Every fan editor is manipulating trademarked and copyright intellectual and artistic content.
This is true, definitely, but I think the difference comes in the intentionality and the decisionmaking behind the edits, the juxtaposition of shots, the way this affects and alters narrative. Editing is an art in and of itself. But you can’t edit artfully unless something has been created first, full stop. Novels, songs, movies… anything! That doesn’t make the act of editing uncreative in and of itself, though. The reliance on having something to work with doesn’t remove the art from editing - nor does the art inherent in editing innately make it good. Most of the art made by most of the people isn’t good art. A ton of it is awful. But it is still art because it’s people making deliberate artistic choices as a real human expression.
It’s the intentionality, and the creative decisionmaking, and the skill (or lack thereof) applied together to create something. In the case of fan-editing: yeah it’s illegal at its core, but there’s a reason all the best fanedits that everyone knows about are examples of an editor (or editors), taking material, and making something compelling out of it via their choices. They’re taking what they have to work with, and actively, thoughtfully, intentionally working it. The art is obvious and self-evident, whether it’s a “fix” or a full-blown transformation of style and tone.
Using algorithms to generate a facsimile of creativity, arrived at by averaging the scraped data of prior works and synthesizing an imitation of what it thinks a user wants, is not a creative act. the thing “creating” is incapable of thinking, much less feeling, much less being able to understand why the juxtaposition of images, the movement of shapes and bodies in the frame, are eliciting emotions or connecting dots. It can’t know, and won’t ever know, because it’s an algorithm, it’s not a person. And what it spits out when you prompt it isn’t a creative act.
algorithm-generated imagery is off, and is always off, no matter how detailed the imagery continues to become, because the algorithm doesn’t know why the camera moves the way it does, or why the shot is framed the way it is, why it’s lit the way it is. Same with vocal performances. It doesn’t understand why the inflections are placed where they are, why certain quavers and tremors communicate things in a line in a way that shouting or whispering won’t.
I understand the increasing usage of AI as a substitute for creativity, because it’s easy, and it’s “close enough” for people who don’t want more than surface-level entertainment; especially if the person generating and then watching doesn’t have a good understanding of why the art they like actually works. Not everyone cares! They don’t HAVE to, to be entertained! And in fanediting especially, the appeal of having access to something that gives you the ability to say you made something - without knowing how, or even being able to actually make it, not in just having the means, but having the skill or the ability - is REALLY strong.
The devaluation of art into “content” for the past decade has normalized people accepting artless content as a primary media diet. And the ease of “content creation” has been increasingly welcomed in the niche fanedit community, where a TON of the output is clearly only made for the ability to say in a post or a tweet or a thread that you ‘fixed’ or ‘made’ something so you can put your name in the credits, and put your name on the poster - frequently, the AI-generated poster, that also has telltale signs that a human being never made any part of it. A machine that spits out superficial content is a godsend for people who see what they do, unironically, as “content creation” and who edit things for the sake of having something to share so they can see “engagement” go up.
A ton of pro-AI rhetoric tends to cop to this as the driving “creative” impulse more often than not - it gets framed as a sort of democratization of art, the free distribution of tools they’d otherwise be prevented, an opportunity to show the people behind the gate that they don’t NEED to be behind that gate, they can do it from here, with some judicious prompts and enough tokens and drops of water and all the prior created works an algorithm can scrape.
But it’s not the democratization of art, it’s the devaluation of it. It’s the ceding of thought, of creativity, to a faulty algorithm; and lowering the bar for what art could be, so that it sits an inch or two below the best result that algorithm can cough up. If you ask an algorithm to take over the creative impulse, you’ll only ever get disconnected facsimiles of what people have already done. And plugging those into human-created, collaborative, intentionally executed art is always going to be jarring, no matter how detailed those scenes might be, because the lack of humanity in the “creation” will always shine through. Especially if “creation” itself is devalued to the point that algorithmic regurgitations and amalgamations of real art by people who don’t understand what they’re doing and don’t want to - actually counts.
Breathing scrubbed oxygen will keep your lungs working. But it’ll never replace fresh air.