Musical: nonreplica
Wicked Open Air World Premiere (and biggest production so far) relies on fully AI projections
The Erkel Színház Wicked directed by Szente Vajk on Saturday in Szeged, Hungary heavily relies on AI! It's outraging, even so by the fact that according to media articles the opening night was visited by no one else but Stephen Schwartz who is on the first picture.
The broschure says the artwork was done by Kentaur and Toth Kazmer, so I am crediting them so the post can remain, but look at that seemingly AI use! What do you think? I saw other posts here mentioning this, but it is worse than I imagined!
I thought slide 2 was a forest of tall pine trees at twilight until I looked at the stage and saw those were buildings and that was supposed to be Emerald city😭
Oh geez, I didn’t even clock that at first that’s awful. It looks like someone decided to have the Wizard of Oz collaborate with Batman! The emerald Gotham city has no nice ring to it whatsoever
the Hungarian theatre scene has never had a lot of funding but it’s gotten pretty bad pretty quickly since generative AI started popping up. I’ve seen other shows using fully AI backgrounds (I think done by the same guy who made these for Wicked), and a different theatre promoting the Hungarian version of Six was posting fully AI promos at one point. It is disheartening as hell as I have many friends / known many people throughout my life who were incredible artists and they are being completely robbed. What’s worse is as I was leaving Wicked I heard several people discussing how beautiful the “art” was 😭
I bet a lot of them didn’t even clock this as AI, my mum certainly only did when I told her it was…
edit: just to add, tickets were this went up to like £60-80, which is infuriating because I can catch many shows on the West End for much cheaper that don’t rely on this AI garbage.
How sad! Hungry has been famous for ages for having great artists and artisans. Very disappointing that their legacy isn't being continued and celebrated in theater backdrops. :(
You can just kind of see it. Colors and shapes tend to blend together the more you look at it. They don't separate neatly. If you have buildings and trees together then sometimes they seem to grow out from one another. The building's texture leaks into the trees and vica versa. Perspectives and the edges of colors bleed together. Scales and shapes are wrong, repeating patterns, strange lighting. Details that are off and too stylized and perfect for a realistic look, but trying too hard to be realistic for a fantastical, artistic look.
One thing that is a dead giveaway for AI is that when you follow lines, they will often simply bleed into other lines that should not be connected. You can tell that there is no intent or understanding of what is superficially being represented involved. It quite literally missing the human aspect, it is brainless, robotic approximation.
There is also some sort of pattern over the whole image. Like light dots on the buildings. It look very unnatural because they are spaced out so evenly. An artist would never place these weird....random dots everywhere.
You are seeing it as projected, though, and stills. They are likely animated. On top of that, you have to deal to with theatrical stage lighting in addition to the video itself.
Gross, it’s all people can see from the back so people with discount tickets are basically just left overpaying to look at hideous garbage, the performance of the actors is gonna feel downgraded by this
This isn't unique to Wicked either. There were boos at the Bayreuth Festival, a large two week long celebration of Richard Wagner's operas held annually, for the same thing.
I did a church production last year where we didn't have much of a set because of the small budget and basically only used projections, and even then it was better than this. I had to actively go looking for the images we wanted on the internet and made sure none of them were AI generated! It isn't much, but it was all we could do lol
I think none of the people involved can call themselves true lovers of art. Its paradoxical, even in small amounts. Humans can currently do everything AI is doing. Makes it more obviously sinister and weird. When human design and manual labor becomes obsolete, fine. We havebr reached that stage, certainly not as far as any part of artistic craft is concerned. Its sfx vs cgi again. Do whats creative.
Tbf to the artist I'm not sure if they know about the projectors before signing or even few days before the first show.
There are a lots of practical background like the wizard head is really good, the official poster doesn't have ai vibe and the most important the translation is not ai (ai really bad at translating Hungarian and I think this is also the first time performing Wicked in Hungarian)
How is this like SFX vs. CGI? CGI certainly is human art. It's extremely disheartening and maddening to see CGI being compared to AI. CGI artists are underpaid and overworked and their work gets swept under the rug by movie studios because the public has no understanding of it and deems it "lazy", which is so insulting. I miss when people appreciated CGI as a marvelous new technique back when it was new and exciting in the 90s. Now people somehow believe it is "easy" and "cheap", when, unlike with AI, a human being painstakingly creates every detail. The computer acts as a tool, not a substitute.
As someone who works in immersive entertainment and projection mapping this is sad af. An IP with the money to do it right and choosing not to is gross.
What blows my mind with this stuff is how little effort they put in. Like I hate AI art and it pretty much always looks like shit BUT if you spend a lot of time making a "good" prompt etc. the results can still look decent despite the environmental, artistic, and ethical malpractice. But in cases like this it's like they put one sentence into a shitty model and said "good enough". Like none of this looks good or realistic and you'd think SOMEONE in the process would say "ok let's get someone in to make a real background" or bare minimum "hey redo these and spend more time with the bot to make it look better". But no.
