{"id":2116235,"date":"2026-08-27T19:20:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T16:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2116235"},"modified":"2026-08-27T19:20:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T16:20:20","slug":"the-fight-over-whether-the-humankind-2-trailer-is-slop-is-its-own-kind-of-ai-damage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2116235","title":{"rendered":"The Fight Over Whether the \u2018Humankind 2\u2019 Trailer Is Slop Is Its Own Kind of AI Damage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[analyse_image type=&#8221;featured&#8221; src=&#8221;https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/08\/humankind-2-trailer-1200&#215;675.png&#8221;]<\/p>\n<article class=\"post-2000803986 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-artificial-intelligence category-culture tag-generative-ai tag-humankind-2\">\n<div class=\"entry-content prose dark:prose-invert lg:prose-xl prose-main dark:prose-main\">\n<p>Spotting videos made by generative AI used to be as simple as counting the fingers of the people depicted. But as with every other aspect of the technology, while AI video\u2019s utility remains questionable, its ability to create a reasonably convincing facsimile of human-created footage has come a long way since the days of this sort of cursed nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>And yet. There\u2019s still something <em>off<\/em> about a lot of AI-created video\u2014if anything, it looks <em>too<\/em> real, too in-focus, too crisp. It\u2019s like watching <em>The Hobbit<\/em> in 5K 3D at 48 frames per second, something your correspondent had the misfortune of doing at the time of its release. While the quality was \u201cgood\u201d by all objective metrics, there\u2019s just something disconcerting about a big-budget Hollywood movie looking like a telenovela, and I think even viewers who wouldn\u2019t know fps from GPS would still look at the film and say it just felt wrong.<\/p>\n<p>AI video is similar\u2014even if you can\u2019t quite put your finger on what feels off about it, you know it when you see it. Unfortunately, \u201cyou know it when you see it\u201d is a pretty dangerous standard, especially now that skeptical consumers are justifiably primed to think pretty much anything they\u2019re being sold is somehow AI-generated\u2014and equally primed to avoid it if that\u2019s the case.<\/p>\n<p>This brings us to the trailer for <em>Humankind 2<\/em>, Amplitude Studios\u2019 upcoming sequel to their 2021 4x <em>Civilization<\/em>-alike <em>Humankind<\/em>. The 90-second video premiered during the opening night of Gamescom, and was greeted with an immediate online chorus decrying it as AI slop. And here\u2019s the thing: you can see why.<\/p>\n<div class=\"not-prose video-container\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"HUMANKIND\u2122  2  - Announcement Trailer\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1LFHvSTt880?feature=oembed\" frameborder allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>Amplitude says the trailer was \u201clive-action\u201d, insofar as it featured \u201creal actors, practical sets, and custom-made props created specifically for the production.\u201d The studio explained that the footage was shot at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it will \u201cbe sharing behind-the-scenes images from the shoot soon.\u201d That\u2019s all very well and good, but unless Sofia\u2019s finest film studio has a storm-lashed ocean or a spare Tenochtitlan in a back room, there\u2019s still a lot of this video that\u2019s computer-generated. Which is fine, obviously\u2014it\u2019s not like we weren\u2019t shooting basically entire films in front of green screens long before generative AI came along.<\/p>\n<p>If anything, though, I wonder whether it\u2019s the presence of real actors in an environment that\u2019s entirely computer-generated that gives the trailer its slightly uncanny aspect. Take the scene that lasts from 0:35 to 0:40, where a woman runs toward the camera as it backpedals away from her. If you pause the video at any point, she\u2019s either perfectly or almost perfectly in focus. And if she slips out of focus for a frame or two, the camera reacquires her almost immediately. Everything else in the center of the frame is sharply in focus as well, while the edges get some kind of motion blur effect.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_2000803995\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2000803995\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2000803995\" src=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-27-at-18.16.53.jpg\" alt=\"Humankind 2 trailer screenshot\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1179\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2000803995\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u00a9 Amplitude Studios<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>If this were a chase scene in a video game, that wouldn\u2019t raise an eyebrow in the slightest. Video game cameras are <em>always <\/em>in focus unless you enable motion blur, which exists to simulate the way your eyes also lose focus when you move them\u2014or your head\u2014sharply. Especially if you\u2019ve disabled motion blur. But pulling off a shot like this in real life, in a real marketplace with a bunch of real extras and a real actor, would be extremely difficult. Maintaining deep focus like this in real life with real cameras and lenses requires lots of light, and gets much more difficult if the camera is moving.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s perhaps why the trailer looks somewhat uncanny\u2014and that\u2019s before we get to the havoc that the compression used by Steam\/YouTube\/etc can wreak on your video. Unfortunately for Amplitude, pretty much everyone these days associates \u201clooking somewhat uncanny\u201d with \u201cbeing made by AI\u201d\u2014and it\u2019s hard to blame them. Generative content has oozed its way into every corner of the internet and, increasingly, into our offline lives too, and we\u2019re right to be on the lookout for it. But there are going to be a whole lot of people who end up as collateral damage, accused of using generative AI when their work was all their own. We\u2019re already seeing this with the written word, and if you didn\u2019t speak up because you weren\u2019t a lover of exuberant em-dash usage, rest assured that they\u2019ll come for you sooner or later.<\/p>\n<p>To be fair, Amplitude hasn\u2019t come out and said that no AI was used in the making of the trailer, and it could well be that there was some degree of generative AI involvement. But it could well also be that there wasn\u2019t, in which case the whole thing is a demonstration that you can do everything right, and if your video still somehow just looks weird, you\u2019re going to have accusations of \u201cAI slop\u201d from every direction. Thanks, Sam Altman!