70s prog rock band Pink Floyd has caused uproar by choosing an AI-generated video to win their music video competition. The contest was to mark the 50th anniversary of their seminal album Dark Side of the Moon.
Each song from the album was to have an animated video made for it. The band would pick ten winners, one for each track. The winners would then share a £100,000 ($127,000) prize pool between them.
High hopes
People were eagerly anticipating the results of this competition. However, controversy struck when the band announced that the winner for the song Any Colour You Like was an AI-generated piece made (or maybe curated is a better word) by Damián Gaume from Melbourne, Australia.
Gaume explained on Pink Floyd’s X account that he used Stable Diffusion to create the video. He describes how he trained the AI generator himself and then used a mix of Blender and his own experience of making digital animation.
Welcome to the machine
Despite the fact that Gaume’s video clearly required a lot more thought and effort than merely inputting a bunch of prompts, the AI reveal caused many negative comments and outrage.
“Welcome To The Machine was an instructional guide, I guess,” says one witty comment on YouTube, referencing the song from another of the band’s albums. Others said they were shocked that Pink Floyd would ever be open to AI-generated work and asked if their next album would be AI-generated as well.
Personally, I like this video much better, and it uses more traditional animation techniques:
It’s interesting that AI-generated art is promoting such a backlash so soon after it has gone public. It is somewhat comforting to know that the general public would still appreciate something human-made over something machine-made.
Other competitions have also caused controversy when AI images have won over traditional photographs. Last year’s Sony award winner even returned his award when he revealed his image was AI-generated.
Is it really that bad?
However, in this instance, I think people are overreacting somewhat. I actually don’t hate Gaume’s video. The fluctuating and strange, almost surreal AI artefacts almost suit the psychedelic nature of the song. I kind of like where he was going with the off-kilter guitar that morphs into a mixing desk, then drums, and then back into a guitar. It’s sort of like a strange bad dream where nothing is quite what it seems.
Comfortably numb to AI
With the launch of AI video generators such as Sora, I believe we are going to see many more AI-generated music videos and short films. We will no doubt be inundated with mostly mediocre padding. However, there will still be the odd crazy diamond to be found, with great storytelling and creative direction.
Critics, however, are quick to point out that AI generators like Stable Diffusion have stolen other artists’ intellectual copyrights by sampling billions of images and videos to train the data set. In fact, it has just been revealed that Sora was trained on YouTube’s video content without the creator’s knowledge.
Only time will tell whether or not most future music videos will be AI-generated. Until then, each new example is merely another brick in the AI wall.
[via petapixel]
