Weird, flawed, captivating: the creators making interesting AI content
Plus: this week's AI news, by a docent who got dumped via AI-written text
By Brandon Copple
If you’re like me you’ve been harboring a suspicion that, amid all the slop and backlash, somebody out there is quietly using AI to create something really interesting.
Quick aside: I had high hopes when Anthropic gave an old version of Claude its own Substack newsletter. Seemed like it could get super weird and fun, just go wildly off the rails. Instead, it spews speculative metaphysical blather, as if it were trained solely on conversations between stoner undergrads.
Anyway, if there’s interesting stuff out there, it’s sure hard to find. Mainstream brands and creators aren’t publishing any AI-generated content; some object to AI, some fear the whipping they’d get in the comments, some have probably calculated that, like going for the big prizes at Dave & Busters, it just isn’t worth the time, effort, and tokens.
So even if you’re creatively curious about what one might be able to do with AI, where do you look for ideas? Where are the creatives using AI earnestly, not cynically, to create something new and imaginative, something that might help you envision the possibilities?
Right here. EX Research has tracked down a few dozen creators making interesting AI video and organized them by genre. They’ve also examined what, beyond the intent of the creator, separates good AI video from slop.
The EX folks specialize in the inkiest, grungiest, freakiest corners of the internet; they’re like the private detective you hire when you fear your kid is holed up in some part of town you’re scared to set foot in. One of the founders, Clayton Purdom, tells me all the creators in the report come from a spreadsheet of weird/interesting content the EX team has been assembling over the years.
Among the 4,400 rows (!) on that spreadsheet: a few dozen creators using generative AI to make short clips with quick edits, populated by strange characters — including many fantasy and gaming archetypes — that elicit a range of very human responses, from laughter to nostalgia to whatever you call it when you don’t know what you’re looking at and are slightly (if not wholly) disturbed but also weirdly intrigued.
The creators in this report are using AI earnestly, to make videos that evoke nostalgia, humor, and other human emotions. So even if the content isn’t earnest — some is; some is straight-up subversive — all of these videos bear the mark of someone’s vision, intention, and process.
You should definitely read the report yourself. Meantime, here’s my takeaways for working creatives.
Mine the gap
If you’re trying to generate AI video for something at work, the blurry edges, impossible physics, and 10-second limits are problematic. Most of us bail on it.
These creators build on it. Their videos are mostly super short, with strange characters in fantastical settings; many of them have the look of decades old media in the beginning stages of decomposition. The aesthetics of early ‘00s video games, ‘80s dark fantasy movies, and late 20th-century hellscapes are well represented.
These videos are “designed to conjure up a vanished era or cinematic mood in seconds, then leave viewers wanting more,” EX writes. “Providing more context would dispel the illusion. (Which is convenient: video AI seems far from solving many different problems with longform coherence, as struggling editors can attest.)”
Makes me want to examine the gap between what I’m asking of AI and what it gives me. Then see where that might lead: what ideas does it spark? Is it pointing in some new creative direction? It’s not a question for when you’re on deadline; but if you’ve got some time to play around, it might be.
Where’s the outrage?
None of these accounts attempt to hide what they’re doing with AI. EX notes several paradoxical comments on the videos amounting to “I hate all AI video except this,” but none of them seem to be catching the kind of ferocious flack we’ve come to expect.
And yet, these creators are using the same models — trained on the same hard work of the same uncompensated human creatives, powered by the same water-guzzling data centers — as the brands and mainstream creators who’ve been roasted for using AI.
I think there are a couple things going on here. First, it’s a reminder that whole swaths of the population just aren’t that upset about AI. Maybe they think it’s cool, or they’re indifferent to it, or they just have bigger problems, who knows.
Second, these are all individual creators and small teams making stuff that wouldn’t exist without AI. That is, they’re using it to create something they otherwise couldn’t — not to replace anybody. When there are no jobs on the line, the outrage seems to fizzle.
For us working creatives the takeaway remains: don’t post AI-generated content on your brand accounts, or be super judicious if you do — a snippet of B-roll here, an SEO image there. You can tell your boss I said so.
Alright but if creating something like this is out of the question, why are we even talking about these AI videos? Just to see what the weird kids are up to?
Well…
Hook on a feeling
Nothing landed harder with me in reading EX’s report than this analysis of the subgenre they label “dark fantasy”:
At the same time, some dark fantasy accounts remain weirdly compelling as hallucinations of a genre that never really existed. There were never really movies that looked like this or video games that looked like this. They result from some kind of elemental confusion within the model, where the close association between fantasy and horror, as well as games and movies, resulted in an uncanny mixture. [emphasis mine]
That’s both fascinating and exactly how I felt when watching those videos. They evoke a run of very weird, mostly bad1 ‘80s movies, but if you look back at clips or images of those movies, you’ll see the EX team has it right: what these creators are doing looks totally different.
Which makes the ingenuity here all the more remarkable. The creators of these videos have generated something new that arouses nostalgia for something old. Super intriguing in itself, but the more useful point is, they’re making content designed to elicit a particular feeling, whether it accurately captures the reference material or not.
What if you stopped thinking about getting AI to create exactly what you’re picturing — whether that’s an essay or a video clip or an image — or recreate an aesthetic you’ve already established? Instead, try just driving toward whatever feeling you’d like to conjure. Keep prompting until you feel something, and maybe you’ll come up with something nobody’s ever seen before.
Even if you end up scrapping the video you made — so you don’t get clobbered in the comments — you might open up a whole new creative avenue for your brand, your client, or yourself.
FWIW
My three favorite accounts from the EX report:
Chicago Sanitation, whose trenchant social commentary I have been evangelizing for months
Evillica, doing wondrous anxiety-horror
Exitdreamnow, because my dreams, too, are set in the ‘80s
And here’s one that’s not in the report, from our video producer Adrien Colon: Devwalks — ethereal videos of people floating in their sleep
What fresh hell
AI news for creatives, as summarized by the Claude chatbot, given this prompt:
You are a museum docent who just got dumped in a text you think was written by AI.
The AI ad platform Creatify launched an agent “trained specifically on advertising performance data, designed to produce ads that convert,” and an Ipsos study found that audiences found AI-generated ads credible but less emotionally engaging than human-produced ads, which is just how I found Tyler’s breakup text —”I’ve cherished our journey but need to honor my own growth” is not something a man who eats standing over the sink has ever thought, let alone typed. The British literary magazine Granta awarded prizes to several short stories that readers flagged as seemingly AI-written, and commenters on X excoriated an AI-generated version of a painting by Monet, for example calling it emotionally incoherent and lacking depth — but it was actually painted by Monet. The CEO of Barnes & Noble said he’d stock AI-written books as long as they’re labeled honestly, a standard Tyler might consider, and the author of a book about how AI would affect truth titled “The Future of Truth” admitted the book contained multiple quotes misattributed or made up by AI. Google introduced Gemini Omni Flash, which generates video clips using other videos as prompts, and OpenAI announced new content-provenance tools, including invisible watermarking, to help identify AI content — which, fine, but how about a tool to identify an emotionally stunted partner. Gartner projected global businesses would spend $2.6 trillion on AI in 2026, up 47% from last year, and I’d spend twice that to know if Tyler really wrote “I’ll always treasure what we had,” but I work in a museum, so instead I’ll just go stare at something beautiful and feel nothing.
I know. I was there. In the living room, in those glorious hours before my parents came home from work, I watched these movies. They were strangely cool, and wildly dumb.
Are most of the videos in the list from the US? Because people in South Korea, Vietnam and China are making some very cool movies with AI. Maybe the curator of the list needs to look beyond the West?