Bad Copy

Conspiracies used to be all fun and games – Bigfoot, the moon landing, Marilyn Manson’s ribs… But now they feel much more dangerous. Pizzagate should have been an X-Files episode, but instead some dipshit actually entered the restaurant and fired his machine gun. And look where election fraud has brought us.

I feel the same way about ai. I enjoyed using those rudimentary engines to create what I felt was absurdist art, but now we’ve accomplished making fake <insert anything here> indistinguishable from reality. Look where that has brought us. (Sorry, I can’t in good faith link any video promoting ai or Trump. Not sorry.) And to speak nothing about the environmental and financial impact that ai and their data centers and their technocrats and their Will Smith spaghetti videos are having.

A little over a year ago I stopped using ai wholesale. I unsubscribed from my ai generators and removed ChatGPT from my phone and set my browsers to stop giving me ai-generated results. I even arranged a meeting with my congressperson where I lobbied for oversight to prevent ai from further plundering the arts.

I get that ai has immense positive potential, but I think we can all agree that the videos I have been making here do not qualify.

As far as I’m concerned technology peaked with a service in the early internet days that would call any phone number in the US that you provided and a robot voice would read whatever message you typed in, anonymously.

This is one of 20+ such messages I found on my answering machine one afternoon:

They got the last laugh though. As you can imagine, my friends abused this service with impunity until it just stopped sending the messages. Then, a couple weeks later, at exactly 2 AM, every undelivered message any of us ever initiated was sent, one after the other. I had to unplug the phone from the wall.

So I no longer use ai. Ooooo, a real anti-establishment stance there, Abby Hoffman… Maybe this resistance is my early foray into “old man yells at cloud,” time will tell. Regardless, I do still have a couple LSotM in the chamber so we’re going back to other methods for making videos. No more time spent tooling and retooling a prompt to generate the most best video of a guy in lederhosen punching flying sausages.

Speaking of flying sausages, I love me a good duet. “Stop Dragging My Heart Around,” “Endless Love,” “Kyle Quit the Band”… all bangers. So I paired two voices that I love so much and had them pretend they were in love despite living in two different countries and having never met each other. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between and outside of that, please welcome back to LSotM, Annie Saunders and Sam Newton!