Today In "AI Stinks"- Will Smith Is Allegedly Using AI To Generate Crowd Videos, And YouTube Has Gone Rogue Applying AI To Videos Without Asking

This is so weird. And not even for the reasons I originally thought. This blog is less about Will Smith, and more about, "What The Hell is YouTube Doing?"

When I first saw this clearly "allegedly" AI-generated video, I thought Will Smith (or his team), had just completely created a fake crowd to promote his rap tour mid-life crisis. Which on its own, would have been very weird and ill-advised. But I still thought, "Well if he's trying to give fans a representation of what going to one of his shows will be like, I guess I can see the thought process behind that." 

Except it's one thing to use AI to generate a crowd for a concert tour promotion video. But it would be another thing to use AI to create a fake cancer guy.

But that's not what Will Smith did. Will Smith did not imagine a "You Can Make It helped me survive cancer" guy out of thin air. That would have actually been jail-worthy. As it turns out, Will Smith's 'You Can Make It', really did save a life. What a world. What Will Smith did was use AI to create short videos based off real pictures taken at his recent shows. You can find all the original pictures on his Instagram.

Which is whatever. It's pretty annoying that the insanely rich Will Smith (although he did recently claim to be "struggling" financially), can't hire a capable videographer and editor to make a simple concert video for him. It's sad that Will Smith of all people is using AI to cut corners like that. But fine… I'm sure there are PLENTY of other people on (or close to) Will Smith's level who are doing the same cheap shit. 

But what YouTube is doing is much more ridiculous, more dystopian, and way more upsetting. Will Smith posted his AI-generated video to Instagram. On Instagram, it was already very apparent what parts of the video were real footage, and what parts were pictures that AI made into short clips. 

But apparently, that video was still a bit too real-looking for YouTube's liking. Because YouTube is now (without asking permission) taking videos people post to their platform and AI'ing the shit out of them. 

YouTube saw Will Smith's AI concert video, decided it wasn't nearly AI enough, and threw even more AI on top of it. When you watch the videos side by side, you can see a noticeable difference. 

Thanks YouTube. Blurry faces are now a thing of the past. Instead, from here on out, every video you watch will make you think you've accidentally taken a hit of acid. 

Fuck off, YouTube. Who the hell do you think you are? Do you think you're better than real life? That people couldn't possibly prefer real life footage somebody posted to the internet without your added layer of AI bullshit on top of it? The cameras we have today are so high quality. Everything is already posted in higher definition than we ever thought possible. There's just no need for this, at all. For YouTube to think they're doing the world a favor by changing real-life is so arrogant and misguided. Imagine being this guy who tried to share a lovely piece of art with his YouTube followers (something that is very clearly not supposed to have sharp edges) and YouTube says, "You stupid bitch. You didn't even outline the edges of your clouds in dark Crayon like a 3rd grader. Let me fix that for you."

We're not even allowed to view reality through a screen anymore. That's so sad. It should be ok for something to not be perfect. But we are 100% going down a road where quite literally nothing posted online will be 100% real anymore. It will all be slightly improved upon with a little dash of artificial intelligence. It's disgusting. It's one thing to use AI to generate something completely fake. But when we're not even letting real things be real anymore… that's too fucking dark. 

For the record, YouTube claims what they're doing is "just an experiment". 

So if you're really looking for "creator and viewer feedback", YouTube, my feedback is that this sucks SO MUCH. Stop the experiment. Everybody hates it. At minimum, you should have to give people the option. I'd prefer you don't even do that, but if there's one thing that's undeniably terrible for everyone, it's doing this to videos/pictures without even asking.