The host platform for my blog, WordPress, has a feature that I’d never considered using until today, when boredom crept in and lured me into trying it.
“It” is an Artificial Intelligence feature that reviews what you’ve written, analyzes the text and makes suggestions for improving what you thought was a carefully crafted post. It can suggest enhancements to what you’ve written, alternative titles and even alternative artwork.
I went back to one of my earlier posts about a low-budget horror movie about sharks ironically filmed recently in our Chihuahuan desert landscape.
I thought about this particular post because of news that the movie, now entitled “Shark Thrash,” will be premiered in Las Cruces on June 6 for no admission charge to those brave enough to see it. I’m hoping to attend when it is shown at the Rio Grande Theater.
My blog about the movie focused on what I thought was the humorous fact that it was filmed NOT NEAR OR IN an ocean, where sharks live. Instead it was filmed in our high desert community where the closest ocean is hundreds of miles away in the Gulf of California or Gulf of Mexico. Some scenes involving water were filmed in nearby Elephant Butte Lake, a fresh water body of water where sharks don’t live. Producers of the movie were proud to say that may of the scary scenes involving sharks in water were artificially created during the post production process.
As one of the producers observed: “… How can you make any shark film in the middle of the desert? It’s amazing what we can do in post certainly, but as long as the actors are there and you have the essentials, you can really make anything work.”
This brought back memories of a 1997 political satire movie entitled “Wag the Dog,” starring Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Eerily predictive of today’s political scene, the dark comedy depicts the efforts of a United States President to diffuse a sex scandal by creating news coverage of a conjured up war in Albania to divert attention from his misdeeds. The President’s spin doctors create a phony video using archaic post production techniques to steer Americans away from the scandal by showing heart-tugging scenes of an Albanian peasant girl dodging bullets in her quest for safety.
These days, with artificial intelligence, it’s much easier to doctor video and still photos, which crop up frequently in our highly charged political arena.
It also makes me think of “Bruce,” the multi-million dollar mechanical shark that was featured in the original “Jaws” movie. If shot today, Stephen Spielberg would likely just use AI to make those scenes that made us cringe and shriek out loud during the movie.
My blog about the shark movie was entitled: “What’s next? Lawrence of Arabia filmed in Alaska???” I thought that was pretty clever. Here’s what AI suggested I should use for titles:
“Desert Sharks: Movies Filmed In Las Cruces”
“The Aslyum’s New Shark Films: A Desert Adventure” (Asylum is the movie production company)
“Godzilla Shark: A New Low Budget Film Craze” (Godzilla is the name of a super shark that I referenced in the blog)
Somehow, I think AI missed what I thought was humorous about my title.
For some reason, AI had no suggestions about how to improve my writing. I tested that feature on another blog that I had written and AI came up with some suggestions that suggested I take a more academic approach to my writing, again failing to grasp what I thought was a more humorous approach to the subject.
But the final thing proposed by AI was a real gem. I asked it to create some artwork for my blog about a shark movie being filmed in the desert. Here is what it produced:
This image was explained by AI as “A shark filled tornado swirling over a desert town with dark storm clouds, lightning and debris…”
And this image was described as “a massive shark bursting from golden sand dunes under a blazing mid-day sun, as if swimming through the sands…”
The fact that AI could create these images based on what I wrote was pretty funny (and a bit scary) to me. But I don’t think we share the same sense of humor.
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