it wasn’t a “type a prompt and go” kind of situation where the machine pulled from vast collections of data from who knows where with loads of uncredited material. there was no artless, formless, unthinking LLM generating images and video clips that they then spliced together and hoped for the best.
the team behind this project, Meat Dept, also produced their VERY NOISE video. this particular music video was trained on their work and guided by the team. they were the artists the machine learned from, they were the people ultimately manipulating their own data.
i don’t see that as a concept anything to be against… it was, however, immediately abused and i understand why people are distrustful and enraged. i share that disgust, but idk i’m not seeing it here.
I liked it. The current state of AI video generation is at a weird level. It’s good enough for some things, but still uncanny.
What makes “ADHD” interesting is that they’re leaning on that uncanniness, maybe even pushing the frantic, unsettled motions further. It evokes something visceral about the condition of ADHD.
The political situation with generative AI is difficult, and I doubt we need to bang on about the problems with billionaires, IP, jobs, and anti-intellectualism. It’s a looming threat, and the use of generative AI, for me, will always evoke some amount of loathing and dread. What redeems this piece’s use of it is that it feels like perhaps the dread is intentional, and meaningful in context.