When it gets too dark

I met a very creative stranger. And then I funded him to make whatever he wanted within the ai video platform I built, and it was horrible.

Ok, not a complete stranger. I have met James Jones a few times and I have seen his submissions as "Satire AI" through a community we are part of called Machine Cinema. And just last week at a gathering in Los Angeles, I got to know him better. He is an architect with a personal commitment to create videos with AI. Having spent many years abroad in Shanghai, he couldn't shake off the importance of taking off his shoes when entering our host's house. He pays attention to details. The kind of thoughtful creative I want to empower with AI.

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James submitted this time bending work about the historic Huntington hotel as a sample of his work. It's a bit weird - what forces cause this time travel? Why is she treated by the nurses from an earlier pandemic? The "what if" hypothesis bears fruit. There is a consistency to the visual logic, the pictures on the wall moving, the mixing of realities, the people who move backwards and forward ... I want to know more.

I think Satire AI is on to something. I think James is way more likely than most of us to make something great. He will push the boundaries and bump into edges, and figure out what works. It's precisely the impulse to try and explore something new that aligns with 10zebra. You need to push on boundaries, and witness failures before you can understand what works.

Over the course of a week, we had a few exchanges. James used the credits I funded him to create a new story, and in exchange he offered helpful feedback about 10zebra. At the end of the week I saw what he made... It's dark. Like creepy serial killer dark. The video shows the first person perspective of someone who has done horrible things. Ugh, why make content that focuses on death and dismemberment of women?

Don't get me wrong. It's not pure gore. It is trying to have depth by exploring the motive, and habits, and back story of the murder.

I reminded myself that this is not my own work, nor my own voice. It can be challenging to review content created on your platform and not have a opinion about it. It’s a hard thing to get right and I am striving for it: to think more about the arc of the artist than to judge the specific content. To celebrate the creator and the craft, and to be agnostic about the output. To provide encouragement on an artistic journey without saying "change this one thing here." I think having a thick skin is important in our polarized world. As a platform host - I don't want to censor someone's voice because it's not aligned with my own views. Over the long haul I think protecting his voice under the banner of free speech is more important than the fact that the content is gross or disturbing.

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But something jumped out at me when reviewing this piece of content. Some people will make content that is even more horrible and more violent than this. And that is worth unpacking. I think it's very important that we are not broadsided by content we "don't want to see."

Don't get me wrong. Good art often contains uncomfortable stuff. Greek tragedies are full of horrible stuff, including beheadings. Tom Huck of Evil Prints can offend people, but his voice adds value to society - even if it is a critique about the downfall of society. Art Speigelman can address the complexity of the Holocaust in a comic; should we freak out because it falls in the hands of children too early? As a father of two daughters, I think there is an important differentiation between seeking disturbing content, vs stumbling upon it as part of the fabric of our culture. The conclusion I take is that how you distribute content is a key moment for judgement. As a society we shouldn't censor ideas at the LLM level, or at the production level. I think talented artists should have unbridled access to generative models to do as they see fit to express their views and create their art. But we should take care about the distribution of content that impacts us as a society. And we should hold people accountable for the work that they make. Sometimes that is simply with our own words in a public forum. I appreciate James is using his own name and stands behind it along with a collection of his work. Somehow, the video he made deserves to be appropriately labeled so that it doesn't fall upon the wrong unsuspecting audience. This used to be covered by movie ratings. Now this effort will fall upon our new distribution channels. My hunch is that YouTube has the incentive to get this right, but maybe not IG or Tiktok, because the flash in the pan is too fast. I dunno.

Do the rewards of shocking content compel someone like James to lean into horrible things to break through the numbing mold of acceptable content? Is it all about shock value? Or is there an underlying message or deeper narrative? I think some kind of video content can create a “collateral damage” to our psyche. I don't think watching creepy content converts us to psychopaths, but I worry that violent and dehumanizing depictions of women dull us, and can lead to normalizing extreme views. Or to living lives with greater fear or greater isolation. But this is not about James’ work, at least not entirely. There is larger societal forces at work here greater than any one single creator. AI, placed in the context of our attention economy, can enable visual media to create rage bate, just like controversial titles in blogs. We have all encountered this in some form - whether in advertisement or politics. I want my community to try hard to set a good example for the next generation of creatives. And it’s not merely attention at any cost.

A collection of someone’s work will reveal more about their intentions in the long run. After reflecting on James’ content, including his prior work, I do think he is on to something. I connected with him after viewing his video and he shared some insights about the themes he is exploring, about impulse, about nature and nurture. And I liked his artistic thought process. I liked what he was trying to explore. I just didn’t like some of his choices about how it came across in visual form.

James is an artist exploring how he can use new AI tools to create his art. If we start to block his prompts to an LLM, we do a disservice to his artistic process. We don’t allow him to create and explore, we pass judgement that “this isn’t acceptable” without understanding the final product or means of distribution. Horror and thrillers are legitimate categories of creation. They might not be for everyone, but should we police the creation of a story that we personally find disturbing? That is one step away from policing creation based on beliefs or ideology.

And I want 10zebra to be a flexible and trustworthy scratchpad for visual thought. But you can’t and shouldn’t police thought.

So where does that leave us? I support James. I won't post his full video on our social channels, because I don't believe it belongs there. I have only included some of his previous work on this blog, not the stuff he made on 10zebra.

If you want to check out the full videos, you have been adequately warned. You can find James' work on his Youtube channel, SatireAI.

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When it gets too dark

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