\n\nAbout those creepy algorithmic kids\u2019 videos:
That Medium article about them is just bad.\u00a0 Badly written, badly argued, conflates a lot of things because they strike the author as\u00a0\u201cwrong\u201d even if some are much more explicable than others.
Most of the videos he cites are based on very simple forms of children\u2019s edutainment, like little exercises that teach color names.\u00a0 It makes sense that a certain breed of content creators would say\u00a0\u201cwe can generate these automatically by swapping in different characters, and the more videos we have including popular characters, the more clicks we will get.\u201d\u00a0 So you get color name exercises with every possible permutation of some Disney characters.
It\u2019s admittedly a lot weirder that people will act out the very same templates in live action.\u00a0 Maybe the animations were notably lucrative, and some people thought\u00a0\u201cif we do the same things in live action, that will seem more appealing and we\u2019ll steal their clicks for any given search term.\u201d\u00a0 There has to be some extra cost associated with live action (one does wonder how much the actors and cameramen are paid), but maybe it\u2019s worth it.
Where it started to strike me\u00a0as weird was in the very last section.\u00a0 There, he talks about a type of video that is a lot longer, and has narrative elements and not just color/name games.\u00a0 There are hundreds of these, closely following remixes of the same basic scene templates, which individually make little sense and are presented in random sequences with no greater plot.\u00a0 This is a typical entry in the genre:
There are some color-game scenes, although here they are more elaborate and bizarre (as superheroes and supervillains swim in a swimming pool, the Joker sprays them with paint; we learn the name of each paint color).
There are also other scene archetypes that recur:\u00a0\u201caction scenes,\u201d composed of many repeated shots in which one character punches/kicks another out of the frame, and\u00a0\u201cchase scenes,\u201d in which some monster chases characters and wreaks havoc until it is defeated.\u00a0 Sometimes archetypes are combined: in the video above, the heroes are chased by a shark which randomly changes color, and we learn the names of the colors.
At first, I thought these were made entirely by computer, and that the\u00a0\u201cscene archetypes\u201d were completely pre-made scenes into which character models could be swapped, Mad Libs-style.\u00a0 But after watching some more of these videos, I realized that can\u2019t be it.\u00a0 The scenes are too different and too well-tailored to their differences.\u00a0 In a chase scene with a massive snake, it slithers along a street, knocking aside cars, and then destroys a building; in a chase scene with a shark, it rises from the ocean and we see shots of sailors on capsizing boats.
So some human sat down to animate a chase scene with a shark, and came up with a pretty good one (at one point, the shark grabs a motorcycle in its jaws).\u00a0 Was that part of some pre-existing library of templates?\u00a0 But what about the other shark chase scene, the one that teaches you colors, where the shark rises out of a swimming pool and then swims through the air?\u00a0 Did someone make that\u00a0archetype for a pre-existing library?\u00a0 Or was it for that video specifically, given how these videos seem to like sharks?
The kicker: people do live-action renditions of this\u00a0stuff, too.\u00a0 In addition to the animations, which are produced by multiple channels, there are multiple channels making the dream a reality:
The adherence to the template is very careful.\u00a0 Yet the actors, as they must, add little human affectations \u2013 you can see them struggling to figure out what\u00a0\u201cact the part\u201d means in these senseless parts.
Maybe this is all\u00a0because someone made some money on this template, once, and everyone else jumped on the bandwagon.\u00a0 Everyone knows the template gets clicks, and so everyone is trying to get a piece of that pie.\u00a0 And so we have hundreds of lovingly exact renditions of the template, even though the template is terrible.\u00a0 (Kind of an accidental satire of Hollywood.)
a lot of the \u201ceerie\u201d stuff I\u2019ve seen is pretty close in patterning to the goanimate Caillou/\u201cgrounded\u201d stuff we know real kids will make given computer animation tools
"}