written by Maurice Cardinal …
Video #6 about designing for ACTIVISM with Ai;
GREAT WHITE SHARKS… ARE KILLING MACHINES, but not nearly as dangerous as LAND SHARKS that CREEP & KILL 1,878 Americans every single day.
A real shark, kills mercifully in a heartbeat…
LAND SHARKS HOWEVER… PROFIT FROM CHRONIC SUFFERING AND LINGERING, PAINFUL DEATHS THAT KILL SLOWLY. SHARKS and their shareholders profit at every step; Starting at CHEMICAL companies, then on the FARM, at the GROCER, the PHARMACY, and ending at the MORGUE.
LAND SHARKS OWN all of the properties in the food chain.
All that death and suffering adds up to a TOTAL of 678,000 Americans who died last year from strokes, cancers, and heart attacks caused specifically, according to the CDC, from collectively eating combinations of Ultra Processed Food that that also contains pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides, plus ANTIBIOTICS and the tons and tons of chemical fertiliser to grow and raise the food you eat. Not to mention, GMOs, and all the added SUGAR, SALT, & INFLAMMATORY FATS. Wow… it’s a mouthful of real slop that unaware food consumers swallow by the ton every day, with many eventually becoming chronically and terminally ill.
This clip starts with the copy:
GREAT WHITE SHARKS ARE KILLING MACHINES
It’s IN THEIR DNAture – crossfades to a pickup with an octopus, OctoP frantically loading bunches of radishes into the bed of the truck while the driver looks on anxiously.
Within a second or two, LAND SHARK is seen racing down the dirt path from the destroyed MALL directly at the pickup. The farm dog, ORGANIC – OG for short runs alongside barking.
Both OctoP and the driver duck for cover just before the LAND SHARK broadsides the pickup knocking it over and sending an ORGANIC+plus grocery bag full of vegetables tumbling into the air in a long arc towards the ocean where it lands with a huge SPLASH!
Seagulls squawk as a red rockfish (SNAPS) and lone seagull (Saylor) fight over fruit and vegetables ejected from the grocery bag after it hit the water and sank to the bottom.
As the feisty rockfish takes a BIG CHOMP swallowing an apple whole, and the seagull grabs a piece of green leaves the COPY crossfades;
SHARKS BAIT SHOPPERS WITH CHEAP VS HEALTHY
Having a FARMER as a FRIEND
GIVES YOU AN EDGE
Within a second the ORGANIC+plus grocery bag with just a bunch of radishes poking out of the top, bursts from the bottom of the ocean to float bobbing on the surface.
This scene looks pretty simple to prompt, but the challenge is that I used a special type of camera that floats on the surface with the lens half in and out of the water. It took several attempts for Ai to understand that the line of delineation between the air and water is dynamic and moves based on the surface of the water. Its first attempt was a straight line that looked like SLOP. After several tries and hours of research and thinking, Ai got the physics correct, but it took more credits than necessary for a service touting itself as being easy to use with just a simple prompt. It’s way harder than they promote.
Ai video producers have to understand that you’re being conscripted as the sacrificial goat to develop Ai in a way that prevents SLOPPY results. It’s the artist who pays for the development, not the Ai geeks collecting the long term profit.
It’s a tech model used for years that lowers development risk and cost by enticing customers to pay for development while the app grows and collects revenue.
For me personally, and I believe for a lot of other experienced artists and activists, it’s misleading because Ai is leveraging experimental artists to build something that has been promised in sales pitches… to already work.
It’s a big reason why many artists hate Ai.
Ai can deliver, but not the way it was promised.
I use tight manual editing to remove or hide mistakes and rarely waste credits fixing slop – I prefer to hide it. Allowing slop to proliferate like Ai companies do though, is foolish because it creates a fingertip hold for critics to ATTACK the ARTIST. Who, in turn loses trust trust and sense of loyalty to Ai development companies.
If you’re in it for just YOU Ai, two can play the money-grab and blame game.
As soon as the ORGANIC+plus grocery bag bobs to the surface, an arm of OctoP slips into view over the edge, then another, and then the full octopus appears.
The wall of water behind OctoP was a prompting error I made that turned out to be too hard to remove, so I left it because it works to spotlight the octopus. Even though it doesn’t fit my original vision I can easily live with it in my surreal fantasy world.
OctoP growls, NO MORE RUNNING, and then leaps out of the bag to dive into the ocean spurting a plume of black ink as an ominous smokescreen.
What many critics don’t understand is that Ai still cannot create something this complicated on its own. Over the course of a few months I occasionally let Ai make design decisions several times in other scenes. It produced SLOP each time that I’d never use because it looks unwieldy and clumsy. I now keep Ai on a tight leash.
I’m producing SURREAL FANTASY for this project so it doesn’t have to look natural. It just can’t look stupid and especially geeky. I expect more from my nerdy colleagues 😉
It didn’t take long to realise that Ai is developed to geek specifications that make average people nervous, and often angry. GEEK SPECS are not good enough for artists. We need real life specs, and if we don’t get it, we’ll cheat a tech system designed to herd us like a lemmings. Artists steal and cheat all the time in pursuit of originality and creativity, and this is not much different.
Ai tries hard to force artists into NERD HERD MENTALITY, and without doubt it works for inexperienced, and often desperate artists. It doesn’t work however on artists who’ve been around for more than a minute.
