Why Do They Keep Promoting This Slop That No One Wants?

Last week, Variety ran a totally-newsworthy-and-not-shameless-advertising-for-AI-slop article about the upcoming film Merry the Christmas Witch, with the article going out of its way to note the most unique aspect of its production:

[Producer Tom] Walsh tells Variety he loved the idea of a Christmas witch and was eager to adapt the title. But when he sat down to figure out the budget, the total cost seemed unwieldy: $80 million, a cost studios would balk at for “an unknown property,” Walsh said. Instead, using AI, he managed to produce the final two-hour film for $1.5 million, perhaps serving as a test case for the types of projects AI can help make.

Let’s see what that $1.5 million resulted in:

Wow. That looks like… shit. Rancid shit. It looks like just one of the deluge of torturous AI-generated shorts that made TikTok unbearable. Why do the spatial relationships in both of the action scenes keep shifting arbitrarily? Why do the elves look like creepy demon-possessed babies with comically fake plastic ears? Why even bother showing that one creepy baby elf reach into his pocket for a bottle of “Santa’s Repellent Spray” if the bottle is just going to appear in his hand out of nowhere? And this is the best AI slop peddlers can do with the technology? This is what has been putting thousands of creative professionals out of a job?! When is this shoddy-looking movie coming out, anyway? Oh, we don’t know? Because it doesn’t even have a distributor?

The film currently has no distributor, though a spokesperson said “optimistic” conversations were underway with “a few different companies.”

Sure, Jan. So, to recap, the writer/director/producer of Dwegons and Leprechauns wanted to make an adaptation of a children’s book that is… I guess projected to be popular when it gets published, got spooked when he estimated that it would cost roughly the budget of Mortal Kombat II and, rather than do the hard work of trying to raise the money to produce a real movie that probably would find a wide audience of young fans, decided to instead blow $1.5 million on a terrible-looking movie that no one wants to watch. If a distributor decides to put in a bid on this, they are the film industry equivalent of a dope who forwards his bank account information to a Nigerian Prince who promises to share his vast wealth if only he receives this one little bit of help from a kind stranger.

But the producers of this garbage are not, to be clear, the target of my ire. There always have been, and likely always will be, scammers trying to pull one over on rubes. There will always be that three-card monty dealer on the street corner convincing dumb people that they’ll be one of the clever ones who pulls one over on the dealer. But a healthy society, with a functional press acting as responsible stewards of the public’s attention, would not promote or legitimize those kinds of grifters. And yet, Variety has been publishing AI slop puff pieces so incessantly they make CNN look like reasonable skeptics.

Here is an article glazing reality TV show mogul (because those guys have proven to be totally trustworthy, right?) Ryan Serhant for AI botting his social media presence:

Serhant has partnered with HeyGen, a company that lets users create personalized AI avatars, to build a new social media presence featuring an AI persona modeled after his likeness. The avatar will appear across Instagram, TikTok and X under the handle @HeySerhant, an extension of his main presence that will share lessons learned from decades in real estate.

Because social media users love all that fake AI account engagement and definitely clamor for more of it. Here is an announcement that the co-founder of Patreon is joining OpenAI’s oxymoronically-named “creator initiative:”

The series, the specifics of which the company has not disclosed, hopes to showcase how AI’s development can help families, in line with Yam’s intention upon hiring to help creators “shape culture” and “unite diverse communities together.”

I’m surprised the dude didn’t describe this new venture as a land of contrasts. Really go all-in on the vague buzzwords, ya know? Here is a Variety reporter touring the set of a movie with AI-generated green screened backdrops and interviewing the cast and crew:

Zada also understands the wariness surrounding AI, but he dismisses critics of the tech as people whose opinions over it — from its impact on the environment to the proliferation of data centers across the country — amount to “hearsay.”

That’s not what “hearsay” means. Jesus Christ.

Whether it’s the out-of-touch co-founder of Quibi lecturing us to just get on board with AI, pretending that AI slop shorts have a shot in hell of being nominated for Academy Awards, shilling for their own Entertainment & Technology Summit bringing together a bunch of executives to speculate on all the hypothetical ways generative AI won’t suck for the rest of us in the possible maybe distant future, or excitedly celebrating an AI trailer winning a $2.5 million prize established that year specifically to funnel money into AI slop projects, Variety has been one of the most conspicuous mainstream entertainment outlets working around the clock to manufacture consent on this garbage.

I want to know why. It is not because of reader demand; to the degree readers respond to these pro-AI articles at all, it’s to voice their disinterest or outright hostility towards it. It’s rarely because they are newsworthy stories. Sure, the news that Antonio Banderas is hopping on the bandwagon is deeply unfortunate, but arguably worth reporting on. But who cares about some corporate hack who produced a bad movie for just over a million dollars and is struggling to find a distributor for it?

It is time for Variety to be forthright with us. They are one of the largest and most prestigious entertainment industry publications in the world, and it is irresponsible to pretend this credulous coverage of something with such low consumer demand and nonexistent artistic integrity is worth devoting so much of their time and attention covering as legit.

How embarrassed do you feel on behalf of Tom Walsh and Jay Penske? Let us know in the comments. Also, if you have young children who are into witches or magic, show them Nightbooks. It’s a cute movie! And it was performed by human actors with sets and costumes and effects designed by talented human beings on a quarter of the budget these TW3 hacks estimated their low-effort garbage would cost if they tried to adapt it into a real film.