Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

> His work can have recurring themes and still be weird for the sake of weird and mostly atmosphere

Everything "weird" in his work serves the narrative and those themes. If you had spent any time thinking critically about any of his films you would understand that, but you clearly haven't.

The AIs also disagree with you. I asked Claude "what are your thoughts on this statement: "Lynch will be one of the easier things for an AI to replicate given his thing is weird for the sake of weird and being deliberately vague about it. His stuff is 90% atmosphere."

and it responds:

"I disagree with this characterization of David Lynch's work. While his films certainly feature surreal and dreamlike atmospheres, reducing them to "weird for weird's sake" misses their intricate emotional and thematic coherence.

Lynch's work often explores deeply human experiences - trauma, desire, identity, and the dark underbelly of seemingly idyllic Americana - through a distinctive visual and narrative language that draws heavily from dreams and the subconscious mind. Films like "Mulholland Drive" and "Blue Velvet" aren't merely atmospheric exercises, but carefully constructed works where the surreal elements serve specific narrative and thematic purposes.

Take "Mulholland Drive" - its dream logic and narrative fragmentation directly reflect the protagonist's psychological state and Hollywood's destructive impact on identity. The "weird" elements aren't arbitrary but emerge organically from the story's emotional core.

I think AI would actually struggle to replicate Lynch's work precisely because it's not random weirdness - it's a complex interweaving of personal obsessions, cultural critique, and psychological insight expressed through a unique artistic vocabulary he's developed over decades. The "atmosphere" in his films isn't just surface-level strangeness but rather the manifestation of deeper themes and emotions.

Sure, it's just money guys. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, Apple. Just money.

If this is the story hollywood insiders tell themselves (and I doubt the smart ones think this...), it's no wonder they are becoming irrelevant.

> Pretentious is reducing the work of one of the most highly acclaimed film makers of our time to “weird for the sake of weird” and “lol an AI could make that”.

No, that isn't pretentious, that's just an opinion you personally find offensive.

Nothing you've said in an attempt to refute what I've said contradicts anything I've said. You just don't like the way I've summed it up.

> Really insightful criticism.

I mean, I've been elaborating, although it's been hard to have a fun discussion since in my opinion you've been combative from the start.

> Pretentious is suggesting his work has no substance, when a poll by BBC Culture of 177 film critics from 36 countries named Mulholland Drive the best film of the 21st century.

I didn't say his films had no substance, first of all, no where can you quote me saying anything like that. I do find them fairly superficial with the surrealism doing a lot of the heavy lifting with peopel interpreting a lot and giving more credit than is due, but that's hardly the same thing now, is it?

Besides, I bet a lot of films on that list don't have a lot of substance and are just fun, and there's nothing wrong with that.

> There are plenty of directors whose works that I don’t personally appreciate but I would never be so arrogant to suggest an AI could reproduce them.

Because you find the notion offensive, fine. I think AI could replicate even directors I do like and find to have a lot of depth, though. I think ultimately everything can be reduced to data and patterns and heuristics and an AI will be able to mimic styles frighteningly well.

> How many Palme D’ors and academy awards do you have.

If I said even 1, you realize that shouldn't affect the merit of any argument I've made, right?

Except the Hollywood insiders still make all of the creative decisions (after the money people make the money decisions).

Even including Netflix's success, there is no segment of the movie and television business where technology is dominating the actual creation of the content. And this conversation started with a Ben Affleck video about how that creativity isn't going to be replaced anytime soon. An algorithm can tell Netflix to greenlight a show about "nonbinary police detectives investigating election fraud", but there's no computer touching the script, direction, or any decisions the department heads are taking. And studios are already hitting the diminishing returns of ingesting a bunch of screenplays to spit out mediocre scripts (at enormous and rising cost).

Feel free to offer counter-examples, just so we're still staying with arm's length of reality.