I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!)

fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not.

Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling.

In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?

You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year.

Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening.

The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.

CGI is still bad tbh. Look at all the boring stuff produced for Marvel.

You are framing it as "this technological advancement is being thought of as bad because we always think of new technological advancements as bad". AI is bad because of all the ways in which it is objectively bad.

It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.

I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."

It's urban myth. Tron was not disqualified because they used computers, it wasn't nominated because it looked terrible.