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With generative A.I. getting more and more capable in nearly all areas but particularly in creating video imagery there have been a number of voices, not industry voices mind you, proclaiming the death of Hollywood with some short video piece that they crafted.

The videos are impressive for what they are, a machine mimicking the data that has been fed into it, but there is so much more to a film, a novel, a painting or any other art than how it appears in its final form. Art is about the choices the artist made along the path of creation and not just the final product that was created.

Some artists are very intellectual, plotting out every detail of their art, knowing with deliberate decision why everything is the way it is, why that color was employed and not some other hue, why the character has that particular name. Other artists work more from hunches and intuition, making decisions on the fly, exploring the piece as they create it. Why that color? It just seemed right. Both types, and every type in between, are making choices, and those choices in aggregate create what is the style and voice of the artist. It is the sum of the choices that let us look at a movie and tell the difference from one directed by James Cameron and one directed by Steven Spielberg, why a song by Taylor Swift doesn’t sound like one from Danny Elfman, why a novel from Kazuo Ishiguro hits different than one from Gail Carriger.

That voice that is generated by the thousands and thousands of choices made by the artist is a product of the artist, the events of their lives, and the way they see and interpret the world around them. It is why only they could have produced that one piece of art, because it is a reflection of everything that they are, had been, and how they are interacting with the world at that exact moment of creation.

Generative A.I. does not make choices, it uses probability on what the next word, or pixel is going to be, probability that is derived from the blending of all the similar data that it has been fed. Mind you, that is still a vast powerful tool. An A.I. powered grammar review will nearly all the time catch when you have typed “tub” when you meant “tube” making it a powerful assist in catching those nasty little errors, but it has no voice. Generative A.I. has no opinions on the world, it has never suffered heartbreak of love not returned nor the heights of joyous love that is returned. It’s an impressive parrot regurgitating with stunning ability what it has been fed, but by that very nature what it creates is bland, without the strong point of view that makes art last.