Tag: The Oscars

Could A Chatbot Win An Oscar?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We are rushing towards a day when humanity may be faced with the issue of the innate monetary value of human created art as opposed to that generated by non-human actors. If most (bad) art pretty much just uses a formula, then that formula could be fed into a chatbot or eventually an AGI and….then what? If art generated by an chatbot or an AI equal to a bad human generated movie…does that require than we collectively give more monetary value to good art created by humans?

While the verdict is definitely still out on that question, my hunch is that the arts may be about to have a significant disruption. Within a few years (2029?) the vast majority of middling art, be it TV shows, novels or movies, could be generated simply by prompting a chatbot or AGI to created it. So, your average airport bookstore potboiler will be written by a chatbot or AGI, not a human. But your more literary works might (?) remain the exclusive domain of human creators.

As and aside — we definitely need a catchy names to distinguish between art created by AGIs and that created by humans. I suppose “artisanal” art might be something to used to delineate the two. But the “disruption” I fear to the arts is going to have a lot of consequences as it’s taking place — we’re just not going to know what’s going to happen at first. There will be no value, no narrative to the revolution and it will only be given one after the fact — just like all history.

It could be really scary to your typical starving (human) artist as all of this being shaken out. There will be a lot of talk about how it’s the end of human created art…and then we’re probably going to pull back from that particular abyss and some sort of middle ground will be established.

At least, I hope so.

Given how dumb and lazy humans are collectively, human generated art could endup something akin to vinyl records before you know it. It will exist, but just as a narrow sliver of what the average media consumer watches or reads. That sounds rather dystopian, I know, but usually we gravitate towards the lowest common denominator.

That’s why the Oscars usually nominate art house films that no one actually watches in the real world. In fact, the Oscars might even be used, one day, as a way to point out exclusively human-generated movies. That would definitely be one way for The Academy to live long and prosper.

My Hot Take On ‘The Slap’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It takes a lot to shock me, but I was honestly shocked by Will Smith smacking Chris Rock. I was “watching” the Oscars via Twitter and when I first heard about it, I assumed that the two men were standing next to each other on stage when it happened.

When I realized that Smith had walked up, approached Rock and smacked him full on the face…oh my God.

After losing a lot of sleep staying up all night looking at Twitter, I assumed when I woke up this morning that things would be a lot worse than they actually turned out to be.

Twitter was not full of bad What Does It All Mean hot takes that saw everything through whatever political point someone was trying to make. So, I guess we can all be thankful for minor miracles.

But, in general here’s my hot take on this situation. The joke that Chris Rock said was tone deaf, but it wasn’t bad enough to deserve to be smacked in front of tens of millions of people. The risk of escalation was too great, if noting else. Now THAT would have been a disaster.

So, in a sense, I guess we can be thankful for once that we live in an era of post-accountability. It seems we’re just going to move on as if none of this happened, just like we do whenever we learn something shocking about Trump.

It’s interesting how all the dire predictions last night of 36 hours worth of takes dominating the public conversation have not come to be. We all wake up today and it’s a big meh. What that says about modern America, I don’t know.

Kristen Stewart Looked Amazing At The Oscars


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Despite being an Old, I still long to get into fashion photography in some way before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. I have an eye for beauty and it seems to me that the one place I could combine my love of beauty with photography would be the sweet spot of fashion photography.

But, for the time being, I’m going to have to focus on the five novel project I’m working on.

And, yet tonight, Kristen Stewart’s outfit at the Oscars caught my eye. She looked amazing! She looked very modern and classy. The black and white ensemble was stunning and she still managed to feature her “pins” as the Brits would say. Her stylist did a great job.

Burn Hollywood Burn: Is Oscar Dead?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I love the Oscars and I love movies. And, in all honesty, if I had had a mentor of some sort to knock some sense into me when I was, say, 15, I would have gone into creative writing as a young man and bounced to LA as soon as I got out of college with a Creative Writing / Theatre degree. (Or something like that.)

But, alas, that’s not what happened.

Anyway — given how niche the movies the Oscars are celebrating are, we have to begin thinking the unthinkable: that the Oscars are dead. They’re now irrelevant.

I only say this in the context of what they once where. For generations, an Oscar movie was both a creative and financial success. It’s only been in the last decade or so that Hollywood has begun to grow more interested in the artistic quality of the movie and not the “double dees, double dees” aspect as SNL would tell us.

I think Hollywood should embrace this as a form of freedom. They should not televise the awards anymore, but put them on Amazon Prime or Netflix and let them be four hours without interruption.