on society and how annoying AI bros would become back then, what made those early DALL-E posts and videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti amusing was how shitty they were. When the output was so low-res, blobby and abstract it was kind of funny when you got it to look like whatever dumb joke you had in your head and it kind of felt you had gotten away with something.
Now all of the world’s most uncreative and annoying Twitter users can bring all of their reddit-brained epic bacon fantasies to life. OMG GUYS CHECK IT OUT, IT’S KEVIN MCALLISTER, DEADPOOL AND HARRY POTTER BUILDING A SNOWMAN! #WHOLESOME
I still laugh at the bottomless hole supervisor greentext, it was probably the only AI-generated thing I thought was actually “intentionally” funny, as in the AI came up with something funny:
whenever I laugh at something that’s AI-generated nowadays, like with twinzinini bombini or the old ladies dropping boulders on glass bridges, it’s more like I’m laughing at how deranged the person making the prompt is, not because the AI actually came up with something funny… it’s a grim kind of laugh at how our brains have rapidly turned to mush in the past couple of years
edit:
also, there was this guy on twitter, I forgot his name, who made these very decrepit, disgusting AI nightmare videos that I would describe as essentially images of American decay, just big parking lots filled with people using drugs and cops doing incomprehensible things, which then shifted in a kind of nightmare-logic into weird TV shows and fucked up hospitals with people with grotesque plastic surgeries
it was a bit of a one-trick pony but I thought that leaning into the uncanniness of AI-generated video was the only possible way somebody could use this tool to make something artistic, but that’s a moot point once you understand just how harmful the technology actually is