2026-04-08 14:53:12
Since Exists didn’t do it for me1, I felt like I was owed a good Sasquatch found footage movie. I decided to finally watch Willow Creek, from 2014 directed by Bobcat Goldthwait.
The premise is that an amateur filmmaker named Jim has traveled to Humboldt County to make a documentary about revisiting the site of the Patterson-Gimlin film. (If you were familiar with the most famous Bigfoot recorded sighting, but didn’t know the names of the people who filmed it, don’t worry; you’ll hear them repeated over and over and over again throughout). In town, Jim visits the local Sasquatch-themed tourist traps and interviews a few people who claim to have had encounters with the creature.
He’s traveling with his girlfriend Kelly, who’s agreed to act as his camera person and to hike out with him to the site. Their relationship is starting to show a little bit of strain, because they’re so different: she’s a supportive, reasonable woman aspiring to go further with her acting career, and he’s kind of a jerk.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair. He’s a little thoughtless, but in terms of horror movie boyfriends — much less found footage movie boyfriends — he’s practically a saint. He’s a true believer in Sasquatch, and he says he’s been wanting to make this pilgrimage since he was eight years old. She’s a skeptic, but is supportive of him realizing his dream.
There’s a pretty charming dynamic between them that gradually develops as they go around these small towns, getting B-roll footage and interviews. You can tell that they’re both in the beginning of their careers, but she’s more comfortable with a camera. He’s still awkward and nervous, and the interviews have missed takes and the sense that he’s not the best with people and getting them to open up and feel comfortable. You can tell that this won’t be a particularly good documentary.
The scenes around town take up the first half of the movie, and it seems like they’re not doing much apart from establishing that the people around here are a little off. As “calm before the storm” foreshadowing, it could seem like it goes on too long. But in retrospect, you realize that it’s underscoring how much they’re outsiders, how this is such a big deal to him, how he’s enthusiastic but woefully unprepared, and how she’s there for no other reason than to support him.
The people in interviews seem to be a combination of actors and actual local Sasquatchers, true believers with an odd reverence for Patterson and Gimlin. Really, they seem like the kind of slightly-off people that Bobcat Goldthwait would find fascinating. One of them is played by a recognizable character actor, which is fitting, because it’s the most dramatic story, but also breaks any suspension of disbelief. I don’t think this works like normal found footage movies, though, since it never seems to be relying solely on verisimilitude.
But Willow Creek doesn’t work at all like I’d expected it to. There’s one brilliant choice in particular: to have a single, uninterrupted take that seems to go on for at least twenty minutes. It seems like it’d be impossible to sustain tension for that long, but it just keeps going and going. You’re dying for it to cut, or to do anything to provide some kind of release, and it simply refuses to. It’s so simple and so masterful, and it is one of the scariest scenes of any movie I’ve ever seen.
I can absolutely see Willow Creek being divisive, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear complaints from horror movie fans, found footage movie fans, and Bigfoot movie fans. But it absolutely worked for me. It feels like a small, scrappy little project that does a lot with a little, and it never feels (unintentionally) amateurish. You don’t need to spend a ton on practical effects when you understand the power of creepy noises in the dark, and you have the confidence to just turn the camera on and leave it running while you try to scare the hell out of people.
2026-04-08 04:32:07
I have to be honest and say that it’s been difficult to work up the right level of reverence and enthusiasm about the Artemis 2 mission. You can’t get too far into NASA news without being reminded of the current state of the American government, and all of the ways that SpaceX has wormed its way into an organization that was always supposed to be a public resource owned by the people.
Growing up, I always thought it was outrageous to hear about the later Apollo missions and how the public had mostly lost interest. Now I get it. And they didn’t even have to see formerly-respected journalistic institutions uncritically printing quotes from the world’s biggest dipshits about wanting to build data centers on the Moon.
The thing that did it for me, made me less cynical: seeing the mission plan. As somebody with just barely a layman’s understanding of space travel, I was vaguely thinking of it as being a straight line like on an Indiana Jones map. Here’s the Earth, here’s the Moon, strap in and take off.
