When Washed Out frontman Ernest Greene agreed to collaborate with filmmaker Paul Trillo on the world's first music video created entirely using OpenAI's video generation tool Sora, he didn't quite know what to expect. What is he getting himself into? “To me, it's just a whole new tool to explore,” Green explains. rolling Stone. In his mind, the video — a dizzying, surreal, uncanny valley tour of a couple's lives — was just the boundary-pushing modern equivalent of, say, the early computers in Dire Straits' “Money for Nothing” video. Animation. .
The video for “The Hardest Part”, the first single from Washed Out's strong new album, Notes from a quiet life, dropped last week. The reaction was immediate, and particularly negative. “This washed-out AI video is the best case of hypocrisy I've ever seen,” wrote Trevor Powers of Youth Lagoon online. “It says nothing, does nothing, nothing. Even ugly sloganeering.” One of the top YouTube comments for the song is: “The future is digital diarrhea.”
Green soon learned that he had stepped into the middle of a growing backlash against AI-generated art in every medium, evident in the social media backlash. rolling StoneCoverage of audio and video production tools. “There's definitely a huge selection of people who clearly don't like anything related to AI art,” he says.
Trello — a longtime director who was already granted early access to Sora, which is not yet available to the public for other projects — was less than surprised by the response. He understands concerns that Sora, which produces video clips from text prompts, might be trained on copyrighted human filmmaking. “Could there be more transparency in how these models are made? Absolutely,” he says. “Was someone else going to make the first Sora music video, if we didn't? It would have. I see every technology as an opportunity to do something unique with a piece of tech and new kinds of visual approaches. to open up.”
A common criticism of video, and AI art in general, is that its reliance on training data makes it a classic form of plagiarism, but both Green and Trello reject that argument. “I don't see any comparison of the video format to any other work, whether it's in film or animation or whatever,” Green says. “I think Paul has managed to do something here that feels very unique. And yes, I think it's an amazing skill.
Greene didn't have AI in mind when he founded Trello, whose work in animation he particularly admired. Trello didn't have time in his schedule for a video shoot, but when OpenAI asked if there was any possibility of using Sora for a music video, he saw an opportunity. Trello created the video with prompts that were at least 1,000 words each, and tried endless variations before settling on the final shots. “Any time you save making shots,” he says, “you put that time elsewhere. You can explore a multiverse of what that video could look like, which is something creative.” Also unlike the other. I really wanted to lean into this aspect of the search process. About 700 clips were made.
Trelew admits that it would be “problematic” if well-funded studios used AI to reduce human labor costs, but he says that wasn't the case here. Not employing a lot of people anyway,” he says, noting that he always loses out on making money. “I'm not paying people their full day rates anyway. They have always been things that you do with passion… but the other fact is that these things are not going away.
No AI was used in the creation of Washed Out's new album — far from it. Notes from a quiet life Green's first self-produced album, so it's more hands-on than anything else in his catalog. The next couple Washed Out videos will be man-made and performance-based, but frontman W