“What’s that weird Chitty explosion?” I murmured to myself as I breathed.
Google just showed off a demonstration of a movie it made using its own AI video generation software stream, in which grandfather tried to invent a flying car with the help of a giant chicken. As the host of the I/O keynote speaker said, “very great.” This is not a word I would choose.
This is a familiar pattern I noticed during Tuesday’s event. Google will show us an example of its content generation tool in action and then tell us how magical and magical the results are. But what I see with my own eyes is neither amazing nor magical. It looks a lot like an AI slope in my opinion.
Its artistic merits cannot be challenged.
For those unfamiliar with the term, AI Slop is the low-quality, aesthetically unattractive content generated by AI. Once you are familiar with the narratives of most AI-generated visual media, you cannot see them. This content style is creepy, which is both overly realistic and obviously false. Unfortunately for Google, even the latest AI tools don’t seem to generate media that don’t have this bad veneer in the examples the company shows us During I/O.
Google spends a large portion of the keynote, running through updates to these content generation tools, which is curious because content generation is not without its controversial aspects. First, the environment tradeoffs using AI are the environment tradeoffs. Then there is a controversial question of which media generated models of these media may have been trained on. Don’t forget the ongoing debate about the true artistic value of this content, and the fate of a true creative person has been designed as a replacement.
From the moment the event was opened, a gimmicky video made entirely by Google’s VEO tools, I’ve been worried that the company is trying to sell us as an example of good AI art in the keynote. After watching the whole process, I was not impressed.
I know there may be some people who strongly object to the quality of content generated by Google AI. But like any art entering the world, there are many views on its value. This is a criticism that Google must fight against, that its long-standing intention is to provide the world with AI tools to provide net wins for the creative and art industries.