But realizing that they had to plot a course that would intercept where the Moon was going to be, and use its gravity so precisely to slingshot around “The Far Side of the Moon” (as evoked via smooth jazz by David McCallum) back to Earth: that’s the kind of thing I always associate with speculative science fiction. Typically as the last desperate gambit the crew has to take on account of running out of fuel and suggesting something so crazy it just might work.
Any time I see a high-profile person online saying something stupid or patently false with no basis in science, there’s some small solace in remembering that they can only make those claims because of the science that they don’t understand and they reject. The smart phone they’re using contains technology far too advanced for them to understand, and broadcasting their nonsense to the world makes use of technology even more advanced.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable that you shouldn’t be allowed to be in a position of power, or to have a billion dollars, unless you can explain correctly and in detail how to launch a satellite into Earth orbit.
Basically: gravity doesn’t care about your feelings.1 We have centuries’ worth of history of awful people in power trying to impede or overturn the progress of science, and it didn’t work. Especially when people (always in positions of privilege) casually suggest that we’re living in an environment where the truth simply doesn’t matter anymore, it’s nice to have a visible, tangible reminder that it does matter, actually.
The Artemis missions are giving us images of the Earth in its entirety, set against a vast blackness of space, and they’re a reminder of how little the concerns of the surface — borders, money, evil and corrupt men in power — actually matter. It’s a reminder of unity2 and the fact that no matter who we are or where we are in the world, we’re sharing the same planet and the same moon.
Often it’s taken as a reminder of our insignificance, which is probably good in a world where humility and decency seem in short supply. But it’s also a good opportunity to think about what’s really significant, the kind of ambitious, cooperative project that makes those whole-Earth images even possible in the first place.
So instead of awe, wonder, and determined optimism that I usually associate with the space program, I’m feeling more low-key contemplative. Like the simple song “Beautiful Moon” by Kim Deal. Appreciating that some things are just true and steadfast and constant, and I can look at the same moon that every other human being has looked up to for as long as there’ve been human beings. And how fortunate I am to live in an age when a bunch of the smartest human beings can work together to go visit it, and share what they found with the rest of us.
2026-04-07 14:05:40
Just a few minutes into the Sasquatch-themed found footage movie Exists, as our protagonists are riding through the wilderness at night on their way to a remote cabin, the girls in the back seat hold a mini blowtorch near the face of a sleeping guy in the front seat, giggling the whole time, for the purpose of setting his beard on fire.
It’s significant because the director of Exists, Eduardo Sánchez, was one of the co-creators of The Blair Witch Project. That movie seemed to take forever making you thoroughly dislike its characters, as part of its winding you up to be so tense that even the most innocuous events would be terrifying. This one is a hell of a lot more efficient; you hate everybody in the car within minutes. They’re psychopaths with GoPros.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t ever really do much with that hatred. The characters are too annoying to get invested in, but not interesting enough to relish their impending murders via Sasquatch. The only tension in the movie comes from the inherent creepiness of being in the woods at night, and hearing growls or moans in the distance, or a sudden branch snapping. Even then, the movie seems to be dead-set on finding ways to undercut its own tension. Like a cheap jump scare where two guys leap out from behind a tree at night and begin firing semiautomatic paintball rifles at Beard Guy. As I said: psychopaths.
I had low expectations for Exists, but since it’s about dumb people going into the woods to make video of Sasquatches, I assumed that it’d still be my thing. But there’s just nothing to grab onto here. The characters aren’t obnoxious in interesting ways, and they’re not killed in interesting ways. I’d been hoping that at least there’d be some graphic shots of a Sasquatch just tearing someone apart, but there’s really nothing more than a lot of blunt force trauma.
And I’m typically extremely forgiving of found footage movies playing fast and loose with the format; I’m not at all one of the people who asks “what camera took that shot?” or “why are they still filming this?” Here, I was wondering that constantly. Apart from exactly one scene (where a guy had to use a night-vision camera to navigate through a dark space), it seems to treat the format as an inconvenience instead of a challenge. They just say that this guy had like a dozen GoPros and mounted them everywhere, and pretty much leave it at that. Meanwhile, while assembling all the video from these disparate memory cards, someone has made sure to edit in several time-lapse sequences of night falling. I guess just because you’re documenting the deaths of several people, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for artistic expression.
