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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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I do wonder how AI will affect these types of things. AI has been better at chess than humans for quite some time, but still people care much more about human chess than matches between different chess engines. I'm not predicting it will turn out this way everywhere, but I can imagine a world in which a similar dynamic happens in a lot of creative media where people really do prefer it to be more human. For me personally simply the knowledge that something is AI generated will cause something to feel less meaningful. But I suppose my media consumption is rather far removed from the median to begin with, so my feelings on the matter might very well not be representative of wider trends.

For competitive spectacles like chess, I think there is always a niche to see humans compete. People watch competitive swimming even though the median shark would swim circles around the fastest humans.

But acting is non-competitive, typically. Animated movies are a thing. Many popular franchises invest heavily in CGI, which is completely orthogonal to human acting ability.

That being said, actor name recognition might be a huge draw for a part of the audience. Some people will have crushes on hot actresses and actors and watch all their movies out of general principle, and follow their life off-screen. Even if AI can act, it can not match the real thing in scandals and messy divorces.

But the obvious solution here is for real people to license their name, image and likeness to AI movies, then spend their fortunes on scandalous pursuits as customary. After all, audiences are fine with watching their favorite actors faking death scenes and their favorite porn stars faking orgasms, so this would be just more of the same.

Even if AI can act, it can not match the real thing in scandals and messy divorces.

It's interesting because this is a double-edged sword. Messy scandals and divorces indisputably garner publicity for actors and by extension the movies they star in. On the other hand, actors being human means they sometimes have to be sent to rehab to dry out (holding up production on their latest movie and costing the studio millions), or get arrested for sexual harassment or domestic abuse (meaning the studio has to just sit on their latest movie until the scandal blows over), or simply express a controversial opinion in an interview that goes viral.

There's no doubt that there are financial benefits associated with actors being flawed, imperfect human beings, but there are also costs. I have no doubt that there are individual films which have posted a loss specifically because one of the lead actors did something suspect in their private life. I think it would be legitimately difficult to definitively say whether the fact of actors having private lives outside of their work is a net help or a net hindrance to movie studios.

People watch competitive swimming even though the median shark would swim circles around the fastest humans.

I know this isn't the point, but I'd way prefer competitive shark swimming

Ah, the logic behind greyhound races.

I feel like the best, if imperfect, comparison is to look at how the art community reacted to the development of photography (ironically here including film). Maybe it did decimate the ranks of realist oil planters (sad, actually), but I'd hardly say the art world hasn't survived.

That said, photography led to a lot of less-photoreal art styles that I won't claim to be a huge fan of (see "modern art"). I do see a human-rendered painting of, say, a landscape to be more interesting than a large photo print, but I do see lots of photos on walls too.

Isn't that tied to the AI content just being bad? The issue I'm having is much like with JJ's mysterybox style story telling, there is no point, it's just narratively stringing people along. It works for a while but then people get pissed.

If there was a point and it wasn't completely inane then I'd wager almost no-one would care about whether something was AI made or not. The amount of people seeking out (good) human performances of music and theatre is microscopic, even when it's free!

It's easy to grandstand about not consuming AI slop (not saying you are) when it's uniformly abject shit.

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