The Art of Making Something Batshit Insane VS. The Lazy Use of AI to Make Wastes of Air

Have I ever told you about Mystery Science Theater 3000?

Have I ever told you about Retsupurae?

Have I ever told you about Watch+Play?

Have I ever told you about Pondering Spooky Tapes?

Have I ever told you about KrimsonRogue?

• Mystery Science Theater 3000 (sometimes shortened to MST3K) is a series that originated on the Sci-Fi channel, where a lone human on a drifting satellite is forced to watch the worst b-horror movies by the evil group of mad scientists and co., and has their robo-buddies watch it with them. The series has a spiritual successor in RiffTrax, where you can buy the commentary track, and play it over the movie that they're riffing so that you can watch it too.
• Retsupurae was a YouTube channel made by the people who made video Let's Plays famous, and watches the worst of the worst LPers that the site had to offer around that time. They expanded their horizons to other areas, but let's not get too sidetracked.
• Watch+Play is a series of livestreams from a group called LoadingReadyRun, where one host has the other host play very bad games. The series got its start on the gaming host's own series of streams, where it got hijacked so that they can play a game which gave the series its name.
• Pondering Spooky Tapes (referred to as Pondering) is a podcast made by the same people who make its parent podcast Please Stop Talking (shortened to PST). Each episode of Pondering has the hosts talk about stuff relating to the horror movie they just watched (of which they also do a similar thing to RiffTrax, where you can buy the commentary track to play it over the movie yourself).
• KrimsonRogue (shortened to Krimson) is another YouTube channel, on which the host does a thorough review on a book he's recently read (to the point of writing his thoughts down in notes, and marking all sorts of things with page tab markers and regular, highlighting markers). These books that he talks about are usually not that great quality-wise.

What do these five have in common, and why are they the cold open to a post talking about crazy art VS ai slop?

I love a lot of fiction, much like my other fellow completely normal human relatives and friends. Most of the time I like to enjoy good media, but with the five series that I've mentioned, you bet your ass that I love watching others poke fun at fiction and media that aren't up to par even remotely.

The fun thing about art is that you get to express a lot of things through it:

• You want to make a strange movie about an unfortunate family that has the wife ultimately become yet another member of the immortal man's ever-growing harem? Strange first choice, but yes.
• You want to record yourself playing a classic game to both showcase what people need to do & crack jokes along the way? Yes please.
• You want to make a humorous little point-and-click where you use little guys to make tools and help you progress and save Santa (who is your great-grandfather)? Dude that's my jam.
• You want to make a movie about this group of partygoers that get stuck in a mansion with their own version of the Necronomicon? Sounds just about right up my alley.
• You want to make a book about an amazing individual who gets amazing powers and ends up eventually saving the world? Sounds like a nice story.

These all sound interesting, right? Funny thing is that these all already exist, and each one has been covered by one of the five series up there.

Manos: The Hands of Fate was watched by the MST3K crew, and not only made so many lingering scenes where literally nothing happens, but ended up having the female child be taken too, to the dismay of the human (which in the era of which they watched it, is Joel) and his buddies Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot.
The LPer's name I don't remember, but Retsupurae riffed on their playthrough of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, where not only do they awkwardly try to make a "Link's got wood for Zelda" joke, but also start having a conversation about their cat being attracted to human sweat, and joking that they might consider it candy or something.
Spud! was covered by Watch+Play, where you play as a kid (the titular Spud) who gets into all sorts of things that a lone kid should not have to witness, including a nude, anatomically correct female anthro reindeer in the shower that they have to coax out, an inflatable reindeer (who definitely isn't a sex toy), the elf workshop that has become a gnome graveyard with lots of blood and dead gnomes everywhere, and worst of all, some racist caricatures that some orangutans exhibit.
Spookies, the movie Pondering started out with, originated as a film called Twisted Soul, but with a hellish production, the original crew left and another crew brought on, who knew so little about what movie they needed to make just threw in a bunch of stuff (effectively making Spookies, the end result, two movie halves spliced together).
Empress Theresa was a book that Krimson covered, and it detailed a descent into madness of literally everyone in the entire book as Theresa kept developing more god-like powers, to the point where she was using them for her own personal satisfaction against anyone who thought less of her, and eventually warping and morphing Earth into her own twisted idealistic vision of what the world should be, all wrapped up in a character that is trying her best to be Joan of Arc, or however you spell that name.

Does that sound batshit crazy to you? It does to me, and that's kinda why I (for the most part) have fondness over not just the episodes of the people poking fun at these things, but the things themselves. Again, for the most part. Spud! could do without the orangutan stuff and the shower could use more of a shower curtain, I didn't really want to watch the let's player that Retsupurae riffed anyway, and I didn't like the ending of Manos, I don't think he should've taken the child too. But I have a fondness for some media that most would consider "bad."

Hell, Alex (the host in Watch+Play that plays the games) put it best in saying that the worst thing any game can be is boring, but I wouldn't limit that to just games. It can be applied to a whole lotta things. I still remember Empress Theresa from Krimson reviewing it because so many laws of physics get broken in such increasingly convoluted ways. Spud! was such an emotional rollercoaster because of the constant mood whiplash and its sometimes out-of-place references, especially because your main character is, in fact, a young child. Manos had such the audacity to have literally dozens of scenes where the characters just stand around looking at each other, not doing a damn thing otherwise (though admittedly my favorite parts of Manos are the scenes with Torgo in them).