A very similar scenario played out a few years ago in 2021 with NFT when TECH conARTISTS tried to convince traditional artists that NFT would change the world. Inexperienced artists swallowed it whole, even though older artists YELLED warnings from the top of their lungs. NFT hustlers banned and blocked experienced artists from social streams, and created streams of BOOMER HATE. When that didn’t work, NFT geeks launched co-ordinated anonymous attacks on experienced artists, pretending to be other artists, and especially investors, called WHALES.
NFT geeks shut out, banned, and blocked experienced artists who voiced their opinion, and it worked for a while. Anonymous soft lobbying works, so I’m wondering today how many of the slop comments are paid for by traditional artists and art organisations to counteract the stream from the tech world promoting Ai?
Some older and experienced artists saw NFT for what it was right out of the gate. A few of us got in quickly and invested, and EXITED as fast when it started going bear. My profit after two years was 5,004 %. Do I hate NFT? How could I when it generated such a huge return in such a short time. It was just another art era.
Does Ai exhibit similar traits? Oh yeah…
The difference is that if you pay attention to history, and you’re smart you can leverage the same energy to use Ai to advance your creative career. However, a word of caution, do it while you can still afford to use Ai.
The SUBSIDISED Ai window won’t be open for long.
After OctoP dives into the water and leaves a plume of black ink, the rockfish SLURPS radishes straight out of the bag, and SURPRISINGLY… the brazen seagull Saylor, paddles straight for the camera and pecks the lens hard, CRACKING it.
Ai didn’t think of this. A human did – me specifically. As an experienced activist I used it to send a message to CONSUMERS that even a little seagull can be brave enough to do serious damage.
It’s another way of saying; YES… YOU CAN FIGHT CITY HALL.
It also signals to FOOD CONSUMERS that you might have to get physical if you really believe in developing better standards for HEALTHY FOOD.
Is it a war? You tell me. How many more Americans will have to die before their families see bad food for what it is? Never forget that 678,000 Americans die every single year from eating bad food, and it’s been going on for a very long time.
Is bad food the new nuclear weapon for countries like China and Russia? Again, you tell me.
After Saylor cracks the lens with its beak, copy fades in:
In Today’s DIVIDED WORLD – a reference to Trump
IF YOU DON’T PROTECT YOURSELF
WHO WILL?
A muscular male arm shoots straight up out of the ORGANIC+plus bag waving a big bunch of radishes. It startles Saylor who flies away. When the beach crowd sees that a human in the bag survived they start cheering, and when the bunch of radishes start to morph into what looks like it could became a Canadian flag the cheering increases.
This scene foreshadows that there is hope for Americans based on the lifestyles of their healthier, happier, and longer-living Canadian neighbors.
At one point I considered unfurling a full Canadian flag, but opted for the more ballon-like version to avoid legal issues.
In the next scene with the ORGANIC+plus bag floating peacefully in the ocean, the menacing shark appears again swimming fast towards the bag to attack and swallow it.
As the shark opens its mouth wide, copy fades in;
EVERYONE NEEDS A FRIEND
Is this portion of the scene a little clunky? Oh yeah, but who cares? It’s surreal fantasy not heart surgery. The point is that it’s memorable, and that the only way to affordably create this scene and build the message is by using Ai.
If we are to save over half a million American lives a year, the Ai END easily justifies the MEANS. If you don’t care about American lives and families, well that’s on you.
The crowd gasps, oohs, and ahhs as an athletic beautiful woman riding an ORCA intercepts the shark, pulling the bag out of its jaws along with the man attached to the arm. This guy is a facsimile of me btw, except he’s younger, more athletic and better looking. Don’t hate me because he’s Ai beautiful 😉
The crowd goes crazy when the woman grabs the guy’s arm and pulls him onto the back of the Orca behind her.
She’s Our ORCA-Riding HERO!
If you recall, I added all the audio manually because it was way too time consuming to have Ai do it. In the beginning, I let Ai experiment with it but it ended up being either way too passive, or it was overkill. Happy mediums are hard to achieve with a prompt because it’s relative. What, for example, is too loud?
The scene then cuts to three Orcas and Saylor HERDING the SHARK back to its industrial ChemFarm feedlot. The shark is growling and angry, but is outnumbered and has no choice.
The final scene then cuts to the woman, man, and orca landing on the beach and being surrounded by a healthy-looking crowd, who unfortunately all look related. I could have prompted it again, but I know the audience, and know they wouldn’t care even if they noticed.
I’ve specialised in audience development for decades and work with millions of subjects, not a few thousand or a few hundred like most people. Over the years, I have literally, personally spoken with tens of thousands of audience members one-on-one, face-to-face who bought very expensive tickets for shows I produced and managed.
Consequently, I learned that most people are exactly the same when it comes to judging or even recognising quality. For proof, all you have to do is look at the 585,000 Americans who ate bad, cheap, low quality food without questioning what they put in their mouths to swallow. Is that harsh to say? Does it matter when over half a million died last year?
What exactly, do you do to stop the bleeding, and dying? Talk?
When the orca lands on the beach, the athletic woman slides off the whale and hands the ORGANIC+plus bag to another woman, while I, look a little Ai goofy standing in the middle. THAT my friend is SLOP, but I can afford to look a little goofy now and then, so I’m good, Mr. Anally Perfect, and found no reason to burn more credits just to appease my ego.
