Super Cool: Prime Video's Fallout Season 1 Recap Has Inaccurate AI Slop
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You know how these days, you wake up most mornings and feel like you've been punched in the face when you check the news? Well, I'm here to make it worse and tell you that, while promoting season 2 of their hit video game adaptation "Fallout," Prime Video made a recap video filled with inaccurate AI slop.
GamesRadar+ was among the first outlets to cover this issue, but you can also go watch the video for yourself. As of this writing, it's still available if you go to the streamer's official page, pick season 2, and watch the bonus content, and you'll immediately clock the problems here. Not only does the video claim that the flashbacks we saw in season 1 centered on Walton Goggins' character during his time as an actor named Cooper Howard before a nuclear blast turned him into "The Ghoul" took place in the 1950s in America (not true), but it also gets the ending of the season all wrong, which is pretty egregious. This nonsense recap claims that series protagonist Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) leaves her father Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) behind because the Ghoul essentially forces her to do so; in the actual show, Lucy finds out that her father was responsible for instigating a nuclear blast against her own mother, Rose, and turned her into a feral ghoul.
This obviously isn't Amazon's first brush with crappy AI; not only are most of their subtitles now AI-generated (and gibberish as a result), but Polygon recently reported that the massive conglomerate had to pull AI dubs from popular anime shows. I'm not going to pretend that a company as huge as Amazon using AI is surprising, but it is infuriating, because there's literally no place for AI in the arts.
AI in the arts is a scourge, and even using it for a video recap is clearly a terrible idea
Don't mind me while I climb atop my soapbox, which doubles as the hill I'll die on, to say this: AI sucks, it cannot and should not make art, and it should never be a part of any sort of creative process. It shouldn't even be part of the discussion of creative processes or art in general, which is why I'm not writing this article with any sort of AI "help" (I don't know how to even use ChatGPT, and if anyone tries to tell me how, I will start screaming and never stop). The recent advent of AI has allowed this insidious, soulless technology to not-so-subtly creep into every single aspect of our lives. Google now shows you AI "answers" to your search queries, which are often wrong. Spotify is rolling out an AI tool that will make playlists for you in case you've never listened to music before and don't know where to start. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told late-night host Jimmy Fallon that he can't "imagine" caring for a newborn without ChatGPT, which is ... insane.
Actors, directors, writers, creators, and crew members are what make entertainment what it is — not AI. Full stop. It's genuinely depressing to see Amazon use artificial intelligence for something as straightforward as a recap video, and it speaks to the larger cultural issue at hand, which is that AI is a disgrace to art. Hayao Miyazaki said (per IndieWire) that AI animation is "creepy" and continued, "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." He's right. Keep AI out of art, now and forever ... even recap videos.