In March 2023, a Reddit user named chaindrop asked a model called ModelScope to generate a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
The result was three seconds long. Smith's face warped between expressions that didn't belong to any single human being. His hands turned into pink, boneless things, vaguely reaching, vaguely grasping. The noodles floated. Not in a way that looked like water, or zero gravity, or a dream. In a way that looked like the model had never quite understood what a noodle was and was making a highly confident guess.
I remember watching it for the first time and feeling something I can only describe as witnessing a very talented artist work in a medium they'd just discovered existed. There was something there. The movement, however wrong, had intention. The face, however melted, was recognizably a face. It was like a child's drawing of a horse — you know it's a horse, and you know the hands that made it are going to get better.