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<div class=\"entry-content prose dark:prose-invert lg:prose-xl prose-main dark:prose-main\">\n<p>Spotting videos made by generative AI used to be as simple as counting the fingers of the people depicted. But as with every other aspect of the technology, while AI video\u2019s utility remains questionable, its ability to create a reasonably convincing facsimile of human-created footage has come a long way since the days of this sort of cursed nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>And yet. There\u2019s still something <em>off<\/em> about a lot of AI-created video\u2014if anything, it looks <em>too<\/em> real, too in-focus, too crisp. It\u2019s like watching <em>The Hobbit<\/em> in 5K 3D at 48 frames per second, something your correspondent had the misfortune of doing at the time of its release. While the quality was \u201cgood\u201d by all objective metrics, there\u2019s just something disconcerting about a big-budget Hollywood movie looking like a telenovela, and I think even viewers who wouldn\u2019t know fps from GPS would still look at the film and say it just felt wrong.<\/p>\n<p>AI video is similar\u2014even if you can\u2019t quite put your finger on what feels off about it, you know it when you see it. Unfortunately, \u201cyou know it when you see it\u201d is a pretty dangerous standard, especially now that skeptical consumers are justifiably primed to think pretty much anything they\u2019re being sold is somehow AI-generated\u2014and equally primed to avoid it if that\u2019s the case.<\/p>\n<p>This brings us to the trailer for <em>Humankind 2<\/em>, Amplitude Studios\u2019 upcoming sequel to their 2021 4x <em>Civilization<\/em>-alike <em>Humankind<\/em>. The 90-second video premiered during the opening night of Gamescom, and was greeted with an immediate online chorus decrying it as AI slop. And here\u2019s the thing: you can see why.<\/p>\n<div class=\"not-prose video-container\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"HUMANKIND\u2122  2  - Announcement Trailer\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1LFHvSTt880?feature=oembed\" frameborder allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>Amplitude says the trailer was \u201clive-action\u201d, insofar as it featured \u201creal actors, practical sets, and custom-made props created specifically for the production.\u201d The studio explained that the footage was shot at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it will \u201cbe sharing behind-the-scenes images from the shoot soon.\u201d That\u2019s all very well and good, but unless Sofia\u2019s finest film studio has a storm-lashed ocean or a spare Tenochtitlan in a back room, there\u2019s still a lot of this video that\u2019s computer-generated. Which is fine, obviously\u2014it\u2019s not like we weren\u2019t shooting basically entire films in front of green screens long before generative AI came along.<\/p>\n<p>If anything, though, I wonder whether it\u2019s the presence of real actors in an environment that\u2019s entirely computer-generated that gives the trailer its slightly uncanny aspect. Take the scene that lasts from 0:35 to 0:40, where a woman runs toward the camera as it backpedals away from her. If you pause the video at any point, she\u2019s either perfectly or almost perfectly in focus. And if she slips out of focus for a frame or two, the camera reacquires her almost immediately. Everything else in the center of the frame is sharply in focus as well, while the edges get some kind of motion blur effect.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_2000803995\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2000803995\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2000803995\" src=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-27-at-18.16.53.jpg\" alt=\"Humankind 2 trailer screenshot\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1179\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2000803995\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u00a9 Amplitude Studios<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>If this were a chase scene in a video game, that wouldn\u2019t raise an eyebrow in the slightest. Video game cameras are <em>always <\/em>in focus unless you enable motion blur, which exists to simulate the way your eyes also lose focus when you move them\u2014or your head\u2014sharply. Especially if you\u2019ve disabled motion blur. But pulling off a shot like this in real life, in a real marketplace with a bunch of real extras and a real actor, would be extremely difficult. Maintaining deep focus like this in real life with real cameras and lenses requires lots of light, and gets much more difficult if the camera is moving.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s perhaps why the trailer looks somewhat uncanny\u2014and that\u2019s before we get to the havoc that the compression used by Steam\/YouTube\/etc can wreak on your video. Unfortunately for Amplitude, pretty much everyone these days associates \u201clooking somewhat uncanny\u201d with \u201cbeing made by AI\u201d\u2014and it\u2019s hard to blame them. Generative content has oozed its way into every corner of the internet and, increasingly, into our offline lives too, and we\u2019re right to be on the lookout for it. But there are going to be a whole lot of people who end up as collateral damage, accused of using generative AI when their work was all their own. We\u2019re already seeing this with the written word, and if you didn\u2019t speak up because you weren\u2019t a lover of exuberant em-dash usage, rest assured that they\u2019ll come for you sooner or later.<\/p>\n<p>To be fair, Amplitude hasn\u2019t come out and said that no AI was used in the making of the trailer, and it could well be that there was some degree of generative AI involvement. But it could well also be that there wasn\u2019t, in which case the whole thing is a demonstration that you can do everything right, and if your video still somehow just looks weird, you\u2019re going to have accusations of \u201cAI slop\u201d from every direction. Thanks, Sam Altman!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>[analyse_source url=&#8221;https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/the-fight-over-whether-the-humankind-2-trailer-is-slop-is-its-own-kind-of-ai-damage-2000803986&#8243;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[analyse_image type=&#8221;featured&#8221; src=&#8221;https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/08\/humankind-2-trailer-1200&#215;675.png&#8221;] Spotting videos made by generative AI used to be as simple as counting the fingers of the people depicted. But as with every other aspect of the technology, while AI video\u2019s utility remains questionable, its ability to create a reasonably convincing facsimile of human-created footage has come a long way since the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,53],"class_list":["post-2116235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-gizmodo-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2116235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2116235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2116235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2116235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}