Also, the creature is a disappointment. The end credits list Weta Workshop as having collaborated on it, which is surprising, because it looks about on par with a Messin’ With Sasquatch beef jerky ad.
Honestly, it’s the kind of thing I’d usually ignore, but I feel a little obligated to mention it on here simply because it seemed like it was such a no-brainer of a movie for me to like. But there is at least one good thing I can say about it: the movie chooses the correct side of the eternal Sasquatches vs. Twenty-something Extreme Sports YouTubers divide.
Really, it doesn’t even wait until the beard-igniting incident to let you know who’s to blame here. At the very start, there’s a bit of text saying that there have been over 3000 Sasquatch sightings in the US since the late 60s, and there’s no record of them attacking humans without being provoked. (Little consolation to those of us who watched In Search Of… and were suitably terrified).
Exists is completely unambiguous in its pro-Sasquatch stance. And that, at least, is something I can get behind.
2026-04-07 10:27:14
…pation.
I was flattered to be invited to write something for The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, a collection of over 100 essays about game narrative curated by Jon Ingold at Inkle. There are a lot of really solid essays in there, and it’s all cleverly presented like a choose-your-own-adventure story to let you skip around randomly. Plus there’s now an ebook version!
My essay was titled “In The Moment,” and it’s about how narrative design for interactive entertainment requires thinking of storytelling as front-loaded: it’s less about a series of impactful reveals, and more about building up to impactful moments of action.
The essay was a case of my eagerness to revisit some of my favorite topics colliding headlong with the need to hit a suggested word count. So I’d like to expand on them a little bit here, to see how my thoughts have changed over the years.
The basic ideas:
By far the most writing I’ve done for games was at Telltale, where for most of the time I was there, the mission statement was to combine traditional media (sitcoms, comics, and then later, “prestige” drama series) with an episodic game format.
That meant that the process of narrative design was almost always more like translation than like working from the ground up. Start with a story that you instinctively know how to tell in a traditional format, from a lifetime of watching TV and movies, and break that down into a structure where the player has a feeling of agency in driving the story forward.
Since I’m a Gen-Xer, I’m curious whether the shift has already happened — or whether it will ever happen — so that most of the people working in game narratives have games as their “native language,” not movies and TV. Do younger writers “think in game language,” or is traditional media so omnipresent that it’ll always be what artists are most familiar with?
The experience of watching an engaging horror or suspense movie is almost totally different from watching a drama or comedy, in a way that makes it feel like game narrative’s closest cousin.
Mystery and detective stories are another contender, especially stuff like Poker Face, which has you re-considering and re-contextualizing what you’ve seen throughout. But there’s still inevitably a point where you’re passively watching a key moment, the reveal that serves as the story’s climax. This is what the artist decided was the outcome.
But even the most forgiving and least discriminating horror fan could tell you the difference between a movie filled with jump scares and one filled with actual tension. You can’t possibly anticipate a jump scare. And the only room for creativity is to play around with the timing and framing, e.g. setting up an obvious jump scare and then denying it or delaying it until later. That’s still entirely in the hands of the filmmakers, though, and doesn’t invite any “participation” from the audience.
I still say that the Final Destination series has the best moments of the kind of active storytelling I’m talking about: scenes where the actual outcome is almost irrelevant. You know exactly what’s going to happen; the only question is how it’s going to happen, and you spend the entire scene in a back-and-forth with the filmmakers as the various possibilities are introduced, rejected, and reconsidered.1
It’s easy to think of horror movies as being a series of memorable kills, but the experience is doomed to feel empty if it’s nothing more than the filmmakers showing the audience what gruesome idea they come up with. The thing that makes those gruesome moments really land is the scene building up to each one, where the filmmaker is inviting the audience to think about what’s going to happen.2
Ultimately, these feed into the idea that I’ve been thinking about ever since the days of Mass Effect, which was being marketed partly on the promise that it was so vast, there were entire planets that some players would never visit.
