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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I'm all for AI art but right now the state of video is absolutely godawful. Elon is completely delusional if he thinks he can make something good in a year. Than again nano-banana came out and nobody expected it (though most people are still using gpt-image-2 ... YUCK!!!)

If the theory is that in a year video generation will be on a level where you say "Grok make a movie" and it does it, then I agree. But take our current tools and a gifted artistic team and spend a year carefully prompting and editing, and I think you could make something pretty extraordinary. Even when I'm just making a joke image like "grok make me a poster decrying anti-italian discrimination" I have to re-prompt it at least four times. Once to get it to what I actually wanted, once to edit some problems, and twice to remove weird artifacts from the first two edits. For a feature length movie, you'd be prompting every scene dozens of times. Which is basically what a director does now with actors, they reshoot scenes over and over until the actors understand the prompts and the director sees what they want, and sometimes at the end they have to go back and reshoot scenes that didn't come out right or that they have to change later.

On a related but unrelated note, casting a black girl as the green girl in Wicked completely ruined the movie. Because despite being green she was just so black.

I didn't like it because they made her skin color a metaphor for...her skin color. Why not just have her be black at that point and skip the green altogether? Though my bigger problem is Ariana Grande, whose face I find disturbing. She looks, after all the plastic surgery, like a black girl wearing whiteface.