I think part of the answer is that this is actually the content America C wants, but no one would make it for them. Even our worst slop, up til now, has been made by artists, or aspiring artists! That biases the output towards what artists, as a group, want to make.
Even the worst comic book movie still contains somewhere in it the sensibilities of hundreds or thousands of people who enjoy making art. Even the worst corporate dreck still is made by people who *assume* certain conventions of narrative art. It would never even *occur* to them to make something like this.
The AI slop answers the question of “what would art look like without artists?” and one of the answers is that it would look like the most hideous, manipulative, garish, spiritually-abject swill you could imagine, because that’s actually what a good chunk of people want and have been denied because artists would resent making it too much.
The whole history of the blockbuster or the sitcom, etc, is to some extent a negotiation between these forces—the sensibilities of artists, chained to the sensibilities of moron consumers. We could never get the full realization of what the dumbest, most vulgar people in the world wanted to watch until now, because the artists still pulled things in their direction, even if only a bit.
Reality TV was probably the closest we’ve come to seeing what “art without artists” would look like, but even then it wasn’t fully realized. Remember that Nathan Fielder used to be a reality tv producer—there are still real artists embedded in the process, even there.
But now with AI, we can remove the constraints of taste, quality, authenticity, meaning, and humanity that artists tend to try to impose even on their most cynical projects. Because they’re people who care about art, who want to make art. They can’t help but have a perspective, a sensibility, an aesthetic—taste. Even if it’s bad taste. AI is showing us the world of no taste, no sensibility, no perspective, just brute manipulation of the senses. It’s vile.
I know about ai videos and how they are made to make money, but has anyone figured out why they are so gouche and macabre? like why is it always like south park meets precious moments???