For decades, game developers and players both have been fixated on what I think is exactly the wrong thing: the idea that making games with a greater sense of immersion and player agency means making more stuff. Branching narratives. More characters. More choices. More environments. More character customization.
The most current manifestation of that is the hype around generative AI content. This idea that you can have a system able to respond to practically anything the player says or does. But whether it’s the result of overworked and underpaid teams having months of their work hidden behind an optional dialogue choice, or a billionaire-owned network of planet- and job-destroying data centers, the problem is essentially the same: responding to the player isn’t the same thing as engaging with the player.
Which is why I think it’s important to keep calling back to The Walking Dead, and the creative leads’ (Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin) focus not so much on branching narratives for their own sake, but on setting up situations where the choice has maximum impact.
So much external attention3 was put on the scenes that played out as a result of one of your choices. I think the far more interesting aspect was the work that went into coming up with the moments of choice themselves. Moments where you had to make an important decision with no good options, and whatever cut-scene that resulted from it was less impactful than the weight of having to make the choice.
And especially when you think in terms of the “rules” of narrative storytelling that we picked up from years of engaging with traditional media, it can be easy to underestimate how much the emphasis on choice is an inversion of the ways that traditional stories typically work.
Typically, in traditional media, you want to gradually build up to your reveals. Drop hints, use foreshadowing, scatter clues around, but you’re laying groundwork for that a-ha! moment, when the artist reveals the answer to the puzzle, the shocking twist, the meaning of the scene or of the entire work.
In games and other interactive media, you still want that feeling of engagement, where the artist and audience are on the same wavelength and have been working together to reveal the meaning. But the timing is shifted. You want to have the player more aware of context at every step of the way, anticipating what happens next instead of just waiting to see what happens next. Every traditional storytelling instinct says to be circumspect and to withhold as much as possible until the end, because otherwise you’re being too obvious and too on-the-nose.
But that’s only possible because in traditional media, the audience is guaranteed to get to the reveal no matter what. That may be improved by the audience being actively engaged, but it doesn’t depend on it. And no matter how much traditional media plays with first-person or point-of-view tricks, there will always be a sense that the audience and the characters are separate. But in interactive media, you pretty much never want the story to move forward with the audience feeling like they’re the ones who are making it move forward.
And in interactive media, you get that feeling of immersion basically “for free;” you have to go to some effort to break the sense that the player is the player character. You never hear anyone (except for the actors themselves) describe events of a movie in terms of “…and then I went down to the basement…” But even with a character as cartoony and well-defined as Mario, you often describe it in terms of “…and then I jumped on a Goomba and found a hidden warp zone.” There is inherently a greater feel of ownership over the story.
It seems like such an esoteric point, but I believe it’s the key to making engaging stories that actively involve the player in the storytelling. Not just simply watching everything they do and then responding with one from a set of pre-determined story outcomes. You can generate as many different story outcomes as you want; it’s still going to feel like watching instead of doing if I haven’t felt actively engaged in the process of reaching that outcome. By having a real moment-to-moment understanding of what might happen, and how the things that I’m doing might change that.
So I say that the key to immersive, satisfying, interactive storytelling is to think of it as constant engagement, instead of as actions and responses. Always keeping the idea in mind, “What does the player need to know right now, and what is the player thinking about right now?” We all understand the need for the basics: tutorials for the game mechanics, and exposition for the narrative. But I still keep seeing a tendency in game narratives to set up the player with the basics — here is your current objective — and then leave them alone until it’s time for the next story choke point.
Which is better than nothing, obviously, but it still creates this sense of disconnect. My time in the game loop is basically a series of activities instead of active storytelling. I know that my goal is to get to there — that’s the tomb that will contain the ancient artifact, or that’s the power station that I’m trying to sabotage for the next phase of the plan. But I’m also aware that all the good story stuff is going to happen after I get there, not along the way.
