What I Am Watching: Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust
Why AI art is essentially Dracula
After putting off an intended rewatch of the now twenty-three year old “Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust” anime, I was pushed to rewatch it after the revelation that it was used to train AI and make a mediocre visual clusterfuck of a short film. Chances are you’ve already seen the “AI Anime” put out by Corridor Crew a few weeks back. If you haven’t, I’ve included a link to it here. We’ll return to it in a moment.
For the uninitiated, “Vampire Hunter D” is a series of forty light novels written by Hideyuki Kikuchi and illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano since the 80s. There’s been comic adaptations, a video game, two anime films and supposedly an upcoming animated series. The original “D” film is a seminal piece of now-archaic anime, and “Bloodlust” a slab of turn-of-the-modern-century neogothic drip.
Without belaboring the point with a summary of the film, D (the titular character) hunts vampires in post-apocalyptic future-medieval setting. In Bloodlust, he hunts a vampire. The film drapes itself in style and atmosphere, and has my favorite “oh lord, a vampire is coming” scene in the first 10 minutes of the film. The film is shockingly creative, and still looks incredible and is a sort of surrealist attack on the senses that comes from every angle. It also utilizes the classic seizure-inducing strobe effect of old school anime, so viewer beware.
What I found interesting watching the film again for the first time in a decade is that it is so utterly original. It works as a horror film, as an action anime, as an atmospheric background vibe-setter. It explores gothic tropes with new eyes, and rarely explains anything about its “lore” preferring instead to say “here’s a country of mutants, deal with it.” It is at times maximalist in a way unique to anime, and at other times it is subtle and thoughtful, even wistful and sentimental. In the end, it is less about vampires and more about love.
Which is why it is so ironic that Corridor Crew used it to model their basically-rotoscoped freakshow on.
In the comments of their “making of” video (feverishly entitled “Did We Just Change Animation Forever?”), Corridor Crew says “We trained our model, not from hundreds of artists, but from ONE film- Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust. We've been very open about this, and I think it's important to be. But this is also an experiment and a loving parody of this era of anime. I consider it no less ethical than the countless other videos on our channel that borrow from pop culture to tell their story.”
The irony then, I think, is that they see no difference between what they have done as a visual FX studio and the culmination of music, art, writing, and design that make up something like “Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.” Their entire tone is full-throated arrogance, the elevator speech to a venture capitalist about the something-something future of something-something disruption in a stagnant industry“ while claiming no ethical qualms can be applied to them. There’s something hyperparasitic about it, the idea that they are beyond reproach as they gobble up someone else’s lifeblood to make their ghoulish homunculi dance as though it lives. Below’s a little snippet of a freeze frame from “AI anime.”
Oof. You probably see where this is going.
Corridor Crew wants desperately for something they produce to be alive, to be making something of meaning and weight and beauty, but AI art is a vampire with a dead heart. It can only consume, never add anything to the artistic genepool. It produces gross facsimiles of life and beauty, that at a glance may appear to be living things but on closer inspection are revealed for the grotesquery they truly are. You may say that “technology makes art evolve,” and you’re absolutely right. Photography didn’t replace painting, it gave the act of painting juxtaposition and new meaning. Process matters.
The lack of self awareness regarding the subject material stolen and used in the creation of Corridor Crew’s stitched-up-monster could be excused as fanboy tunnel-vision, if it weren’t for the fact that in the aforementioned making-of video, a member of Corridor Crew makes an off-handed comment that someone has uploaded all of “Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust” onto Youtube, and you can watch it there, and “it’s actually pretty cool.” In effect, he says you can steal it while crowing about ethics in the face of criticism.
This kind of AI art makes the “idea guy” at think that he’s an artist. You know them; sitting around conceiving of things, wondering at their own genius, and putting no effort into achieving any goals whatsoever other than the waste of your limited time and life with their out-loud daydreaming. Appropriately, there’s a new mind-numbing discourse on Twitter (as always) where some people have had the nerve to suggest that “if you want to be a writer, you should write” in the face of folk who think oujia-board rantings of ChatGPT AI is the same as the fundamental magic of the written word crafted by human hands.
The thing here is that people who only care about the end product are just that: product-driven. They are capitalistic and materialistic, and AI-produced facsimiles of human art suit them just fine, especially if it can be monetized. It’s soulless, like a vampire, and cares only to propagate itself at the cost of others. You know people like this, that believe the world owes them something, and then if they ever do actually try these things, they immediately quit if they aren’t praised for their amateurish output. They have no desire to learn, change, grow, or live.
This is narcissism, the essence of the vampire.