‘AI Slop’ is a slap in the face to humans, art and Olympic glory
Hey, ChatGPT – What’s the most efficient way to disrespect a century of shared world history, discredit hundreds of thousands of athletes and destroy any remaining speck of joy from television?
“….from what I can tell, the best way to spit in the face of human achievement is to undermine the last 100 years of Winter Olympic glory by refusing to dignify human beings by not allowing them the opportunity to create their own unique art, and instead to present ‘AI Slop’ to the entire world.”
In case you missed it, The Olympics used AI to animate the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony video. Their short clip already has a multitude of complaints online. The disgust and disappointment hits even harder after the use of AI commercials during this year’s Super Bowl.
If you were choosing someone to represent the last 100 years of winter sports, surely you would choose an athlete or the founder of the games.However, that was too obvious of a choice for this ceremony. Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, known mostly from her role in the TV series “White Lotus,” had her image replicated by AI as the main character of the video.
Just over a minute long, the video shows Impacciatore magically changing into outfits from different cultures where the Olympics have been hosted. The graphics show her playing a variety of winter sports with no visual transitions other than disjointed colorful explosions. At one point, Impacciatore rides a giant bird like a skateboard, before falling off and ending the video.
While AI is not bad per se–at least when it comes to using it for your business major classes– nobody can deny that the animation is horrendous. A neanderthal might be able to enjoy the color and explosions, but anyone with an iota of sense could identify this as soul sucking garbage. And even if it looked beautiful, after all of your Cor philosophy classes, you cannot still think that “the end justifies the means.”
Although the advertisement mocks art, the whole reason behind it is not clear. It seems that the mega corporations in charge of the Olympics just want to keep all profits for themselves, even from the very opening of the games.
One user on X said that the clip was “An animating job that a talented animator would’ve bitten your arm off for, you’d have been able to find someone to do it for free even.”But if costs are the issue, then they could have created a competition for artists to showcase their talents and have one winner’s art selected and showcased as a ‘prize’ instead of a payment.
The questions that come from this are bigger than just about AI advertisements or AI Olympic monologues. Replacing real human work with AI is a slippery slope. In the past 200 years there have been several papal encyclicals on the nature of man and his relation to work.
“Rerum Novarum”, Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical on Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, and “Laborem Exercens”, Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on human work are two of the most famous Laborem Exercens reads,, “Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons.” Using AI to animate, instead of asking human professional artists to do so, removes the mark of humanity and the element of community, the antithesis to the nature of the event it preceded.
The Olympics are a global event meant to uphold global unity and the pursuit of human excellence, not a platform for ‘AI Slop.’