I’m all over the place here. No coherency, just a stream of consciousness…

Got a tip from Photojojo on a new service called Animoto. The premise is simple: Upload some pictures (or link to pics from your Flickr page or another service), pick some music, and it will cut together a kind of music video. “Welcome to the end of slideshows,” they say. And “no two videos are ever the same.”

It’s a great idea. I want to be more creative, but I probably don’t have the talent or energy to screw around with iMovie to make my own music video. Check out the video made using pictures of my daughter at the end of this post.

But how soon till we have a computer program that will automatically make a great Hollywood summer popcorn movie? A hit R&B album? A TV ad for some candy bar? I can’t find the link, but The New Yorker ran an article a while back about a group of guys who wrote some software that analyzed every minute detail of a screenplay — whether the protagonist wears a hat within the first five minutes of the film, for example — and could predict the box office gross to within an acceptable margin of error. Some other fellas did something similar that “listened” to a song before it was released and predicted whether or not it would be a hit.

Something in me really hates the idea that creativity can be analyzed and modeled (and ultimately commodotized). I want creativity to be the result of human inspiration. And I want that inspiration to inspire me.

More than anything else, I hate the idea that I am someone whose response can be predicted (and manipulated) by some machine. Even though I already know that I’m going to like certain trashy content like, say, Gossip Girl even though I haven’t yet watched the first episode.

It’s easy to rail against all the bad ads out there, but don’t they make it all the sweeter when you run across a truly inspired spot like that Cadbury’s one from the UK? A spot that comes at you totally from left field; a spot that could not possibly have been concocted or analyzed by a piece of software.

But at the end of the day, look: I now have a lovely little video of my daughter. I’m happy about it, and you probably could have predicted that fact.

Here, take a look for yourself and tell me what you think. (Music credit: My friend Darrick’s now-defunct band, AM Sunday.)