Don't Fall for the AI Clickbait!
Don't Let The Bozos Out There Stress You Out
The purpose of this article is not to tell you my takes on AI and how I think it will change our industry. But just as a general kickoff to where I’m coming from…Here is where I stand:
Do I think AI will fundamentally change our industry? Yes
Do I think generative image technologies will cost artists jobs? Also Yes
Do I think there’s a small chance all of this artificial intelligence may push us into the world laid out in the film Idiocracy? Yes and yes…sigh…I wish I knew what plants TRULY craved.
But am I concerned? No.
Why? Because every time I find myself spiraling and worrying, I step back and evaluate where that concern is coming from. And it’s often after scrolling through social media and seeing links for various content sources that make my stomach drop. It could be an online article or Twitter feed that either proclaims “AI WILL DESTROY THE WORLD” or AI apps are developing and releasing so quickly that if I don’t hop on these “10 new AI apps that will blow your mind,” then the whole world will pass me by.
Once I realize that is the reason for my stomach butterflies…I relax.
Because whether it’s TikTok videos, online articles, tweets, or anything else, they are all driven by engagement. And engagement is most easily manifested through fear and outrage. If someone wrote an article entitled “AI for 3D Artists: It’s Too Early To Tell” no one is engaging with that. Instead, it’s all the fear-mongering tactics.
No place is worse for this clickbaitiness than YouTube. Here is a sampling of YouTube video thumbnails and see if you notice a theme.
That’s right…It’s the white guy making a dumb face over a video with an outrageous title!!! (I’m pretty confident that this will go down as a major movement in art history textbooks.)
Take this one YouTuber for example. His entire channel is nothing but him making that same face over a bunch of click-bait titles!!
Suppose you click on any of these. What do you think you will find? It’s not deep, well-researched content from someone with extensive experience and know-how. It’s just surface-level information and extreme assumptions about what this thin bit of knowledge indicates for the future.
I’m not calling this guy out specifically because he is just doing what drives his revenue, but thoughtful, useful content was never the goal of these videos.
The goal was get you to click. The goal was view numbers. Because that is how it is monetized and incentivized. Not through the quality of content but the number of clicks.
Overall, we appear to be in a classic case where the smartest people in the room are also the quietest. Because they know we are in the infancy of generative AI and there isn’t enough information yet to truly understand where we are headed. So prognosticating is simply guessing and not that valuable.
So don’t let these bozos manipulate you for their profit. If you feel anxious or full of anxiety of the future of 3D take a moment to discover the source. Perhaps that stress is just someone messing with your natural unease about the future. And don’t give them the power to do that to you.
As a little stress-free exercise, I’ve created this Photoshop template with a dumb, white guy face to add whatever ridiculous claim you want! Go crazy and share it with me on Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, or LinkedIn. Don’t worry…all these images are AI-generated so no influencers were harmed in creating these thumbnails!
I’ll give it a try with a couple of these:
3D News of the Week
A roundup of interesting 3D related news you may have missed this week.
Meta beats revenue expectations, remains committed to metaverse - techcrunch.com
Isotropix has Discontinued Clarisse - cgchannel.com
Collection of Backgrounds from Love, Money, Rock’n’Roll - 80.lv
Maxon Cinema 4D 2023 Demo Reel - YouTube
Apple App Store Policies Upheld by Court in Antitrust Challenge Brought by Epic Games - Bloomberg.com
Artist of the Week
Love Roman’s commitment to mastering the art of the tire.
3D Tutorials
3D Job Spreadsheet
Link to Google Doc With A TON of Jobs in Animation (not operated by me)
Michael Tanzillo has been a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic. Currently, Michael is a Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D Growth team at Adobe.
In addition to his work as an artist, Michael is the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging.
www.michaeltanzillo.com
Free 3D Tutorials on the Michael Tanzillo YouTube Channel
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