So it's a couple weeks ago. While im watching videos of absolutely UNDENIABLY adorable Siamese cats that make me want to sing "We are Siamese, if you Please!" if it wasn't a racist stereotype
(seriously, look it up, that song was supposed to make fun of Thai people, but it ended up doing the exact opposite and boosted the popularity of Siamese cats as a breed.)
and i heard this absolutely catchy song. A dubstep(?) loop of a Swedish guy singing "Chicken, Banana!", it captivated me and was way more catchy than it should've been. So i looked the song up, listened to it a LOT on my own and thought about how catchy it was. I looked up the music video, but something hit me about it. It was extremely saturated and uncanny in it's movement. I assumed this was by intention to make it more wacky in the same way the music video for say, Crazy Frog, or the animation of ATHF is intentionally lo-fi, so i excused it, but then I looked at the channels banner. Just an image of Chicken Banana with the tag "WE ONLY DO FUN SHIT", and almost no videos except just Chicken Banana. So I looked into their shorts section, and found very blunt abrupt AI art. Then I thought, with how saturated and plain this entire channel is, is this entire channel AI generated? Or, considering the channel is tagged Swedish, could it be that it was only used for a couple shorts for exaggeration and everything else was officially made? Was it just a language barrier making everything seem more artificial than it actually is? Then, it hit me. AI Art is making me paranoid.
I realized that this wasn't the first time I saw an AI generated thing out of nowhere not specifying it was AI. While I was searching about the TF2 cast, I found this nifty little article about how Sniper has Garand Thumb in his design, and the article (which is this in question) states that the sniper rifle Sniper uses is "pretty clearly based on the iconic service rifle", yet the shape of Sniper's rifle is completely different to that of an M1 Garand. So I looked on an actual reputable source, the IMFDB (the Internet Movie Firearms Database), ran and used primarily by gun nuts, and they specify that the weapon Sniper own is a slightly muted out and more stylised variant of Remington Model 700, to which it looks nearly identical. If you google the Sniper's rifle source, nothing about the M1 Garand comes up. Where the fuck did he get this? Was he just making an assumption? So i looked at the author, they have no SM linked or anything, nothing. Just articles. I looked up the site and IMMEDIATELY saw a post on Reddit saying how absolutely awful it was by ranking the best charms in Hollow Knight and having a completely wrong list link. Then I realized and looked up more about TheGamer, and every single post about them elsewhere on the internet is people complaining about how low quality their articles are and calling it AI. So, how the actual fuck was this one of the top results on Google? I saw ONE article on there written by an actual person (someone with links on their profile), so how do we even tell if this is AI or not?
Then before all of this, I encountered this musical artist, rapper by the name of Prvnci who blew up on YouTube Shorts through taking adorable animal videos that aren't his and plastering his music all over it. The music itself is completely nasty, He doesn't properly sync up the instrumental to the beat and he doesn't even rap to the BPM either. All of the sounds aren't in sync. However regardless, he rode the algorithm by stealing cat videos that weren't his. This is weird enough, but what really makes it so crazy is the fact that the music is AI. It's clear, as sloppy and uncanny as it is, his "diversity". He isn't just a rapper, he also somehow at the exact same time knows how to make "emo rock", and then you listen to the emo rock, which is well, a much harder genre to generate due to being mostly analog and deeply layered (no offense to hiphop! it's a beautiful genre, im just saying). Take a listen to this "beautiful" "inspiring" piece of music. link It starts off appealing, but by the time Prvnci starts singing, you can hear the AI-ness kick in. The drums are blending into the guitar, somehow? the song just ends abruptly, you literally can't understand what he's singing and the riff is unclear and inconsistent somehow. The repetition is also baffling. There's no consistency in the repetition like you'd find in an intentionally repetitive song, It's switching from segment randomly at will rather than coordinated. Keep in mind that Prvnci repeatedly denies using AI even though it's obvious. By not saying what he's doing, he's able to get away with it, because AI is still realistic enough there's still (VERY SMALL) plausibility.
The most terrifying part of this to me is how I found these completely randomly by crawling around the internet. These weren't random, I actually just found these naturally. I wasn't looking FOR AI things, they just showed up naturally. This influx makes everything more difficult, after all, how do you tell something that's just simply sloppy and mediocrely made to an actual AI creation?
It overall has made me more paranoid as a person, because it makes me constantly worry and think about what exactly I'm checking out on if it's AI or not. One of my favorite pass-times used to be slashing through the trash bag that is YouTube and the internet to find weird and unique niche things in general, but it's actively hard to do that now because the trash bin no longer has cool toys in it but instead artificial toys made with 3D printing. (Shit allegory, but it gives you the idea.) My head is constantly looking for the telltale signals that something is AI, even if it isn't whenever I check out something more obscure now. It's no longer that I even have to look for it, they show up naturally like this example I showed.
AI is a greedy little vampire bastard that still wants it's fangs into the internet, even though trends similar to it have already passed such as NFTs, and it's actively contributing to the constant influx of piss streamed directly into the mouth of the internet. It's become hard to tell what is and isn't AI, and it doesn't help that there's no clear indicator of when something is using AI or not. I'm sure in the future it'll get better. Overtime, AI honestly just keeps getting worse, and more obscure, and it keeps getting easier to tell what is AI and what isn't. It also somehow keeps finding it's way into every crevice of old artists too, for some reason Daft Punk of all groups (maybe it wasn't them but their record holders, no idea either) did an awful AI regeneration of Interstella, and Telepopmusik keeps making these shitty AI music videos.
Anyways, there isn't much to say atp. AI sux. Uhh. Go visit a Canes. Buy yourself a mountain dew. Start an mtn dew collection before they redesign the bottles and you'll have some antiques to share, that's what im doing rn.