No, My Music Video Wasn’t AI-Generated. But Let’s Talk About AI McCarthyism.

I’ve seen goofy comments online accusing my “Zero Hero” music video of being AI-generated. And not only just AI-generated but also 100% generated with machine learning.

Now, I normally wouldn’t bother to dignify such a thing. I figure most of my genuine existing audience has enough common sense to both know the difference and how much care I put into my creative work. They know a human being put an imaginative brain to use on every musical note, word choice, line of code, and pixel they see and hear. I’m not someone who runs prompts in apps, uploads the results, and dusts off my hands.

However, I’d like to talk about my own case because the internet has a way of turning theories into potentially damaging facts without asking the accused. This also isn’t the first time I’ve been accused of using AI, sometimes for blatantly absurd reasons. And there are thousands of others who have ridiculous claims lobbed at them daily. So, I figure it’s time for me to share some thoughts I’ve had for a few years now. And, no, AI didn’t create this essay either.

Before I dive into the absurdities of modern society, how was the video made?

Creative with animation, film, graphic design, coding, music, sound design, acting, writing, and concepting experience + MacBook Pro + 2D Animation + Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Character Animator, After Effects) + a few licensed 3D assets ($30 budget) + Keyframing + Motion Capture + Character Rigging + Compositing + Masking + Multiple Editing Workstations + screener feedback from about 8 people (including professional animators, with 4 subsequent revised and expanded cuts) + several months of all nighters and shitloads of coffee

In every case where I’ve been directly accused of using AI (always in visual or writing work) there’s been a pattern. It’s been someone who didn’t take the time to learn about my background or someone who was trying to diminish and dismiss what I do. They couldn’t find a more convenient way to explain away how I personally can do or know something that they can’t wrap their head around. Instead of asking questions, proposing a collaboration, or hiring me to work for them, it quickly escalates to kookiness.

This has even happened after leaving thoughtful or informative comments on YouTube videos. How dare I use punctuation or make a factual points that… make sense? A lot of people are just as insecure as they are downright strange.

While I don’t care what random people on the internet think about me, my work, or the assortment of factoids I have stored in my cranium, I do take issue with the idea of planting these kinds of Red Scare seeds.

In the case of “Zero Hero”, my work wasn’t the only one named on this list, it was posted on a platform known for irresponsible and snarky people, and I don’t believe that the people responsible for creating or spreading it have enough genuine influence to derail anything anyone on that list has going on.

It concerns me all the same how easily the person got others on board to raise torches over this list of people. Commenting, shaming, and sharing. The list was nothing more than a list of works, names, and a”film festival review”. That review comprised a single line each in which he assessed the likelihood of all of these creatives’ work being AI, followed by mostly trashing the “human made” ones.

That tells you all need to know about this specific incident but it’s a symptom of a larger problem that I’ve observed over the past few years.

No evidence was given. No specific suspicion cited. Just an accusation and instant conversion of believers ready to destroy lives if they could.

Senator Joe McCarthy would be proud.

Don’t get me wrong. Like many tech-savvy people, I’ve experimented with AI. I can’t speak to the capabilities of premium subscription services or anything corporations have access to.

I can tell you that, at the moment, independents like myself cannot create anything worthwhile with AI without significant human intervention. The critical thinking of a human mind is still needed to catch and correct frequent bot hallucinations, corral short bursts of correct output into something more coherent, and if it involves anything other than code or generic marketing language, that human being’s own talent must be used to shape it into something useful.

The type of people who swear up and down that there’s no difference span two types of people:

The first is the type most AI services are being marketed to and who are largely responsible for churning out all the generic slop you see in your feeds. Some mean well but they’re not usually people who are motivated to sit down and learn how to draw, animate, play an instrument, shoot a well-lit video or photograph, record a voice over, etc. It takes too long when you can have gratification now. They don’t know what the process of making the real thing is truly like, the obstacles you face, the problem-solving you need to get to the finish line. They have the memory of other people’s work to reference and approximate. So, yeah, it does feel authentic to them to see a representation of art magically appear on their screens that they can hit “publish” on and pick up a bunch of engagement. Others enjoy the god-like power of making something appear from nothing, the easy way without needing to learn or or hone a skill. They need to tell themselves that what they’ve prompted is just as good as or better than what an artist made.