This is most relevant to action adventures — Half Life: Alyx and Jedi Fallen Order are the most recent ones I’ve played — but I think it applies to anything with a narrative. I can think of several ways the adventure games that I worked on could have been tweaked to feel even more like the player was making story progress while solving the puzzles, instead of just after solving a puzzle.
And in an action adventure, it’s even easier for me to play armchair level designer. Throw in enemies that I hadn’t expected, who I gradually discover are rival groups searching for that ancient artifact. Put in clues and hints foreshadowing the fact that the bad guys are fully aware that the power station is my target, and I’m being led into a trap. (Which I probably already knew anyway, considering that I’m still only on level 3).
Again, it means inverting the way we traditionally think of narratives, as a slow drip of clues building up to a significant reveal at some point in the future. Instead, spoiling the surprise for the player: giving them even more context at the start, and staying present with them moment by moment as you confirm or subvert expectations along the way.
My gut instinct, from a lifetime of watching TV shows and movies, is that dooms the big story moment to feel like an anticlimax. But in practice, it can feel more like the collaborative process in a writer’s room: you’re not always trying to surprise the rest of the people in the room with your hidden reveal. You’re actively collaborating in coming up with those beat-to-beat moments that make the surprise have the strongest impact.
I was already gushing about Return of the Obra Dinn after I finished it, but thinking of what it does in terms of narrative makes me respect it even more. Essentially, it does a complete inversion of the traditional story structure: using the most dramatic and exciting moments as a starting point, and then giving the player the “writer’s work” of putting all the pieces together to build up to that moment.
You can immediately tell that it’s a story told backwards, as the first bodies you encounter on the ship were chronologically the last ones to die. That’s not a spoiler; it gives you a journal and puts them in their places in the last chapter as part of the embedded tutorial.
It’s baked into the premise that because you have a tool that shows you how a person died, you are always going to be seeing the end of their story. The side effect that I didn’t immediately appreciate: it’s an implicit assertion that what’s fun and engaging about a story isn’t seeing how it ends, but in the process of telling the story itself.
You’re not shown these spectacular, dramatic moments as a reward for your deductive reasoning. They’re more like storytelling prompts. How could this have happened? Who are these people? What would have brought them to this moment? The kinds of questions you ask from moment to moment while you’re writing a story.
And your reward for coming up with the answers (i.e. successfully collaborating with the game designer) is a charming and understated “Well done.”
2026-04-05 05:31:15
Since I was thoroughly creeped out by The Blair Witch Project, I got swept up into the later hype around the first Paranormal Activity movie, and went in fully prepared to be terrified. Instead, I spent the whole time being bored and irritated, impatiently waiting for someone or something to come in and murder these painfully annoying people already.
It wasn’t offensive, and I don’t begrudge its success or anything. But I might be the easiest person in the world to scare, and it barely ever registered a blip in my heart rate. I was perfectly happy to write off the entire series as not for me.
But digging through older episodes of the Dead Meat podcast, I found a series where they talked about each installment of the Paranormal Activity movies. I’ve been just curious enough to wonder what they did with the premise, without having to actually watch any more of them, so I listened to the recaps and had my “not for me” suspicions confirmed.
Until I got to the episode about the fifth installment in the series, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. I was surprised that not only did they like it, but that it sounded like something I’d probably enjoy a lot as well.
There are three big changes with The Marked Ones, which all work together to make it more my thing than anything else in the series:
First, it was written and directed by Christopher Landon, who had written some of the other installments, and who would go on to make the Happy Death Day movies, Freaky, and Drop. Because this was a spin-off instead of a direct sequel, I think this one was freer to break from the existing formula, while Landon’s involvement with the others meant he knew how to tie it into the series in a way that would make fans happy.
Second, it breaks from the usual setup of spooky stuff happening to a white, upper-middle class, annoying, suburban family. This one has spooky stuff happening to a Hispanic community living in an apartment building in Oxnard, California. The main characters are Jesse, a recent high school graduate who’s just bought himself a new camera, and Hector, his best friend. And you’re immediately introduced to their friends, family, and neighbors, making it feel like it’s happening in a real place, instead of all confined to a suburban house somewhere in southern California.
