Creativity and the incredibly odd thing you want to make
I don’t watch many YouTube videos, I have never really gotten the concept of just sitting there watching a video. It marks me out as a Very Old Millenial. And instead of watching YouTube videos I read things, lots of things. Mainly news apps. It makes me feel smart but it also speaks to the journalist's tendency to believe that everyone likes reading things. And, actually, most people do not like reading things, in fact, they very much like the recent irreversible pivot to video. This is a problem for someone trading in a text-based newsletter.
Anyway, one of the few YouTubers I will watch from beginning to end every time is Bobby Fingers. Here’s his first YouTube upload:
It’s called Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama and it is on over half a million views. It’s 18 minutes, 54 seconds of a guy detailing how he painstakingly makes an incredibly accurate diorama of Mel Gibson getting arrested in 2006 for a drunken anti-semitic rant at a police officer. And once Bobby Fingers completes the diorama he then buries it in the bog in County Kerry. I know he buried it in the bog in Kerry because he left a series of co-ordinate clues within the video, also a friend attempted to follow said clues and uncover the diorama, but was beaten to it by another person who had uncovered the same clues.
His channel just has four proper videos. There’s Mel Gibson, a ‘Steven Seagal Choke Hold’ Diorama, a ‘Michael Jackson on Fire’ diorama and, just uploaded this week, a Jeff Bezos rowing boat. The last one isn’t a diorama, it’s a working rowing boat in the shape of the head of world-famous bald man Jeff Bezos. The entire 20-minute video is incredible because Bobby Fingers shows spectacular dedication to his craft, including a side mission to a Turkish hair transplant studio, but his dedication is toward the dumbest thing you have ever heard about. It’s worth watching the entire video:
You will either completely hate it, and that’s absolutely OK. Or you will love it with every single cell of your heart. Because it’s a guy pouring all his craft into making a bald boat of Jeff Bezos’ bald head.
Why is this relevant to an AI newsletter? Because, at heart, most creatives would like to do this. Not this. Not to-scale models of Steven Seagal caught in a chokehold. But something a bit silly that consumes them, that leaves them in a state of flow while completing it, and tells the world a little about how their brain works. That’s a lovely thing to think when hearing a song or reading a story or watching a 20-minute video about a guy building a detailed diorama of Michael Jackson catching on fire before burying it somewhere.
And there is a chance AI will never get that. You could, today, train an AI on those Bobby Fingers videos and it would come back with the worst output you have ever seen. Because there’s nothing at stake. The Bobby Fingers videos work (to a relatively small audience!) because at many, many points he must have thought ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ How do explain the beauty of that to an AI?
I was at a conference for journalists this week. It was full of brilliant journalists who sidled up to me and said, with careful ‘off-the-record’ qualifications, about how they were using AI tools and how they weren’t shouting it from the rooftops because they didn’t want the bosses getting ideas about redundancies or their colleagues thinking they were disrespecting the craft, or the public thinking they were outsourcing work to machines. But they were telling me about cool, interesting experiments that could impact journalism, could make consuming news more engaging, or that were just plain fun. But journalism isn’t currently a great industry for aimless experiment or fun.
Not everyone wants to spend months making a working Jeff Bezos boat (though I genuinely would like to do that), but everyone - hopefully everyone - has a Jeff Bezos boat-scale project in their head that they would like to realize. Nothing in the Bobby Fingers videos is AI-enabled. But some of our insane projects could be. We’re just not really living in a time when it’s a comfortable notion to commit to these insane ideas, and that makes me a little sad.
Small Bits #1: Art is dead again
This video, and similar efforts, did numbers in a lot of different X/Twitter posts this week because it is a little too on-the-nose example of how artists could be destroyed. Except they couldn’t - see Bobby Fingers discourse above - but it can make people feel a bit worried about the concept of craft. Anyway, it’s from a tool called Krea and I’m not sure what it means yet.
Small Bits #2: Fight, Fight, Fight
The Senior Art Critic for New York Magazine and a dude who is making waves for AI art installations are having a public fight on X. It’s fun. Refik’s installations look cool and are grabbing attention (I’ve been trying to get an interview with him of late) but Jerry Saltz (a genuinely great name for an art critic) is getting some good shots in.
Small Bits #3: Fair use farrago
Ed Newton-Rex led the audio team at Stability AI, but last night he announced that he had resigned. He fundamentally disagrees with the prevailing attitude in the major AI companies that training an AI model on copyrighted works is covered by fair use and as such doesn’t require compensation for creators. His whole statement is here and, hopefully, it will spark more debate. But it’s worrying that his concerns for creators appear to be a minority opinion in the industry.
Tha is for that intro to Bobby Fingers. That's great content.