#i wonder if the fact that christofer's dating a photographer is part of the reason why he's taking this seriously

[clouds-of-wings]

I guess I can post this now... this is the video to the new Therion single, out 2 days ago. As you can see even from looking at the preview picture, it's AI generated, by Stable Diffusion to be precise.

So, the latest one in the sad parade* of "bands I like that have no problem with screwing over visual artists to save a few bucks and have their heads in the sand about how it might impact them to legitimize this way of making content"? Thankfully no. Christofer wrote a very long text about his opinions on AI yesterday, which are generally very critical of how the technology is used. The video above was apparently made without his input, he hadn't specified that he wanted AI and was in fact a little shocked when he got the video and didn't want to use it. But it was also too late to order another video, so he figured he'd take it to avoid not having a video at all, and also use it to start a discussion. There had apparently been some AI stuff in the "Twilight of the Gods" video too at first, but he had made them take it out.

Being made with Stable Diffusion, the video of course uses stolen art. The bot is also doing its best as a "bias automation machine", as the meme goes, by accompanying a song about Turkish mythology with imagery of Arabs, Arabic stuff, and deserts, an inaccuracy that was apparently lost on the production team behind the video, but very much not lost on Turks on YT.

Anyway, Christofer would, based on his text, like it if people thought about the future of the arts for 0.05 seconds before jumping head first into AI, and also thinks we need to "strengthen the cult around real art" to keep human-made creations alive. And complain a lot, of course. Under videos like the one above.

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\* Those are by no means the only bands that come to mind, but they are the biggest ones that I am in some way interested in and that I have seen use AI openly. A couple of smaller bands I like did the same, but I don't wanna hate on them on my blog since they're basically just some random people with a hobby, not public figures. I did try to be more understanding towards them, but I don't know if I really succeeded at that.