If you haven’t already seen the newest Corridor Digital video going around, I’m jealous of your algorithm, because it made me roll my eyes so hard I got a head🌺ache. This production studio went mildly viral a few months ago with an AI-generated anime video of two dudes playing Rock Paper Scissors. It looked like shit, had absolutely no style, and the facial movements freaked many people out. The team, naturally, said that having AI animate sequences was democratising art, while totally ignoring that the AI was trained on the work of real artists and animators, and was essentially stealing that labour in service of an inferior result.
The studio has now uploaded a new video titled We try Putting Photoreal Faces in Video Games. The video makes the ca𒊎se that combining AI tech with video game character models makes them look more realistic, and we’ll be able to “emotionally connect” with them better. Maybe they should emotionally connect with my fist. Corridor co-founder Niko Pueringer says that they’re combining the worlds of “visual effects and video games to show you what the future might look like”. What they’re actually doing is essentially putting AI-generated filte🀅rs over character models to make them look “more photo-realistic”, while the staff of Corridor sit on a couch and go “Oh, yeah!” and “That looks great!”
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It does not look great. None of it looks great, actually. In fact, I’d say that they look worse – not because they look “more human”, but because they look like poorly animated airbrushed magazine covers. These AI filters take out all the detail from the faces they’re laid over. In Lara Croft’s face, they remove the dirt crusted on her cheeks from being in theꦫ forest, and give her a full face of makeup complete with contour and baked under eyes. Aloy’s face has the redness removed and mascara added, making her look more off-duty model than a jungle adventurer. Nathan Drake gets turned into a chad meme. As the team acknowledged in the video, all of the models have less animated facial expressions, making them look more uncanny valley and taking the strength out of their performances.
More than that, these filters are explicitly removing artistic intent. To imply that character artists don’t make their characters look the way they do intentionally and that they can be made more emotionally relatable by slapping on some virtual makeup and adjusting for better bone structure is absurd. Good design is memorable and intentional, not just pretty. Lara 🉐Croft’s character design is already iconic, you don’t need to yassify her furt🅘her to make a more compelling protagonist.
The title of this article is perhaps too generous, in retrospect – I think Corridor Digital should keep its hands off art, in all its mediums. Thinking back to the Rock Paper Scissors video debacle, I’m convinced that the problem with Corridor Crew is that they don’t understand what the ‘democratisation of art’ actually means. Everybody can already learn to make art. Humanity has been making art since the dawn of man. In the modern day, nobody is stopping you from learning to draw a horse. What they’re actually democratising is the free use of other people’s stolen work so y🐲ou can put a facsimile of an i꧂dea you have in your head out into the world, through no effort of your own.
What they’re really perpetuating is the idea that a computer can make art as well as a person if it ‘has the skill’, which a) a program can’t have skill and b) that program can’t make design choices. That program doesn’t have artistic intent, and that’s what’s most insulting about the whole thing. Corridor Crew believes that artistic intent isn’🤪t as important as making characters look more realistic, and that’s just not true. I don’t want characters who look real, I want well-designed, iconic characters. They misunderstand games, and worse, th♈ey misunderstand the point of art.
