points by api 2 days ago | 0 comments
That’s what led me back to books. Character, plot, ideas, coherence. I also love great prose.
You occasionally see thoughtful movies. Many of them are unsurprisingly based on books. The horror genre has become this weird eddy of creativity too with interesting characters and plots and some surprisingly good acting. Of course you’ve historically had innovation in that genre, often ignored because it’s horror and thus low brow by definition.
My take on horror being creative is that it’s like old school punk, pulp novels, zines, underground music. The key there is that these are genres and styles that give you permission to suck, and therefore permission to try stuff.
If it must be high art or it must gross nine figures, you can’t suck. So you can’t innovate.
"Permission to suck" made me think of something even more fundamental that's relevant to the AI art conversation, and often forgotten; that the best art, the most creative work, comes when you're working around constraints. Those could be the constraints of a medium, if you're chiseling in stone and need to make certain trade-offs; or they could be monetary constraints (you can't afford a cast of 40,000 extras for a war movie, so you turn your focus on the intense local experience of a few characters). In a "necessity is the mother of invention" kind of way, having limitations forces you to think more carefully about every move, and that kind of thought is what can make something a small masterpiece instead of a large sloppy shitshow.
Given an unlimited budget, most directors will lose their heads and do terrible things, even with a good script. Having no limits brings out the worst impulses in any creative endeavor. If "AI filmmaking" comes to stand in for "unlimited budget", then I think the trend in the future will be toward smaller, more human-scale art, because artists will find constraints to work within as a means to focus.
Maybe I'm not saying this as well as I could.