The usual list:
AI has no real emotion. Faces look stiff. Voices are flat. Performances feel lifeless. We know the argument. It isn't new either. Every new medium has been accused of having no soul – photography, film, computers. Cinema was written off for years as a machine that records rather than an art that creates. It took critics until the 1910s to argue seriously that this apparatus could be an art form at all.
But you don't have to go that far back, though. In 2004, Robert Zemeckis made The Polar Express, the Christmas movie with Tom Hanks, and the first studio feature built entirely on performance capture. The technology wasn't ready, and everyone said so. Lifeless. Soulless. Dead-eyed. It was the film that pushed the uncanny valley out of academic papers and into everyday conversation.
Five years later, Avatar. Neytiri isn't human, but she was built to read as human – and with no eyebrows, everything had to carry through the eyes. Precisely where Polar Express had failed. People came out of the cinema talking about Neytiri, not about how she was made.
With AI we're at the same stage. The slop is real – flat performances, plastic faces, eyes that don't quite track. The complaint is fair. It just isn't the whole picture anymore. A good deal of recent work clears that bar. For me, a prime example is Simon Meyer’s new work: an ultra-realistic music video created entirely using AI. I really like the track, by the way.
At MAD, we just added one. A brand film for Lässig, a children's brand turning twenty. You can watch it on our website. A family in fast-forward: the baby shower, the first steps, the first day of school. It looks shot. We think nobody would have spotted it without the label. But that call isn't ours to make.
So when something still looks like AI, it isn't the AI anymore. It's whoever made it.
