By The Gatepost Editorial Board
This Thanksgiving, The Gatepost celebrated by publishing an editorial by our editorial staff about the aspects of campus for which we are thankful.
The Walt Disney Company celebrated by posting an AI-generated illustration to their Instagram account.
This illustration was a disgrace - a violation of everything the company used to stand for. It was created in bad faith and showed a lack of regard for artists.
Not only does the post embarrass Disney, but it also represents the ironic state of the company - the shift from the laboriously hand-drawn animation that defined the company’s early days to its current unapologetic use of low-quality AI artwork.
And Thanksgiving’s Instagram post is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. One has to wonder - did their most recent project, “Wish,” use AI technology?
Why would this multi-billion dollar company choose such an unpolished method of creation over artists who have the capacity to make something beautiful and authentic - which it has done for over a century?
The company is attempting to cheapen its service and cut out exactly what made them so successful and magical in the first place - humans.
All to increase the financial bottom line.
Artificial intelligence creates material only by first drawing from its data sets. These data sets are typically huge collections of information scraped off the internet without any of the original creators’ permissions, most damagingly with AI image generators.
If Disney, a top-50 United States company, can do this, the future of creative media looks bleak.
But if the response to Disney’s Thanksgiving post is any measure of the general public’s attitude toward a top company turning to AI, it’s safe to say it isn’t a popular choice.
And the backlash to these corner-cutting practices shows that consumers still care about a final product - and how it was created.
Even though Bob Iger, who recently returned as Disney’s CEO after less than a year of retirement, makes considerably less than he did in 2020 according to Business Insider, he still takes home an annual paycheck in the range of $27 million.
With so much money going to the company’s CEO every year - what exactly is the excuse for electing to use AI-generated content over human employees?
If it’s due Disney having a poor fiscal quarter - why doesn’t that loss come out of Iger’s paycheck?
If it was a problem with employee efficiency, why hasn’t Disney - a global model for entertainment production companies - put more effort into improving that efficiency?
Disney, as a company, deliberately chose to cut artists out of the picture with their use of AI-generated content.
And that sends the message that they are willing to cut out artists - the types of very talented people that were at the company’s foundation.
People who created Disney’s first projects by using the extreme skill, precision, and attention to detail necessary in their craft.
However, the response to their Thanksgiving Instagram post shows that their audience won’t let them get away with it.
If anger and embarrassment is the response audiences give to a simple Instagram post, imagine the damage that may be inflicted on a corporation’s reputation if they attempt to create and sell whole movies, merchandise, and books using artificial intelligence. Consumers will not want to buy recycled, regurgitated content.
The magic of watching a Disney movie - of watching any movie - is being able to watch the stories unfold and learn how they interconnect with your own life and the world. These stories are written by people who spend their whole life creating and dreaming of ideas in their heads, hoping that they will resonate with at least one person.
This is why people pay so much to go to the movies, to visit their theme parks, and buy their merchandise.
By cutting their employees out of the picture, Disney is also diminishing all of these charms.
So they can try to cut expenses.
But it will be cutting out exactly what makes them profitable.