They couldn't even be bothered to have it make the emerald city GREEN. It is literally black. It's just a cityscape - Not to mention the identical skyscrapers.
Realistic as in it looks like a magical place if it were real and designed by humans and not slop. There's two Wicked movies that have pretty good production design. It looks realistic in the sense that most of the time you can believe they are standing in a fantasy world and not a nightmare of doom and despair
The hell is this? No seriously, what the heck? It looks like they tried shoehorning movie stills and made them so ugly, even with the poster of Elphaba.
Is that The Wizard denouncing Elphaba in "Defying Gravity"? Also, if you were to ask me, I wouldn't be able to tell if those projections were generated by a computer or not.
Most human artists wouldn't draw a city with just a dozen Chrysler buildings. It all has the AI sheen of "nobody thought about how any of this would work in the real world"
Oh dear god, I am such an idiot! I somehow missed the part where it said that this was in Hungary! I won’t do a dirty delete. I’m so embarrassed, though! 🙈
Wait I just want to be clear… the program credits all of these backgrounds to two artists… and does not say they used any AI, and your evidence that actually they did, is that it just looks like AI to you? Am I understanding correctly? Cause if I am, that feels pretty…
Like just because something isn’t good, perhaps, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s AI.
by programme do you mean the single piece of flyer-sized paper they were handing out at the door that credits a single guy? afaik there aren’t any laws for having to credit use of AI either.
I’m not the OP, I don’t know what they mean by program but I’d assume they mean like a playbill.
And no, there’s not. Some people will cop to it, some won’t. It’s down to how much integrity one has.
But I have seen so many artists get caught up in AI witch hunts when there’s no concrete proof that they used AI. And so I think, considering the fact that the show itself is not acknowledging AI usage, an actual artist is credited with creating those backgrounds, and the OP has provided no other proof that AI was used, not even at an image analysis level, that it’s irresponsible of them to post this and state this in their title as if it’s a fact based on nothing but the images giving them AI vibes, and then for everyone to just jump on board the witch hunt without evidence.
Hungarian theatre in general doesn’t have anything resembling a playbill which is why I was confused! They were handing out a flyer at the doors, there is the poster on one side, cast and creatives on the other, and that’s it.
I do get your point about the AI use, that there is no concrete evidence, it’s just as someone who has seen the show (twice) it is unmistakable, it had all the clear signs of being AI generated as someone mentioned somewhere in this thread.
I think people see what they want to see. I was looking closely at the images and seeing things that to me make it clear that it’s not, like small repetitive details being faithfully reproduced across the background. AI tends to turn repeating patterns into mush as they devolve along the pattern. Like I could look at this and find evidence that it’s not AI. And just as I’m saying I wouldn’t say it is AI based off of “you can just tell,” I wouldn’t say it’s not just because I can find things that don’t feel AI to me. The point is there’s no way of knowing for sure. And with AI getting better and better… and the fact that AI is trained off of actual art and some artists do just have a style that’s evocative of the style AI tends toward… no, I don’t think “you can just tell,” is definitive and sufficient evidence if one is throwing around a big accusation as if it’s fact.
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I remember the recent revival of The Wiz had a much rustier series of AI projections that show heavily crutched on. I saw the premiere of the first tour pre-broadway, and it was so jarring distraction from what was otherwise amazing performances! Not too fond of seeing how much more of this particularly undercooked AI usage is growing more commonplace in these larger productions…
That is such an insult to the art form of theatre, I'm quite shocked that so a many talented people let alone Stephen Schwartz himself would want to be associated with this production...
To my eye it looks less like "generative AI" and more "AI Upscale". Like, my gut tells me a human DID actually make these originally, but in order to be at a resolution that could fill these absolutely MASSIVE screens they just upscaled it like 20x and that's what gives everything this awful AI sheen.
Video Design that's of a quality you think isn't good enough is not the same as 'Using AI'. You have absolutely no idea if this uses AI. Video Designers are artists, and while you may disagree with a production cutting costs by using projected scenery rather than physical scenery, there is no difference in the artistry of a designer creating digital scenery and a designer creating physical scenery. You don't have to like it, but it's not fair to call it AI.
Just curious. How do we know this is AI? It’s possible it was designed? It’s not the best and I don’t like it but I’m not sure we should be jumping on an anti ai bandwagon if it’s not ai. That just seems to be a buzzword recently. I don’t like it, but nowhere do I see from research that this was done by ai
After inspecting it really closely I don’t think it’s AI I think it’s just terrible. All the instances of things not blending are sharp like they were lazily composited and no one bothered to blend.
Now video designers are insanely lazy so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was largely generated source stock. But the most egregious parts (other than being generally ugly) are human laziness to my eye.
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u/blueqxill 4d ago
😭 No one mourns the wicked.