Right now, our artificial intelligence future sure seems to look a lot like… Wes Anderson movies! Over the past week, various AI programs have used the director’s quirky style to frame TikTok posts, rethink the looks of movies and even, more recently, make a trailer for a fictitious reboot of Star Wars. The future may be creepy, but at least it looks color-saturated and carefully composed.
The fake, fan-made Star Wars trailer, appropriately subtitled “The Galactic Menagerie,” is great fun, and its viral success shows both the strengths and current limitations of AI technology. Anderson’s distinctive visual style is an important part of his art, and the ostensible mission to “steal the Emperor’s artifact” sounds straight out of Star Wars. But the original Star Wars captured the imaginations of so many fans because it suggested a future that had some sand in its gears – the interstellar battle station had a trash compactor, and the spaceport cantina had a live band (and, one assumes, a public performance license).
Right now, at least, AI can’t seem to get past the surface.
“Heart on My Sleeve,” the so-called “Fake Drake” track apparently made with an artificial intelligence-generated version of Drake’s vocals, also sounds perfectly polished precisely in-tune and on-tempo. So do most modern pop songs, which tend to be pitch-corrected and sonically tweaked. (Most modern pop isn’t recorded live in a studio so much as assembled on a computer, so why shouldn’t it sound that way?) It’s hard to tell exactly why this style became so popular – the ease of smoothing over mistakes, the temptation of technical perfection, the sheer availability of samples and beats – but it’s what the mass streaming audience seems to want.
See more at billboard.com