Third, it breaks from the format established by the first one, of a bunch of static cameras placed around a house, inviting you to look for weird stuff happening in the periphery. This one is still a found footage movie, technically, but it’s a bit more like Cloverfield: it’s structured like a traditional mid-budget horror movie, but you’re seeing everything from the perspective of one of the characters holding a camera.
That does lose the sense of verisimilitude that was (at least initially) the core idea of the franchise, and it means fewer opportunities for the kind of eerie moments that the first movie actually did pretty well: like seeing via timestamp that a woman stood next to a bed and just stared at her partner for hours.
The “found footage” aspect of The Marked Ones is more of a stylistic thing than anything else. It’s given an initial justification, but it’s never allowed to become a burden. The movie’s happy to keep using it even in situations where it just doesn’t make sense that someone would keep filming, and complaining that it doesn’t seem realistic misses the point in a movie that isn’t that concerned with rigorous realism.
Instead, we see a couple of teenagers goofing off with a camera, recording themselves doing Jackass-style stunts around their apartment building, as a sinister story about their creepy neighbor Ana (who’s rumored to be a bruja) plays out in the background. It’s an ingenious way to introduce the characters as real, likeable, reckless kids who don’t take any of this stuff seriously. It means that they’re just fun to watch, and that it’s completely in character for them to make all the obviously terrible decisions you need characters in a horror movie to make.
I watched it on Pluto, which is streaming a version that for some reason cuts out several scenes, the most significant of which is one of those terrible decisions: the kids sneak into a local church one night to perform a ritual to summon a demon. You can find the scene on YouTube. It’s not really essential — I didn’t even detect anything was missing until the podcast hosts were describing a scene I couldn’t remember seeing — but it does establish the tone. Teenagers who don’t know that they’re in a horror movie, doing the kinds of things that drive a horror movie into the next act.
A really clever gimmick is when the kids are playing with an old Simon game, and they discover that they can use it to communicate with whatever strange entity is making weird noises in the building. I like it because it does a ton of things at once. First, there’s the simple novelty of using an electronic game instead of the way-overused Ouija board. Second, it drives home the idea that the teenagers think this stuff is weird, but they’re not scared of it: they’re more in sync with a horror movie audience, because they’re not completely oblivious to the fact that things are getting spooky, but they’re also more interested in having fun with it instead of being freaked out. Third, it gives Jesse’s abuela Irma — one of the best characters — the opportunity to be suitably spooked and pulled into the story.
Finally, it just sells the idea that these are bored teens hanging out together without a lot to do. The movie moves really quickly through its initial scenes, rapidly cutting through short clips, and its total run time is pretty short. It’s a difficult pace to establish the feel of bored people with a ton of time on their hands. I like it because it hints at the same feel of It Follows, a bunch of young people in a holding pattern on the cusp of whatever comes next. And it further explains why they’re diving recklessly into this story — they just want something to do.
And I realized one of the biggest differences between The Marked Ones and the first Paranormal Activity: I’d really gotten to like these characters, and I was dreading something terrible happening to them, instead of eagerly looking forward to it.
I don’t want to oversell it. It doesn’t just abandon verisimilitude, but requires hyper-active suspension of disbelief more and more as it goes on. It’s weakest when it tries to be part of the franchise instead of just a teenage slice-of-life story set in a Hispanic community — although I did appreciate the scene where a character (who I’m told is from the second movie) shows up to deliver all of the exposition they need in a couple of minutes, then disappears, with as little as possible attempt made to make any of it seem elegant or even natural. And ultimately, I didn’t think it was ever that scary.
But it’s pretty fun! And that’s something I never thought I’d be saying about a Paranormal Activity movie.
Content warnings: body horror related to eyes, and a dog in distress (but not injured as far as I could tell).
2026-04-04 09:45:56
I’m coming in a little bit hot with this take, so I’m going to say exactly what I mean at the start, instead of trying to build up to it. That way, no one on the internet can possibly misinterpret or misrepresent it!
