We may want to hit pause on the celebrity schadenfreude. Because Smith’s act is not singular at all. It is something universal, or at least soon-to-be universal.
Influencers and spinmeisters have been using AI upscaling for years, if quietly, the way you might round up your current salary in a job interview.
It’s only going to grow more popular as the tools get better. (And they will — you just need some tweaks to the model and increases in compute to erase these hallucinations.)
In fact, when the chapter on the early AI Age is written, the line about this moment is less likely to be, “Remember when Will Smith did something cringily AI?” and more, “Remember when AI was still seen as so cringe that we made fun of Will Smith for it?”
Experts differ on the timeline, but everyone agrees it’s just years if not months before we’ll stop being able to spot an AI video. “You Can Make It” had the particular misfortune of coming out at this interregnum moment: good enough for someone to use but not so good we can’t spot it.
That moment will be over soon enough, and, I suspect, so will our pearl-clutching.
The main effect of this new age of the synthetic is that video will stop being a meaningful measure of truth. We have long stopped believing everything we read, and AI image-generators have killed what photoshop wounded. But video until now has been the last bastion of objectivity — incontrovertible evidence that an event took place the way it seemed to.
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