I am a big fan of watching people poke fun at stuff, to the point where I can become somewhat of a fan of the stuff they rip to pieces. Pod People, Werewolf, and Devil Fish are all movies covered by MST3K, but I came to love those movies while watching them get prodded and torn asunder. The first official episode of Watch+Play had them start out playing Airplane Simulator, which was such a good example of why those streams exist, and yet I love it all the same. It doesn't always happen though, and I will usually end up liking the riffed version more than the actual piece of fiction itself.

There's a reason for all of this. That is because, when we create, we put a little bit of ourselves in the works we create. We put part of our soul into it. No matter the quality of the piece, anything that has any ounce of artistic integrity put into it will allow you to see that piece of soul all the same. I honestly understand those people a bit more, the ones who have trouble separating art from the artist, now that I've had time to think about things. I'm glad I still have that ability to separate them, but I can understand and respect those who don't.

With good art, you have an amazing journey riddled with excitement, tension, and well-executed payoff, alongside an ending that either lets you calm down and bathe in the memories of the journey, or makes you think about things in a different way, another light. Now, art is subjective, and art that I find good isn't always going to align with art that you find good. That's part of why I refrain from using the word "bad" outright for the most part. However, there are movies, shows, animations, games, and books that do get considered "bad" by a majority of people. It could be for a number of reasons, like the animation being stilted or straight up alien and disgusting, the writing requires studying just to understand what the hell the plot was even supposed to be, or it makes so many unconventional choices to tell its story that you are simply lost.

I call them Batshit Crazy, because while you can call it "bad," "awful," or down-right "the worst thing anyone on this speck of a planet could make," you will still have a similar experience with something like this as you would with a good piece of art, though obviously not for the same reasons. That's because it not only has a part of themselves in it, but also they tend to be more unrestricted in what they get to put within their stories. Sometimes you can enjoy them yourself, considering it a guilty pleasure, while other times you need the filter of someone reviewing it / making fun of it to truly understand what is happening, let alone enjoy the ride. We should be thankful for those who riff on stories, as otherwise we wouldn't have access to the ideas these stories hold tightly to themselves.

You also wouldn't have any anti-role models to teach you how not to do things for your own story if we don't have people like these who can (with time) dissect and present the story in a more digestible manner.

Now onto the main reason why I'm here. Obviously, since a few years ago, AI has been taking the world over by storm. While it sounded like a nice concept for certain things, nowadays I have become resentful against these AI's. The tool has been used by so many people who want to make mad bank without all of the actual fucking work they need to put in. This extends to art and stories.

For those of you who either don't know, or are curious, here's how an AI works:

• An algorithm takes your input as the command.
• The algorithm predicts what needs to be said next.
• The algorithm posts the output.
• That's it.

This is why I've been recently calling it Algorithmic Intelligence. The "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't really exist, it's just an algorithm that was programmed to predict what it should say based off of its limited idea of context. It doesn't have a will because at the end of the day, it's a set of code that takes input and provides output.

As an artist, I really dislike the idea of AI Art. Yes, I have had ideas of generating art, but my ideas are more along the lines of how games like Minecraft and Terraria use procedural generation to create the worlds you play in. Hell, I had a game idea when I was young about a game keeping a log of special events in order, then using variables as context, is able to put a picture together using assets that were hand-made & fit those variables. AI Art, on the other hand, is generated by predicting what the next set of pixels need to be over and over again until it makes a complete png file. It's a bit more immoral, because a lot of these AI Art generators use stolen work from artists as the sample data to work with.

AI Art... is not going to be the major AI thing I talk about here today. I just wanted to rant about it and bully it.

Because sites like ChatGPT are done in a text-only format (for the most part), a lot of people use ChatGPT to write them stories that they can sell on Amazon and the likes. It's been happening for a while, though I've been thinking about it more recently due to a youtuber I watch (KappaKaiju).

He posted a video today where he takes the time to look into some more AI-written stories. While watching, I scrolled down in the comments and found one that inspired this whole post. To reuse an idea that I had on another post, thank you to LVT (not going to put an @ or username here, but you should know who you are) on YouTube for making that comment, and in turn inspiring me to make this.

They state that it's more fun breaking down the craziness of the stories written by those who lack the ability to write, because they made an honest attempt that unfortunately crashed out on the highway, creating a huge pileup on I-75, and soon we'll have our eye in the sky report just how bad it is down there right after he finishes reporting the initial accident plus the rest. The stories reflected a lot about the individuals who made them, up to and including their lack of skills required to make what they were attempting work. We can poke fun at these stories day and night because we get to dissect the soul that was delivered in front of us on a rusty-ass copper platter, and question all sorts of decisions that they made along the way.

You can't do that with AI. AI doesn't think, doesn't have a soul, and is simply just attempting to mimic how we speak, how we write. Thus, they end up bland, boring, and mind-numbing. You know the feeling that you get when you see yet another AI-generated response that a big corporation posts? Imagine reading a book written the same way. No substance imaginable, no experience to speak from, no intention of anything other than fulfilling the prompt that was given to them.

That is why a batshit crazy story is better than anything the AI generates.