Any rejection of generative AI in the creation of art or entertainment has to make a stronger case than simply, “a real human being made this.” You can, and often do, have dozens if not hundreds of very talented people make something that ultimately feeds into the “commodified content” mentality that’s making so many business people so eager to push AI onto everyone in the first place.
The impetus for this post was discussion around The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Specifically, someone calling out the complaint that it looks like AI slop, by insisting that comparing it to gen-AI does a huge disservice to all of the people at Illumination who worked on it.
And yeah, there is absolutely inherent value in something simply having been made by a person. Even before you take the obvious skill and talent of Illumination as a studio into account. There is significant artistry involved in taking worlds and characters — even ones that have already gone through decades of refinement and been drawn, modeled, and animated countless times before — and translating them into an animated movie format. Tons of decisions about what works and what doesn’t, what exactly to take from the existing character designs and adapt them for this movie, and likely thousands more moment-to-moment decisions that I’m too ignorant to speculate on.
But then also: what are we even doing here? Can you imagine ten years ago — even five years ago — defending an unabashedly commercial movie release by saying, “it was made by humans?”
The reason I’m fond of the word “slop” as a derogatory rejection of AI-generated content is because it’s all-encompassing. It gets at the heart of why the stuff sucks so much. It’s not just because of the inability to render details correctly. It’s not just because the video can’t retain coherence beyond a few seconds. It’s not just because it’s trained on copyrighted data and decades of people being forced to do CAPTCHAs. It’s not just because it consumes an exorbitant amount of resources, or because it’s driving up the cost of computing resources for everyone. All of that sucks, but even if you could wave a magic wand and make each of them disappear, the root problem is still there.
The push for generative AI is really just the culmination of a decades-long process of devaluing people’s work, expertise, and labor, towards the complete commodification of art. If you find it unsettling that it’s getting more and more difficult to distinguish AI-generated art or video from the real thing, that’s not necessarily a sign that the systems are getting better and better. It’s more a sign that your taste and standards have been gradually chipped away for so long that you think the difference between slop created by humans and slop created by a computer is a meaningful difference. And that is pretty unsettling.
It might not sound like it, but I actually see it as an optimistic take. If there is anything positive to having all of this gen-AI slop shoved on us, it’s that maybe it’s taught us to pay closer attention to the stuff we’re consuming and the stuff that we’re making. I know that it’s made me have a lot more grace towards the stuff I make, simply for having a better appreciation for the process that went into it. Not simply because a person made it, but because I made it.
I should probably acknowledge that I haven’t seen either of the Super Mario movies, and I’m unlikely to until there’s a screening that’s not packed full of members of its target audience, if at all. For all I know, it’s more charming and fun than it looks, and it has touches that justify its existence beyond a marketing campaign.
But that’s also all but irrelevant for the point I’m making, and the reason I’m using it as an example. Everyone knows exactly why these movies exist, and it would be bizarre to the point of nonsense to suggest otherwise. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a blatantly commercial piece of entertainment, and often it gives people a chance to do good, fun, work, but the craft and artistry is still always going to be a happy side effect at most.
Every time I see a trailer for the upcoming Masters of the Universe movie — the second live-action movie capitalizing on nostalgia for a TV series that was itself created for the purpose of selling toys — it feels like spiraling towards an event horizon into a black hole from which no art can escape. It’s important to periodically take a look around and do a sanity check. The balance between art and commerce has always been tenuous; is it shifting so far into the category of commerce to the point that it no longer gives any opportunity for actual creativity?
We’re already in a media environment where fans use terms like “IP” without a second thought, as if that were a normal way for normal people, not marketing types, to talk about art and entertainment.
So whether these movies actually turn out to be good is almost as irrelevant as whether they were actually made without generative AI. The mission statement is already clear: they exist to make money, and everything else is secondary. A project can fail the Turing Test and still be part of the years-long process of training audiences to appreciate Commodified Content, to dismiss any vestigial ideas about there ever having been a balance between art and commerce in the first place. Really, all the push for generative AI does is help speed that along.