The second is the type of person who needs to justify their willingness to cut out humans from processes in order to save a few bucks. This bot produces the same quality of writing / coding / acting / musicianship / editing / customer service /analysis / problem-solving as people but it’s cheaper.

Nonsense. These folks know there’s usually a trade-off but it’s one they’re willing to tolerate.

The discussion around the ethics of how AI has come to possess all of the information it draws from is a different discussion. I think it’s a real issue if companies are presently scraping data without consent. But I’m also of the opinion that we didn’t get here out of nowhere.

The loudest complaints I usually hear are from people who shared all of their work for free on free sites for years, knowing full well that their own data was the actual price toward the pursuit of popularity. This version of the world was always at our door, opening it inch by inch. It didn’t happen without that participation, expressing that this was the world we wanted. Now it’s a problem because the apps are over-saturated with trash, the world fell into a deeper mess when everyone was distracted, and their engagement is lower and now offers less personal fulfillment.

For years, millions of people were online happily sharing every detail of their work in between posts about their every personal thought and opinion. Most didn’t read the terms of service or take the time to ask questions about what vague descriptions meant before quickly clicking “I agree” so they could get right back to posting about themselves.

Folks may not want to hear it now but what exactly was everyone expecting when posts received more character and media attachment allotments, more room to detail hobbies and relationships? When numbers, buttons, and badges were put on everything to keep everyone coming back to opine, gripe, yell, or chase approximations of strangers’ affection? When everybody was on board with bots telling users who and what was important based on how often you clicked on those things and how long you stayed?

It’s also a different discussion to talk about the human intervention piece, artists who do use AI assistance. People can debate about that forever. While I do think there’s a line to be drawn, we also have to be realistic here as well.

I’ve observed that many arguments about it are essentially about deciding which algorithmic shortcuts are “evil” and which ones are merely convenient. Policing other people’s workflows while enjoying how machine assistance reduces effort in their own.

They’re fine with unlocking phones with facial recognition, using predictive text to finish their sentences and correct grammar, letting algorithms curate feeds and music streams, email spam filters, fraud detection, and GPS apps guide their navigation of the physical world.

For decades, artists in visual and audio mediums have been using automated features like snap-to-grid alignment, auto color and pitch correction, quantization, and so on to create absent pixels, notes, or frames mathematically. In homes, we have smart devices, robot vacuums, Keurig machines, and automotive features like collision avoidance, keyless entry, ABS and much more.

Those all now have features that powered with machine learning. Given a real choice, most people would want neither an automation-free life, nor would they want a world of pure manual labor.

I’ve personally been as flattered about AI accusations against my work as I am annoyed.

Nowadays, people assume any stylized, error-free, or coherent visual or writing must be machine-made. It’s good company to be in, honestly. I’m proud of the work I did on the video, in particular, and am grateful for the feedback and recognition it received.

Pointing fingers and making reckless accusations has become the default response to questions of ethics or matters of insecurity instead of reaching out to people and asking for help to understand what is unclear to them. I can’t speak for everyone else who’s ever been subject to an AI witch hunt, but I’m going to address the situation where my name and work came up.

It’s bizarre to be told someone’s “disappointed in you” when their failure to understand your background is what’s disappointing. Even more bizarre for a perfect stranger to level the accusation at random. Some people are just trolls or otherwise looking for attention.

Things like this used to be easy to ignore but we now live in a culture where people with X number of followers is often treated as a reliable source for not much more than that reason.

Today, it’s easier for some people to credit a machine than to recognize and give that credit to a human being, especially an independent artist. They find it impossible to accept that another flesh and blood person (who isn’t mega-famous or backed by powerhouse studios or advertisers) might genuinely possess the imagination, and the patience to meticulously craft a layered piece of work.

To me, there’s very little difference between that and a corporation laying off dozens to thousands of people to replace them with algorithms. There’s a straight line between the random internet skeptic dismissing independent art in this manner and the executive. In both cases, there’s a cynical person in a similar headspace. Someone looks at human effort and says, “I no longer believe in the capacity of human beings. I believe a machine is the only thing capable of this.”

