AI vs. TV: Will AI produce the next Wes Anderson?
As I continue to think about the current state of AI and its future impact on the media & entertainment industry, it seems like, at the heart of the issue is —
What are the creative limitations of AI? (if any at all)
I recently got into a debate with my friend Alan about my current position that AI cannot produce true creativity, using the example that AI could not produce a Wes Anderson.
Wes Anderson as an AI meme
Ever since AI image-making tools popularized ‘in the style of’ image generation, creating images and videos ‘in the style of Wes Anderson’ has become popular.
Who is AI anyway?
Let’s remind ourselves what AI is really doing though. AI produces images based on models trained on lots of existing prior art. This training also involves humans providing the semantic information so that the model will understand what‘Wes Anderson’ means.
Because of this, I would suggest that:
AI could not create images in the style of Wes Anderson without a priori knowledge of Wes Anderson’s work
That much is obvious from a semantics standpoint. You need ‘Wes Anderson’ data in to get ‘in the style of Wes Anderson’ data out.
But could AI originate the style of Wes Anderson if Wes Anderson never existed?
This is the heart of the debate. Let’s imagine Wes Anderson never existed, and yet we’re seeing the images above produced. Or one day we have an entire film in that style, independently created by AI.
Given the current state of AI technology, which is to remix existing sources, it is possible that with the right guidance the AI would land on similar color palettes, scene composition, set decoration, and all of the other accoutrements we associate with the style of Wes Anderson.
But this wouldn’t happen randomly. There would be a feedback loop of a person or people saying they liked a certain style and wanted to see more of it.
In this case, you’ve crowdsourced a style that is sort of like Wes Anderson
Even if, by that logic, you’ve arrived at a surface representation of Wes Anderson’s style, I’d say you’re still not even close to approximating Wes Anderson’s creativity.
Authentic vs. Karaoke
I remember seeing Malcolm McLaren speak in London in 1999. He gave a talk called Authentic Creativity vs. Karaoke Culture. I think he’d see AI as pure Karaoke, replaying its best guess at crowdsourced goodness, but lacking any true signs of creativity.
True Creativity is an AGI problem
There’s a tendency for us to think about the current AI as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) — that is to say it gives a pretty appearance of sounding like us. But it’s not actually thinking, it’s behaving like an incredibly powerful autosuggest tool.
AI is showing us it’s ‘best guess’ at what we’ve asked for, but creativity isn’t guesswork
What goes into Wes Anderson’s creative decisions?
True creativity requires a cognitive process that doesn’t just synthesize influences, but has a lifetime of historical context. Why are writers often given the advice to write about what they know? It’s because they are layering their own emotionally resonant meaning into a piece from their life experiences.
Humans are a storytelling species who have evolved an uncanny BS detector
We naturally gravitate toward authentic stories and creative decisions. Wes Anderson struck a chord because he defined a unique style that resonated with people through the stories he’s been telling.
You would need a complete AI model of Wes Anderson’s mind to be able to get the same creative decisions he would make
For instance, how does he know when to break with his normal convention, and do something that doesn’t seem ‘Wes Anderson’ for a certain dramatic effect.
Or how would you know that he would ever produce a stop-motion animated film with Japanese dialogue? An AI that did this ‘in the Wes Anderson style’ would be told it was off target.
But what if it’s really really good?
Someone could bring their appreciation to guiding AI to create something that approximates a Wes Anderson film in the same way that a brilliant singer could do an amazing cover of someone else’s song — but it’s still Karaoke!
My conclusion is that any authentic creativity still owes its genesis to the human factor — either in crowdsourcing ‘goodness’ or in prompting and guiding its output along the way.
AI’s rebuttal
I asked ChatGPT to make arguments against the assertions I’ve made in this post. Here’s what it came up with:
