A.I. Video Gives Me a Headache

It should stand for Aspirin Imperative

It’s Friday, and apparently that means I’m going to babble about A.I. some more. Oh no!

I’m a layperson who has no idea how any of this robot crap works, which makes me the target audience. We just want to ooh and ahh at all the pretty colors. And what I’m seeing so far delights, baffles, and disgusts me in equal measure. It’s amazing what algorithms can do now, and I want to enjoy the spectacle before the machines rise up and destroy us all.

You know what really gives me a headache? A.I. video. What’s up with that stuff, man?

I can handle A.I. images at this point. Usually I can spot a fake, but the software is getting better by the day. And I haven’t really messed around with A.I. music much lately, now that the novelty has worn off.

But A.I. video really scares me. It’s so good now that it took me a minute to realize the new Wu-Tang Clan video is completely computer-generated:

The opening scenes absolutely fooled me. Then I noticed the dude’s face changes every scene, and the kung-fu action doesn’t really look right, and the whole thing just has an unnatural sheen. Because it’s 100% unnatural.

But the biggest giveaway is that after a couple of minutes of watching this stuff, I start to get a headache. As the great Mr. Plinkett says: “You didn’t notice it, but your brain did!” Millions of years of evolution have made our brains minutely attuned to reading human faces to survive, and this stuff is so close-but-not-quite that it triggers the “uncanny valley” effect. It just feels wrong.

Which is really the only thing that gives me hope. Maybe an A.I. apocalypse isn’t inevitable. Maybe society won’t collapse under the weight of this machine-generated unreality, because that glob of goo most of us have between our ears is always working, even when we’re not conscious of it.

Anyway. If that video gave you a headache, you probably shouldn’t even click play on this new one by The Darkness:

Oof. I like The Darkness, who were glam-rock throwbacks even when they broke out 25 years ago, but this is just a disaster. Now my headache is compounded by nausea.

Then there are all the ethical problems. How many people were put out of work making a rock video by a machine that can do a passable(?) job at a fraction of the cost and time? Are those jobs becoming outdated already? Is it already too late to stop this? Should we even try?

Throughout history, honest, hardworking people have been put out of a job by automation. That’s why nobody needs milkmen anymore. That’s why you pump your own gas and scan your own groceries.

Is art next?

Bandleader Justin Hawkins admits that the band chose to do an A.I. video because “none of us could be arsed” to film one themselves. At least he’s honest. He doesn’t really care about the ethical questions because he’s a big rock star who has better things to worry about.

He basically has the same attitude I do: Yeah, it’s gross, but it’s also kinda fun. If I think of a funny image to decorate a newsletter, I’ll just type a prompt into Grok instead of hiring someone to create it for me. Mostly because it’s funny.

Are we ruining the world by not taking this stuff seriously? No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe? Yeah, probably. Okay, definitely.

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Meanwhile, in stupid politics news…

China is mocking Trump’s tariffs with A.I.-generated videos of fat Americans working in sweatshops.

Well, if there’s one thing the Chinese are good at, it’s going viral. They also just admitted to hacking us, and this time it’s not a cough.

Seriously though, it’s a funny way to bash Americans, but I’ve never seen that many grossly obese people all in one place and I live in Indiana.

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Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this mess. Make sure to watch Gutfeld! on Fox News, where my jokes and witticisms appear with some regularity. And if you’d be so kind, please pay me to keep writing this newsletter. Thank you in advance.