Posters promoting the Transylvania International Film Festival for 2025 depict an “audience” enjoying a screening beneath what looks like a futuristic fascist spaceship and accompanied by two robots, with Saint Michael’s church depicted with an evil eye above it.
This dystopian future is obviously made with A.I. The creators did not mean to show symbols that are used to portray communist and fascist alien species; instead, we can see by the unsightly artefacts that the image was made with A.I. They didn’t even clean up with distorted faces or the scrunches in the dress of the AI robots.
Does this mean the festival itself will be worse? Will films exhibited in TIFF be created by the AI? We hope not.
We have used AI ourselves a couple of times on this blog, when we didn’t think we had a good photo, and once even for a book cover. The main reason we did it is because when you start off playing with AI, it is fun. Just give the computer a prompt, and it gives you a result.
“Create an ethnic Hungarian pharmacist in manga style.” or, “Draw us Margaret Thatcher dressed as Cleopatra delivering pizza.” Now, if I sent that to a real artist, it might cost a few hundred dollars and take a few weeks for the result. Some artists could do it quicker, sure, but usually artists of that talent are busy with other projects, so you have to wait. The AI produces an immediate result that is inferior to that of a talented artist.
Another advantage of the AI is that it sometimes seems to understand you better.
The worst problem, however, is with some artists using AI themselves; clients find unrealistic quotes on how long it takes to create quality artwork. The AI “artist” undercuts the competition in both time and price, then gets the bid, and finally doesn’t have time to complete the project properly.
AI is great for dystopian futures and horror because of the “mistakes” it makes. It is so close to photorealistic, but the slight differences make it uncanny. Uncanny means those little differences that almost look authentic but are frightening because they just look off and you can’t always say why.
In other news, the festival does appear to be showing some classic films, that are not horror. These old films will ofset the fright caused by the AI material.
Hopefully, the fright of seeing the recent photos will cleanse the temptations to use AI out of our system. We might still use it for a spell check or something, but AI art and writing is just unnecessary. If you have nothing to say, just don’t say anything. If you have no image, do not use one.
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