There is one significant difference, though.

When corporations do it, most people agree that it’s motivated by greed. When the average person does it online, it’s usually a lack of imagination or information. Juvenile reasons, in some cases. We’ve been collectively conditioned to view genuine human creativity as something scarce rather than something any individual can cultivate and nurture on their own. For many creative acts, you need some form of tools, techniques, or process to apply. More important than any of that, you need to invest time, thought, and effort.

That’s the thing that trips up many people when so many millionaires and pseudo celebrities have been created through relatively low-effort acts. A lot of people figure, “Well, if they can do it, why can’t that be me? I want overnight fame. I want overnight cash. I deserve it. I have no interest in spending thousands of hours learning more skills and languishing in anonymity and poverty like that plebe, Jammes Luckett.”

But probably only 1% of people online can catch those lightning-in-a-bottle opportunities at any given time. Many others waste two-thirds of their lives chasing them. You commonly see both resentment of the influencers who “made it” and toward those of us who don’t chase those things at the expense of what makes us happy to wake up each day. We continued doing what we wanted the best we knew how.

I’ve had several encounters in recent years where a few people have admitted as much. Passive-aggressively, of course. It has come out in the wash that they feel left behind. They felt entitled to a certain reality and thought they were an exception who would coast to material glory. Since it isn’t happening as fast as they thought it should, or shows signs that it’s unlikely to ever happen, they realize they haven’t spent time further developing the skills that distinguished them as individuals and might build them their own audience.

When some people realize they skipped the hard work of building actual skills because they were waiting for a shortcut that never came, they get bitter. And instead of looking inward, they project that anger outward, turning into internet puritans who find and hunt down perceived “enemies” who “took something” from them.

Some are too angry to realize that it’s not actually too late and that they’d just have to accept slower growth and smaller reach as a matter of fact. It’s difficult for many who have latched on so strongly to a false or misguided narrative to back down. So, they double-down on it rather than admit they were misinformed or put their chips on the wrong number, and then course-correct.

It’s not dissimilar to the behavior we’ve seen in certain political movements where many of the same markers appear to be present. We’ve become a culture that punishes other people for having what we choose not to make an effort to pursue ourselves. All of this grievance is a cultural tragedy. Creative or social despair masquerading as moral righteousness.

For someone like me, the fact that so many people are focused on hindering rather than helping is precisely the reason I have as many skills as I do and one of several reasons why I made a video like “Zero Hero”. I was giving myself an opportunity to showcase skills I don’t get many opportunities to show otherwises and I wanted to find new ways so reach more of the types of people who do value thoughtful work such as this. I managed to succeed on a small scale, putting my work in more physical spaces people intentionally choose to be in and getting some recognition of that work in the process. I’m sure that there were festivals who probably rejected it by making the same wrongful assumptions about what a one-member crew can/should make or because it doesn’t look exactly the same as every other film they were showing (same festivals are indeed fairly homogenous). However, there were a number of legitimate festivals who thought it was worthwhile and obviously knew a human made it.

There’s a lot of reasons that people do what they do, and say what they say, and you can’t control any of it. We’ve empowered even relatively unknown people with a currency that can be wielded to harm others for any reason they so choose, be it a serious offense or simple hurt feelings or resentments. People adopting rivals or trolling to bury a piece of work that is impressive to others, to settle personal grudges, or to “enforce” some gatekeeping around a specific aesthetic.

There’s not always a valid reason for it. You can’t always control the impact of false statements when reckless claims or insinuations are made. We’ve seen such actions result in hireability questions, resignations, harassment, wrongful terminations, expulsions, imprisonment, even death (not all with AI, false accusations in general). Once such a thing is out there, it takes on a life of its own. And we’ve also seen numerous cases where people spread lies more than corrected facts, condemnation faster than exoneration.

AI witch hunts are becoming a more frequent occurrence for many people. Frankly, I’m more concerned about how this modern McCarthyism will impact work for imaginative minds than AI itself. So many people insist they’re experts in human vs. machine creation simply because they’ve learned how to type a prompt into a generator or they’ve seen someone else crank out thoughtless trash on the billions of accounts they’d much sooner click on than one belonging to a creative like myself. They mistake typing a sentence for understanding an entire animation pipeline, yet they aren’t even experts in basic online research or self-reflection.

