We are all old enough to know that Internet booms last as long as they last. IRC, blogs, forums, Facebook, the metaverse, cryptocurrencies, NFTs… And now artificial intelligence. With each new development, it takes us a little less time to get tired of it. If online blogs lasted a few years, the fascination with AI has been seen and not seen: from overwhelming success at the beginning of the year to a coldness that leaves it almost ready for judgment. It was nice while it lasted, what’s next?
Death Journey
The idea seems like something out of a B-movie from a few decades ago: a robot capable of thinking like humans and doing the same creative things, and to which many end up paying obeisance by using economics as an excuse. And yet, it is the world that a few seemed to salivate over in late 2022 and early 2023, when MidJourney, ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence began to take off in Google searches.
The problem is that not everything is as it is painted, and the public has a limit of swallowing. Everything is, on paper, very modern, very futuristic and very evocative, but when it comes down to it, the result looks ugly, artists are losing jobs and companies are getting online boycotts for using AI on book covers or, as in the case of the infamous intro of ‘Secret Invasion‘, for using it in mainstream products.
And so, the dream of all of us becoming artists who can write “Teddy Bear swinging on a cloud Bill Waterson style” faded away as laws have been put in place. Not everything goes, copyright exists, and the results of AI are far from perfect. “In the future they will be,” some say. The problem is that the metaverse will also be more perfect in a few years, but if it is not interesting now, it will be very difficult for it to work in the future.
The first big mainstream attempt to sneak AI in, even if it is creatively justified, was in the Marvel series for Disney+. And it has coincided with a general drop in interest, in Google trends, in everything related to AI content generation systems and even in the words “artificial intelligence” themselves, which peaked in April and since then have been of less interest.
No one denies that it can have incredible uses for different applications, but it’s pretty clear that there is no place in the art world for AI. Catching the trick is easy, companies look bad, creators get angry and the result is negative for everyone. We’ve been hearing for months that AI will brutally cut back on work and create a new world, but maybe it’s time to ask ourselves a simple question: we’ve played with the toy, we’ve had enough. And if we don’t want any more, so what?
