The Art Directors Guild, IATSE Local 800 #adg800 has issued a statement on Martin Scorsese’s recent promotion of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): "Mr. Scorsese, The Business is not in flux. Oscar winning director Martin Scorsese is turning his back on the human artists who throughout his career have helped him create his most memorable works. In the recently released Black Forest Labs video promoting their generative AI product FLUX, Mr. Scorsese asks the question, “how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew?” He claims the solution is the use of this generative AI program to do the jobs that are rightfully the jurisdiction of Art Directors Guild Local 800 artists and designers - human artists and designers who have been successfully collaborating with directors to visualize their films for decades. Mr. Scorsese's promotion of a generative AI product circumvents the input of Art Directors Guild Local 800 art directors, graphic artists, illustrators, production designers, scenic artists, set designers, and other talented Union professionals. Generative AI is only capable of producing this type of “cinematic intelligence” by ingesting large swaths of copyrighted work, likely scraped from the internet without consent, credit, compensation, or transparency. The skills of Art Directors Guild Local 800 artists and designers bring the highest level of value to any film or television production. To think their professional contributions can be mimicked or outshone by generative AI, which is built on work likely stolen from them and many other artists from around the world, is a betrayal of the collaborative nature of cinema."

Hideo Kojima says he has no interest in AI-generated art. “Art is life. Maybe AI could create art in 50 years or 100 years, but while I’m alive, I don’t think I’ll see it. I’m not interested in it.” Kojima added that it will be up to younger generations to decide how AI is ultimately used. (via The Washington Post⁠)

Congratulations, Keith David!

Listen to Virtual Crates Episode 316 now featuring: Media Puzzle, Split System, Raw Distractions, The Cowboys, @Jacob2dash2, @S_Type, SML, @lomajicat, @MonsterRally, Menoncle Jason, @JackStauber, @mikefredkrol @caribouband And many more! mixcloud.com/virtualcrates/v… #virtualcrates

Inferno discourse is beginning to make me understand Swifties.

Another anti-AI hand drawing.

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

The art of Neal McPheeters (1939-2021)

Ahem…FUCK AI!

In conclusion, FUCK AI and support real art

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Cheers to @InvertedAudio for the kind and thoughtful review.

Google CEO tries to tell University students to love AI. They tell him to BOO off. This is what most people think of the hated AI, we don't want it.

#OTD (11 May 2001) - 25 years ago, #42DouglasAdams left this particular dimension. Photo (c) 1986 by Brian Griffin #thehitchhikersguidetothegalaxy #DoctorWho

F You, Tammy! Unveil Video for Cover of Julee Cruise’s Classic Twin Peaks Theme “Falling” post-punk.com/f-you-tammy-un… via @postpunkzine

Maxo - Tweewaster new audio/visual album 10 tracks / 34 minutes releases 5/12 with video premiere preorders open today with single ‘Body Image’

Logos for Evil Companies from 80s Sci-fi Movies

Unlike the happy, roller-skating, all-American feel-good adverts for Pepsi and Coke, quintessential 80s soft drink QUATRO (1982) went for a dark, grungy, machine-smashing cyberpunk aesthetic, courtesy Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton (Max Headroom, the Accidents Will Happen video)