SoulMonster

I have seen it 5 times now and I like it. Not like it is a masterpiece or anything, just that there is a lot of cool things happening and really crowded with something new to see each time. A thing that occurred to me: There are monsters in the video, providing a connection to the song Monsters.

That's what I assumed. The level of sycophantic messages on social media is astounding.

Ah, so just speculation. Would be hilarious if true, though.

No. But a qualified guess is that it is somewhere in the queue of songs to be released. But dont hold your breath.

Huh? No. It isn't released.

How can you tell they are fake bots?

The rendering hours themselves would push it far, far beyond $500 Then comes the live shots editing, the live motion, the hand drawings, and finally merging all this and post-production. So obviously maaany hours work resulting in much higher cost/price than most of their recent videos.

You could very well be correct and this is the band just following trends, but that is pure speculation. In my opinion, this is likely to a much larger extent being oursourced to third parties with Axl being less involved (for better or for worse), than, say, the video to November Rain was. Still, I am sure Axl has been involved to some extent and has okayed the style and direction. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if younger people like this and that this will actually make the band more appealing to a new demographic. I appreciated your measured and thought-out response

I am actually ambivalent to it. My main problem is all the motion. No, you can't get this for $500 on Fiverr

Creative Works were only dealing with the band management, which is customary and really what management is for. They wouldn't necessarily know to what extent the band itself directed management. And thank god Axl didn't decide to go for a complex storyline

Uhm, I don't think bands typically make their own videos, this is usually outsourced. The interaction would likely have been to commission someone, give initial direction, approve storyboard, go through early drafts, make new directions, approve final version. The difference here is that they wanted to spend a lot more money on it.

Of course not. But there will definitely be many who love this video. As is usual, they push some fans away in the process. They have done that as a trademark throughout their career, like when they released acoustic music, when they added keyboards on UYI, when they released One In A Million, when they used drum machines, etc etc, You know this as well as I do. There is nothing new under the sun here. The fact that you don't like the video doesn't mean it doesn't have qualities, it just means you don't like it.

I think you got it wrong. Creative Works was working on a more conventional video using the Unreal Engine when the band decided to instead go for a mix of AI, hand drawn graphics, live footage and motion graphics, either because it would be less expensive or as an artistic choice. Or did I get it wrong?

They make no attempts at making it easy for themselves. They chose to release Absurd first when they could have released Perhaps or Hard Skool first. It makes little sense to anyone than Axl, I suppose. They have gone for all kinds of artistic styles on the videos these few years, making sure to annoy just about every part of their fan base. I dig it.

I would bet the budget for this is more than the budgets for the Hard Skool, Shadow of Your Love and Absurd videos combined. That you don't like the video is entirely irrelevant to whether the band has made an effort. I have followed this band for quite some time now, and the band not making an effort is very different to this, it is zero singles and zero videos

This is fun. I love all the reactions to it. Anyway, as far as storyline goes, yeah, there doesn't seem much, it is more about describing certain themes, although I wouldn't be surprised if we would keep on discussing specific details in decades to come. Similarly, I am not surprised the video doesn't go in detail about Axl's childhood - it could be difficult to handle this delicately and I don't think he really wants to go there, I think he would prefer a video that more hints than is graphical about what happened. Still, even this limited storyline is vastly preferably for me than the messy storylines in the Since I Don't Have You, Don't Cry and Estranged videos As for my impression of the video: It is too much movement for an old guy like myself. Still, I really appreciate that Axl wanted a music video to this song, the band making the effort, going for a new style that is controversial, and clearly putting resources into it. But more than anything, I LOVE how the band manages to still not take the easy way out by simply making something that is crowd pleasing to the fans.

There is so much happening, so many details. But yeah, it could be only focusing on some themes, "a young boy who stares down the monsters of dark childhood memories, blurring worlds in the process", and not include any details that are more directly connected to Axl's past.

I am really happy Axl wanted a video for this song. I feared he had become more indifferent to it since it was released "only" as a B side, but obviously they wanted to make a proper video here. I wonder to what extent Axl has been involved in the storyline or imagery. Some obvious themes are innocence, children, decay, I guess all being topical to the lyrics.

Obviously he is waiting for another opportunity to complain.

I love that song.

To keep some media focus on the release of their latest single. Maybe they can get some more media coverage on the basis of the music video which will result in a bit more sales of the single. It also keeps GN'R in the media if they intend to do another tour run later on. Honestly, I don't get why people complain about the staggered release of the single and the video. If you are an old-timer like me, the normal way was that an album was dropped and then there would be a few singles to go with that, perhaps with a music video if we were lucky, released in a staggered fashion, too. So we would first hear the song on the album and then later it would be played on the radio after the single had been released. Dumping everything at once makes little sense marketing-wise. You got to do this over a time period to maximize the media exposure which in turn result in the sales of the music.

I think the artists who protest again AI arts "taking" their data are not fully able to see that this is just how it has always been, only that the data is stored digitally and not neurologically. In the end, the result is the same: Art inspired by other art, but not to the extent where it is plagiarizing or infringing. And again, I understand the emotions, of course, after all they see this a big competition coming where all the years spent honing their craft is becoming less relevant, but the argument that AI arts is fundamentally different in "taking" or "stealing" or "using" their art, that I don't buy.

Because you don't ask for permission to use other's art as inspiration when you create your own art. No one is demanding this from conventional artists, hence it makes no sense to demand it from AI visual artists. Whether the data is stored in RAM or neurons is irrelevant.

Which is why it is just a tool. Like the paintbrush. It doesn't create anything on its own. It relies on the direction of the artist in the form of text prompts, the parameters used, and finally the data models it has been trained upon and which it will use. A bad artist will create bad art, regardless of using a pen and paper of an AI software. But to great artists it can be a valuable tool.

You don't think you can get proficient in using software like Dall-E and Midjourney and that as a result you will have AI visual artists that are better at realizing their artistic vision using the medium of AI than others?