For me Drew Gooden’s YouTube channel has become a place for voicing exactly how I’ve been feeling and thinking recently in terms of the internet, AI and art. Scrolling through his comments section it’s clear I’m not the only one. He has grown from his roots of making comedic based commentary videos and has blossomed into making some of the most insightful and thought-provoking videos YouTube has to offer.
His most recent video ‘Everybody wants to waste your time’ spoke to me on such a personal level that I watched it three times in one day. The basic synopsis is how Netflix, social media and video game companies have realised how time is the new currency, especially in a world funded by advertisements. Netflix wants to steal time so you're forced to renew that subscription for just one extra month, video game companies steal your time by making games impossibly long or impossibly difficult and YouTube wants to steal your time for adverts and monetization.
I’ve begun to notice how much more prevalent advertisements on YouTube have become. An example that has begun to annoy me especially, is whenever you rewind a YouTube video it automatically plays an advert before it starts playing again. A minor inconvenience? Yes. But I feel it’s beginning to fall into manipulation: hey we know your full attention is on the screen, here’s two ads about Google's new AI feature.
Gooden has two videos solely dedicated to AI and its potential risks to art and entertainment. Both made me feel very pessimistic about the future of art. His most recent example ‘AI is ruining the internet’ is a beautifully constructed harsh critique on AI’s involvement in music, art and videos.
The section in his video on AI’s infiltration into the music industry included a clip of an account that is creating AI generated music to apparently make “10,000 dollars a month”, and as his closing statements says “It’s easy to get carried away and just start having fun creating random styles of music. But here’s the key, you want to create the exact type of music people wanna hear”. I think this quote is a perfect narration of the entertainment industry’s mindset at the moment. Shovel out the most cookie cutter, no risk project to make a quick buck.
The problem with both AI and cookie cutter entertainment is it's oversaturating the market so much that people feel alienated by these medias and it’s causing a distrust. I kept seeing these TikToks saying “Oh, every film in the cinema is a remake or a sequel” and whilst they are right in a way, this year has had some beautiful original films (Sing Sing, Challengers, Evil Does Not Exist and The Holdovers come to mind). The problem isn’t originality, the problem is, in a world where Disney is shovelling hundreds of millions into sequels and remakes, how are indie films supposed to market themselves?
An article from New York Times in 2019 called ‘How will the movies survive the next 10 years’ has industry professionals discuss how they envision the film industry in the future. A quote that stood out to me by director Anthony Russo was “And when the numbers start to get up this high, you start to lose the trees for the forest.” This quote states how the more money put into films and media, results in a lack of quality. While in a way this sounds counterintuitive, it’s got a lot of truth in it, because these huge budgets aren’t being spent wisely. The 2023 WGA writers’ strike in America highlighted an ethical problem in Hollywood, stories of professional industry writers having to pick up shifts at Uber eats to survive while Hollywood elites like Bob Iger (CEO of Disney) makes over 33 million dollars and receives huge bonuses. I see it as cherry picking a golden name over actual gold: the thought goes let's give Robert Downey Jr 75 million dollars for one film and give some scraps to the writers.
I feel all these industries have become blindsided by the colour green and they’re chasing the dollar but they don’t see that the floor is cracking. And when the paradox engulfs itself, the victims will be the little people.
So, to sum up, I will leave the final words on the dangers of AI to Drew Gooden: “Part of what makes art special is that it’s difficult to make even with all the tools right in front of you. It takes practice, it takes skill and every time you do it you expand on that skill. Every song you hear, every movie you watch is the result of thousands of hours of trial and error. Making a video using generative AI does not teach you anything about making videos.”