Remember back in April, when that AI-generated video of Wes Anderson's STAR WARS went insanely viral? And then the exact same company did the exact same thing with The Lord of the Rings and a ton of other parody properties that were all so similar that it basically became its own trope?
Filmmaker Patrick H. Willems — who made an infamous Wes Anderson's X-Men parody video a decade ago — has just released a new long-form video where he gets to the bottom of the AI Parody Trailer trend. He digs into the roots of Curious Refuge, the content creation company behind those super-viral parody videos that has tried to pivot into selling "How to" classes for $500 a pop, and follows their formula to re-create his own AI-generated Wes Anderson's X-Men parody video. Spoiler alert: it's exactly the same as the other ones, in the same bland way.
Along the way, Willems does a great job of spelling out everything wrong with the soullessness of the AI-generated content trend. At best, he explains, some of these mashups are just mediocre fan art that only took 10 minutes of an actual human's time. At worst, there's something much more insidious going on.
