this is the now famous AI generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti it was generated all the way back in 2023 and for some reason this video has become a kind of Benchmark for the development of AI generated video and at the time of filming this is how much that technology has improved it's truly astonishing and it might lead one to believe that this trend will continue to the point that image generation tools will eventually be used to produce images like these images that will stand along side any other in the grand artistic tradition that
we call Cinema well in this video I'm going to argue that that will never happen not because the technology isn't capable of producing believable images but because the way images convey meaning is more complicated than you might think so let's get into it on The Art of Storytelling you might have seen a Coca-Cola ad that played during the 2024 holiday season an apparent homage to its famous holidays or coming campaign from the '90s if you didn't know this ad was created entirely using AI though the ad was widely mocked for its uncanny depictions of people
and the general tone deafness but to many in the film industry myself included this ad raised the Spectre of AI generated Cinema and the general claim put forward by proponents of AI image generation is that it's simply a matter of time before AI is capable of producing cinematic images that are indistinguishable from Real Cinema and given that eventuality it seems plausible that people people will be able to use AI tools to generate entire feature films perhaps even that aspire to the quality of the great cinematic works of the past you might have seen examples of
so-called cinematic AI generated videos these images from Google's V2 seem to be the state-of-the-art at the time of filming and I got to admit that AI has improved dramatically from downright terrifying to just weirdly unsettling but to me the problem with the concept of AI generated Cinema is that it overlooks some important things about how human beings interpret images I feel like the real question about the artistic and cultural possibilities of AI has much less to do with the Technology's capability of producing images and much more to do with the psychological and philosophical questions of
how the human mind decodes and makes sense of those images so let me show you what I mean this is me creating a photographic image using the traditional method of recording light onto a medium in order to do this I have to exist as an embodied conscious being somewhere in space and time and use my camera to capture a moment of physical reality and the unique pattern of light that I capture is translated into a two-dimensional interpretation of reality that we call a photograph in this case a photograph of Mr baby now the promise of
AI is that we can forgo this entire real world process no camera no embodied conscious being no reality we skip straight ahead to the image itself and well so far so good we've been able to lay off most of the film industry and we've got a reasonable fa simile of Mr babes but before we celebrate we need to remember that the production of the image is only half of the process arranging pixels in a frame to produce a representation of reality is the easy part the true test of an image happens when the light from
that image passes through the eyeballs of a conscious Observer and is interpreted by that often overlooked part of this process the human being if there's one main point I want this video to make it's that an image is much more than a visual representation of something we have centuries of philosophical contemplation on what images are what it means to produce them and what it means to interpret them and as it turns out images are rather elusive Scholars have spent half a millennium debating whether Mona Lisa is smiling or not you may have seen another famous
painting by Renee mcreed called the treachery of images the subtext reads Su pazin peep this is not a pipe an absurd contradiction except that it's also a true fact this is not a pipe it's a representation of a pipe this distinction is obvious if you think about it but it nicely illustrates the philosophical complexity of how images mediate reality now we could go as far back as the Renaissance here and talk about how even the invention of linear perspective raised questions about man's relationship to reality but I think for this video we should look at
the invention of the photograph because that invention really illustrates how the creative process behind an image dramatically changes how we perceive and interpret it the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted that your feelings about a work of art art are in part determined by your awareness of whether or not that work has been mechanically reproduced and this is actually really easy to demonstrate here's the story KN by Vincent van go now of course you're not actually looking at the story KN this is a file called story kn. JPEG that I downloaded from the internet and put
in this video you're actually just looking at pixels on a screen that represent the story Knight and Walter Benjamin would say that the millions of copies of the star KN do not have the aura of the original work the one that's hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City the mechanically reproduced image of the star KN is of course practically identical to the real thing and yet there's clearly something in your perception of the original painting that is not contained in your perception of this star KN mouse pad that I found on
