Coming Soon: More AI Slop on Facebook

I’ve always been a collector of bile fascinations, objects so wrong and so unworthy of attention that they shoot the moon and capture my mind anyway. It’s what’s driven me to write about AI-generated images and AI-generated recipes before; everything about them screams that they shouldn’t exist and yet they not only exist but are treated very credulously by social media users. A similar thing animates my love for elaborately bad movies, so much so that I shriek into a mic for a podcast about them and that brings me to the AI trend I’ve been following lately: fake movie posters and trailers. And wow wow wow do they look ridiculous.

For a quick sampling, let’s take a look at some of the sequels AI would have us believe are coming:

How janky are these posters? Oh let me count the ways! “John Terminator: 7 End of War, 7” is probably the best title of the bunch and I’m pretty sure Hell will freeze over before Timothee Chalomet plays Aquaman Jr. A Braveheart sequel isn’t entirely impossible, but what a laugh to think Mel Gibson still looks like that. Evil people are long-lived, but age pretty horribly.

Usually taking the form of sequels, AI-generated posters and trailers for movies that don’t exist are popping up all over Facebook. Some trade on recent hits like that could conceivably get a sequel like another Moana which theoretically helps sell the lie, but then you look at the posters and it’s just like, obviously no.

AI-generated trailers stand a better chance of fooling someone. It’s easier to generate a static image than it is to generate a stable moving image, but there are some tells. The uncanny valley can be found in full effect and details like the pallor of skin, the shape of eyes, and the proportions of mouths are pretty reliable signs. Poor visual quality should count as a tell, but unfortunately, bad-looking real movies are always shoved out. The most reliable way to check is to compare two trailers that claim to be about the same thing, like these two trailers for “Iron Man 4.”

Those are two drastically different versions of what they claim are the same story. They’re also deeply ugly and pretty obviously fake. Check that font on Tony’s grave. All of that said, the trailers represent how much closer to genuine movie slop the fake AI slop is becoming. They’re still noticeably unreal, but they’re closer to real than before. None of this would bear exploration except for how AI marches forever further into the creative world, regardless of its ugly lack of quality. When people insist that AI can’t replace human artists because AI art sucks, it feels frustrating because when did the media corps care about quality? We’re beyond quality being any hurdle to AI. Recognizing AI trash is a skill of greater utility than before because the hideous nature and devastating environmental cost have not stopped it at all. Hundreds of gallons of water were spent to create Z-grade clones of John Cena for a movie that isn’t real. We’re beyond there not being a point or a real product; those concerns don’t matter. The pointlessness of it all didn’t matter with woefully bad AI art and it didn’t matter with AI-generated recipes, so why would it matter now?

I treasure what small enjoyment I get out of the absurdity of these wrong creations, but I expect that to wane as the amount of AI slop exponentially increases. Facebook has yanked the teeth out of its moderation and aside from how queer people, women, and people of color are less safe on Meta platforms as a result, that means we’ll see more of these dead-eyed creations as well. While the average person can tell the fake from the real, it’s worth wondering how much longer that will be true. AI will grow in sophistication and it’s likely the mis/disinformation density on the internet will grow with it. If the internet is dead and this is all a show for audiences of bots, it would make a lot of sense, but damn if it isn’t depressing too.