Washed Out made a music video with AI. The reaction was quick

When Washed Out frontman Ernest Greene agreed to collaborate with director Paul Trillo on the world's first music video to be created entirely using OpenAI's video creation tool, Sora, he didn't know exactly what he was getting into. “For me, this is just a brand new tool to explore,” Greene says Rolling rock. In his mind, the video – a dizzying, surreal, uncanny valley tour of a couple's lives – was simply the modern, boundary-pushing equivalent of, say, the early computer animation in Dire Straits. “Money for Nothing” video.

The video for 'The Hardest Part', the first single from Washed Out's powerful new album, Notes from a quiet life, dropped last week. The reaction was immediate and mostly negative. “This Washed Out AI video is the best case of blatant ineptitude I've ever seen,” wrote Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers. “He says nothing, he does nothing, he is nothing. Nasty slog too.” One of the top YouTube comments for the song is: “The future is digital diarrhea.”

Greene soon learned that he had stepped into the middle of a growing backlash against AI in every medium, which was even evident in the response on social media. Rolling rockcoverage of Suno and Udio music production tools. “There's definitely a wide variety of people who just don't like anything related to artificial intelligence,” he says.

Trillo—a longtime filmmaker who had already been granted early access to Sora, which is not yet available to the public, for other projects—was less surprised by the backlash. He understands concerns that Sora, which creates video clips from text prompts, may have been trained to create a copyrighted human film. “Could there be more transparency in how these models are created? Absolutely,” he says. “Would there be someone else to make Sora's first music video if we didn't? That would have happened. I see every technology as an opportunity to do something that is unique to technology and to open up new kinds of visual ways.”

A common criticism of the video, and AI art in general, is that its reliance on training data makes it a glorified form of plagiarism, but both Greene and Trillo reject that argument. “I haven't seen a single comparison of the look of the video to any other work, whether it's film or animation or whatever,” says Greene. “I think Paul has managed to do something here that is extremely unique. And yes, I think that's an amazing ability.”

Greene didn't have artificial intelligence in mind when he sought out Trillo, whose animation work he particularly admired. Trillo didn't have time in his schedule to shoot videos, but when OpenAI happened to ask if there was a possibility of using Sora for a music video, he saw an opportunity. Trillo created the video with prompts that were at least 1,000 words each and tried endless variations before settling on the final shots. “Whatever time you save creating the shots,” he says, “you end up spending that time elsewhere. You can explore a multiverse of what this video could look like, unlike any other kind of creation. I really wanted to lean into that aspect of the exploration process. About 700 clips were created during the process of this video.”

Trillio acknowledges that it would be “problematic” if well-funded studios used AI to reduce human labor costs, but says that wasn't the case here. it doesn't employ tons of people anyway,” he says, noting that he always lost money to build them. “I don't give people their daily rates anyway. It's always been these things that you do out of passion… But the other reality is that these things don't go away.”

No artificial intelligence was used in the creation of Washed Out's new album — far from it. Notes from a quiet life it's Greene's first self-produced album, so it's even more hands-on than anything else in his catalog. Washed Out's next two videos will be human-made and performance-based, but the frontman reserves the right to continue experimenting with AI for videos or other projects in the future. “I insist,” he says. “We will still explore any new tool. I'll still be open-minded about it.”

What if he learns that the AI ​​music generators are being trained on the music of Washed Out? “Yeah, I'm fine with that,” Greene says.