AI's Invasive Species

""A male figure formed of gentle fire, his outline glowing with soft embers, approaches a female figure shaped from flowing water, her form glistening with ripples and fine mist. They move toward one another with calm grace, meeting in a warm embrace." The scenes come to life before my eyes in the form of AI-generated video. In the first clip, clumsy lightning cascades out of a cloud and moves across the water and into my feed."

"I am experiencing Vibes, a new social network nested within the Meta AI app-except it's devoid of any actual people. This is a place where users can create an account and ask the company's large language model to illustrate their ideas. The resulting videos are then presented, seemingly at random, to others in a TikTok-style feed. (OpenAI's more recent Sora 2 app is very similar.) The images are sleek and ultra-processed-a realer-than-real aesthetic that has become the house style of most generative AI art."

Vibes is a social network within the Meta AI app that displays AI-generated videos created from user prompts. The platform contains no actual people; a large language model turns prompts into short, stylized clips. Videos appear in a TikTok-style feed and prioritize sleek, ultra-processed, realer-than-real aesthetics. Individual clips act as fleeting curios whose value evaporates after the first view. The continuous stream produces an overwhelming, narcotic effect that leaves viewers unsatisfied and bypasses the time the brain would take to imagine scenes independently. The feed can include political or provocative AI content posted by public figures.

Read at The Atlantic