Teemu and to be clear the aura of an image is not a real thing that exists like it's not a special goo that van go put in his paint or something it's a perception that exists purely in your conscious mind so what does this mean for Ai and Cinema well one interesting thing about Aura is that it seems to matter for paintings which exist uniquely in one time and place but not so much for photographs and this makes perfect sense because by its very nature the medium of Photography is all about mechanical reproducibility it's not
awe inspiring to be in the presence of the original film negative or even the first print of a photograph and the same is true for Cinema it's not especially important to our experience of a classic film that the original film print is threaded through an old project what does matter in photography is the moment when an image is captured the precise intersection of timing intuition and composition that transforms the chaos of reality into an enduring image what is that chaos exactly it's everything literally everything in the universe a photograph captures much more than what is
apparently contained within the frame of the image take a look at this Photograph I took of my own hand it's an apparently simple image but let's pause to consider all of the things that had to exist in order for this image to be produced my palm creases were determined way back during my fetal development my skin tone was determined by how much time I've spent in the sun in my life and my fingertips are calloused from writing too many YouTube scripts about obscure philosophical ideas this image of my hand tells the story about my life
but you can go even deeper the grain of this wood is a record of the weather patterns of the region in which the tree grew and the slats are cut and joined in the precise style of an IKEA dining table a company from the nation of Sweden which is a country founded by Vikings and so on and so on into Infinity photography captures all of that swirling chaos and renders it as a 2D image all of those things needed to occur in reality in order for my hand to exist exactly as it does and so
in some sense those things are in the image it's sort of like the old Buddhist idea that you can see the universe in a grain of rice so if that's true of a relatively simple image what does this mean for the art of Cinema in which images are created with artistic intent just take a look at the scene from Stanley cubrick Barry Lyon look at the very subtle movement of the character's eyes What story do they tell what lived experience are you referencing inside of your own memory when you interpret the coded meaning of Lady
lynon's expression can this facial expression be described in a text prompt I mean in principle can it be described with language what is she melancholic enigmatic graceful restrained wistful what list of adjectives is long enough to comprehensively describe the story her face is telling the more you reflect on the sheer amount of information contained in an image the more you realize that text and images translate to each other only in a very superficial way and this is just one actor's performance to say nothing of the period dress the shot composition the natural lighting all of
the creative choices that come together to articulate a singular artistic statement if you're still not convinced I think there's another way we can approach this and that is by looking at this shot from the movie Mission Impossible Rogue Nation this is the character Ethan Hunt hanging from the fuselage of an airus a400m as it takes off and as I'm sure you already know what you're looking at is a real stunt Tom Cruz was actually harnessed to this plane in order to capture these images why would he do such a thing well he is insane but
he also understands what the art of film making is and he understands that the image itself is not the only thing people people see when they see an image he knows that the knowledge of the stunt being real makes the image much more meaningful and exciting there's nothing in the shot that tells you it's a real stunt it could easily have been created with CGI but you were told that it's real and that external knowledge that metadata about this image makes all the difference in how you see that image and of course AI by its
very nature could never reproduce that if there's a counterargument to this it's probably that computer generated imagery or CGI is already an extremely common filmmaking tool but even so the general attitude about CGI is that it should be used only if necessary we acknowledge that there are some things that cannot be filmed because they're impossible to recreate or they just don't exist but we also respect films that are produced practically and I think this just illustrates the fundamental ethic that I'm pointing out the ethic of Cinema is to capture the truth and my message is
to the artists and storytellers out there who feel discouraged by this technology don't lose sight of the fact that the end of art is not necessarily the product of art Da Vinci didn't paint the Mona Lisa because he wanted to hang a pretty picture on his wall he wanted to explore the infinite complexity of a smile the ineffable quality that is beyond the ability of language to describe and could only be expressed with a brush the image in the museum is nothing more than a projection of the life he lived just as the story night
is nothing more than the projection of the life van go lived just as lady lynon is the projection of the life Stanley curi lived so it is with all great art and all great artists so no it doesn't matter how convincing AI video becomes because the primary concern of art is truth and a well- told lie will always be a lie so thanks for watching check out my patreon if you want to support the channel and I'll see you on the next one