Many people are ignorant about what AI can and cannot do vs. what humans can do. And they remain ignorant about their role in the spread of AI’s use less as a tool of promise but one of greed. They themselves have quickly shifted from curious observers to reckless judges and enablers. The online judge has become an accomplice to the mindsets they’re criticizing. They want to police independent artists, and some majors too, while fueling the system that devalues human work.

It doesn’t take a historian to see the parallels between these actions and the Red Scare of the 1950s or the Salem Witch trials. The person making the accusation doesn’t even need to provide proof or cite specific moments they suspect. All one needs to do is merely mention the word “AI”. That, in and of itself, is enough to steer people away from the quality of the work and onto questions about the creator’s moral and ethical integrity.

The more I think about the consequences others have faced with this AI McCarthyism in work and academic environments, I find it quite disturbing. A commonly cited thing are flawed “AI detector” tools. They sometimes return results stating something was 99% AI-created even when there’s proof it came from a person. But they’re still often used as a smoking gun to prove a person is worse than a plagiarist.

There are certainly many ethical concerns around artificial intelligence. I believe that all of those issues are related to the fact that so many people leave unethical people to control it. Fear and avoidance of the topic only serves to create less space for those who might use the technology for all the good non-commercial things it could be used for (matters of accessibility, for starters).

However, at the same time… many people griping about AI curiously see no conflict with using AI-driven platforms to do so or using a billion other products and services that employ the technology. Their stance appears to be, “I only don’t want AI in anything that I believe poses a direct threat to what I want for myself.” They’re okay with making those same companies a ton of money if they can get a few serotonin-boosting clicks.

So many of these people are among those actively feeding the algorithms and attention economies that suppress independent artists in the first place. They’re choosing to flood their own brains with actual machine trash. The result is a distorted perspective on what a real person can create when they’re not online 24/7 and actually sit down and put the work in.

Problem with the theory about machine generation in my case, though. It doesn’t take long to research my background and see a long history of using multiple disciplines and showcasing skills the mainstream never utilizes. Furthermore, anyone has the capacity to use decades-old techniques like keyframing, compositing, character rigging, motion capture, and masking to pull off visual trickery. Similar techniques some of you saw in other work I did 20 years ago. Nothing groundbreaking was done here.

Since no major video or graphics production tool is entirely AI-free today, it’s possible the humans behind the few premium assets I licensed (a fraction of what’s seen) may have used AI as their starting point. However, human hands clearly shaped those. I then reworked and integrated those assets using old-school techniques to avoid spending five years building every background and effect in every frame from scratch.

I’m not wealthy and was never going to spend years sweating over a project I’m not earning money from and which will be lucky to get a few thousand views in its lifetime. I was making something purely to uplift and entertain the few people I could rely upon to watch it, and I poured every bit of myself into making sure it was visually interesting to them. I succeeded in that.

However, licensing a few assets for enhancement is still a far cry from claiming AI generated four minutes’ worth of specific scenes, character and camera movements, VFX, timing, and transitions. Or that I even had the resources to do so. In fact, to speed things up on a $30 budget, I used techniques such as basic webcam motion capture. As I performed to the track in front of my computer, the characters’ arms, eyes, heads, and mouths reflected my own physical movements. It was an experimental and imperfect but a completely human process with cool results.

I wondered what the solution is to this upside down world but there apparently are no good ones yet besides simply setting the world on fire.

Showing proof isn’t worth it unless you’re being paid or graded. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to play that game with people. I’m not going to give anyone raw files, time-lapse footage or sketches of my work. All that happens is that the goalposts are then moved. You must have faked that, somehow. Or maybe you didn’t generate this part but you generated that part. It can go on and on.

It seems some people would rather assume and believe a tedious, expensive process was used than take the time to understand and accept that a resourceful, imaginative creative can do a lot with very little. And sometimes, they know that full well but simply want to stir the pot.

Much like AI itself often is, they’re all hallucinating.