The 2026 Oscars™ happened, and a questionable “AI Production Studio” and “AI Talent Agency’s”1 “AI Actor” tried to use the occasion to convince The Academy™ that replacing human actors with AI is actually good, and that they just need to fully embrace it in order to unlock their full potential. The argument was presented in the form of a soul-less, unartistic, AI-generated “music video” that was basically autotune cranked to 3000 or something, belting out lyrics that had the emotional impact of a corporate press release. If this is “AI Art”, real artists have nothing to worry about.
Technically, it’s impressive as hell. They’ve got persistence of objects and characters, who appear to have the correct number of fingers. Everything is AI-generated2. Artistically, it’s just embarrassing and shows that the producers of the video:
- don’t understand artistic creation, and/or
- don’t care
The audio sounds so overly autotuned (not autotuned, but profoundly synthetic) that it is offensive. The visuals are maybe more convincing but all have the sheen of ChatGPT-generated imagery. This is probably some kind of milestone. But they’re framing it as “Actors. Just give in. It’s happening!” and, no. It’s clear that they don’t understand artistic creation.
There are also related questions about the provenance of the data that was used to generate “Tilly”. Where did the source materials come from? Was it all used with consent? How would that even be possible? Maybe all I need to know about the ethics of this approach is that Mr. Wonderful is in support of it?
And AI is coming for art directors in video games, too. NVidia’s latest “let’s overwork your incredibly expensive graphics card so you can have autotuned visuals in your video game” initiative (DLSS 5), again, looks impressive as hell. Except, it just kind of overprocesses actual creative art direction into a Gritty Reboot™ of whatever’s displayed on the screen.
Again, just looking at the demo video, it’d be easy to ooh-and-ah at the extra details that magically get inserted into everything. Medieval bricks have unprecedented medieval-ness! Shadows are redone, lighting is reworked. Art direction be damned! More pixels! Line goes up!
AI has been doing similar things to our photos for years now - every photo you take on your iPhone etc. doesn’t just take a picture, it takes maybe a dozen and then uses AI3 to smush them together to make the “best” photo from parts of all of them. Take the exposure data from this frame, the reds from that one, this section is more in focus in this frame, and that section is more in focus in that one. Sometimes, it works. Often, it looks autotuned (HDR! It’s a feature!) and overprocessed. Yes, you can turn it off (or can you even do that anymore?) but it’s pervasive and automatic. Years from now, people will be able to identify photos taken in the early-to-mid (to late?) 2020s because of this AI-generated look. Your role as personal art director has been largely removed.
To be fair, there are some interesting and more-ethical (less-unethical? the jury’s still out…) uses of AI in filmmaking. Batman just sold his AI filmmaking tools startup to Netflix for something like $600M. The tools are production workflow things, rather than digital actors. You’ve shot hours of footage of actors dangling on wires and someone needs to digitally remove the lines, so you can train a custom AI model on the footage and say “hey siri, remove the lines” and it’ll take care of it. Or something. Maybe useful? Unless your IMDB filmography credits are all “Digital Effects Artist”?
Other tools, like Epic’s MetaHuman, are intended to be used as authoring tools - using motion capture and voice acting to bring characters into a modeling environment for use in production.
Even this level of software-driven artistic creation is being pushed to be automated with the use of AI - take a single AI-generated photo (ChatGPT - create a photo of a superhero wearing a cape), feed it through some software and Google’s Nano Banana Pro, and get a fully formed Metahuman model to use in your production.
So. Artistic Direction - the Art in art - is being sidelined. This happens because of the “don’t care” aspect. “Whatever, good enough.” That’s basically the mantra of 2026. We’re all so exhausted by everything at every level and every aspect of our lives. Having the energy to be passionate about Creating Art (or anything else) is getting rarer and is hard won. So, the draw of things that don’t require our energy4 just naturally become the way we do things. We scroll. We click. We prompt an AI bot to make a video that we can post so other people can scroll and click.
Most people are (or have become (myself included, being a human in 2026)) so separated from artistic creation that it’s an almost alien concept. AI isn’t the cause of that, but it’s sure a contributing factor. I don’t think we get out of this by making more tools, or banning tools, or focusing on the tools. We need to make it a normal part of our lives to make some art, dammit. To take back that sense of artistic direction rather than just offloading that to companies and vendors and going along for the ride.
And - how would that connect with our work in higher education? What if we re-emphasize creation and authorship? How can we address the “beige-ing of thought” in our courses?
Lots of words to get to the crux of it:
How do we get out of the “whatever, good enough” and “don’t care” societal coping mechanisms that have come to define the ‘20’s? How do we embrace the friction and struggle that make inspired creativity possible in a time where everything feels like constant friction and struggle?
see also https://globalnews.ca/news/11713239/ai-actor-tilly-norwood-tillyverse-eline-van-der-velden-xiocia/ ↩︎
Particle6 said that 18 humans were involved in producing it, but they were AI jockeys rather than a traditional film production crew… ↩︎
It started off as not-AI, using deterministic algorithms to do clever math on photos, which, of course, evolved to “let’s use machine learning”, which, of course, evolved into “let’s use ✨Intelligence✨ to do things” ↩︎
Ironically, requiring little of our personal energy requires A LOT of actual energy. Good thing we have such reliable sources of renewable energy powering everything so we don’t have to worry about that! What’s that? Another war in the Gulf? etc. ↩︎