When I saw this eye-popping video for the first time, it bowled me over. I’ve rewatched it several times and am still marveling at it. But is this work a piece of AI-slop? Is it “kind of meaningless in [its] calculated reality,” as Doug McLennan has written of the genre? Or is it more than that?
Click image for video and don’t forget to unmute for the song.
KELLY ELDRIDGE BOESCH, who created the video, writes: “I combined a few surreal prompts with a cool style ref code with this nice muted brownish tone. The song is called ‘My Old Soul’, it’s a gentle reflection on aging, a topic I create about a lot. A quiet reminder that the body may slow, but the soul keeps dancing. The images were made using #midjourney and animated using #VEO3.. The lyrics were written by me, and the song was made using #suno.”
DOUG McLENNAN wrote in Diacritical: “Slogging through the tsunamis of AI-slop, it becomes easier and easier to be put off by the too-perfect video, the generically inspirational songs and the emotionally empty cloying images cranked out by the machines. Yes these things are real, but they’re also kind of meaningless in their calculated reality. Just the fact they’re so easily spun out in endless variation in which any ‘artistic’ choice is an effortless algorithm of the same value as any other, is … well annoying.”
This may be the piece of AI content that nudges me out of my rigid AI resistant position. Crayons are children’s toys until a master picks them up and creates art.
One of the interesting things about the piece, maybe the most interesting, is the original song. The lyrics were written by the artist without AI input. That’s my understanding. And the lyrics are terrific, really touching.
Just heard this song and viewed the video this afternoon and again this evening. At 77 years young I also was “bowled over”. The “awe” was in the video and the imaginative process and production. My smile and spirit were in the lyrics. The “heart and tenor” was in the singer’s gentle power. Kelly Eldridge Boesch; if I was your target-BULLSEYE!