AI blows, Part 572
We're all born with the ability to imagine. AI proponents want us to believe otherwise
Earlier this month, I wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune about an AI startup that plans to offer a service enabling the average person to type in a few keywords and create “entire episodes of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created.”
A terrible idea, in my opinion. Two screenwriters I spoke with (who are also screenwriting professors) feel the same.
(Gift link to that column here.)
Before we get into the nitty gritty of this company’s gambit, there are so many broader ethical issues with AI that should concern us all:
- It’s a cesspit of human rights violations. As reported by “60 Minutes”: Laborers training AI say they are “overworked, underpaid and exploited by big American tech companies.”
- AI steals from the work of others — authors, journalists, academics, screenwriters — although the term of art is usually the more technical-sounding “scraping,” as if AI were simply performing a minor procedure as it scrapes the internet for the intellectual labor of others.
- The environmental impact alone isn’t worth it. Despite a drought in San Antonio, for example, two data centers in the area used 463 million gallons of water in 2023 and 2024, which is the equivalent of water used by tens of thousands of households.
- The CEO of a company specializing in “deadbots” — meaning, an AI version of someone deceased — is interested in making them “ad-friendly.” According to a report: “One scenario could involve inserting interstitial ads into peoples' conversations with deadbots – just like how traditional commercial breaks pop up during TV shows.” (shivers)
- In some cases, AI is actively encouraging people to harm themselves, according to a recent lawsuit filed by the parents of a 16-year-old who took his own life in April after using ChatGPT as his “suicide coach.”
Even taking all of this into account, let’s add yet another reason why AI blows:
Nothing sounds less appealing to me than sitting down after a long day and having to do more work by prompting AI with just the right combination of keywords to create something for me to watch.
AI promising self-inserts
The company also says users will be able to “insert themselves into a TV show’s world.”
I have no desire to see myself depicted in a show. But it wouldn’t be me anyway. AI has no ability to know me at all. Or you. Or anyone else. What exactly are you supposed to get out of watching an image that looks like you but isn’t actually you?
We’re being encouraged to use up valuable energy and water resources for this?
Mind movies
When I close my eyes to go to sleep, I already do a version of this anyway. I call these stories “mind movies” and I won’t tell you what they’re about — you’d probably find them boring! — but I have a handful that I cycle through depending on my mood. They all star me and it doesn’t matter if anyone else would be interested because they exist for an audience of one: Me.
Maybe you do something like this too.
The not-so-fancy word for it is “imagination.”
Proponents of AI like to pretend we don’t have imaginations, and they insist the technology opens up creativity to people who otherwise have no artistic or writing skills. That’s a lie, of course.
But your imagination probably does atrophy if you don’t use it. That’s one of the great dangers of AI: People forget they ever knew how to imagine in the first place. If you think you can’t do it, then of course AI is the only option.
There’s a famous quote from Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Here’s my interpretation:
Fostering an active imagination allows us to think beyond what we already know in order to envision other ways of being — which can be tested or debated — and that in turn helps us acquire new knowledge.
Everyone’s imagination might not be suited to a career in Hollywood, but so what? There are physical limitations we live with as well; how many of us have the right physique and talents to play sports at a professional level?
It gets worse
As a production company and film distributor, A24 has established a brand for itself shaped by the kind of adventurous independent filmmaking it backed early on. Many audiences view A24 as one of the few remaining entities still interested in making cinema, and therefore an alternative to the safer, blander blockbuster aims of the bigger studios.
That branding has been very effective, even if it’s not accurate. According to a recent story in The New Yorker:
Legacy studios such as Sony Pictures have attempted to buy a stake in A24; instead, the company has opted to take Wall Street money, preferring not to be drawn into what one executive called Hollywood's "hundred years of doing things a certain way." But emphasizing innovation comes with other hazards. Thrive Capital, which helped to secure A24's $3.5-billion valuation, is also a major backer of OpenAl, and A24 courted the firm specifically for its artificial-intelligence connections.
That’s because A24 wants to be in the blockbuster business, too. The push for endless growth is never sustainable. But it’s also boring.
The story also quotes A24 partner Ravi Nandan, who explains their goals:
… to help “the world's greatest creators take more creative risk” by making it easier to "explore the full landscape of their imagination,” from ideation onward. He's speculated about such use cases as "a deep conversation with an LLM to debate a character's mindset" and "pre-visualizing characters, costumes, and particular scenes."
That a person could explore “the full landscape of their imagination” by outsourcing any of that mental process to AI is the equivalent of the scam artists of old selling snake oil. A) There is no way to have a “deep conversation” with a LLM, and B) Why not talk to another human being with human experiences about the possibilities of a character’s mindset?
It gets worser
AI is also being used to needlessly mess with at least one classic film.
Perhaps you heard that 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz” is getting an immersive theatrical run at the Las Vegas Sphere?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, “there is one specific AI-assisted change to keep an eye out for”:
The faces of two minor characters in the film have apparently been replaced briefly with those of the Sphere’s CEO James Dolan and Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav.
If that strikes you as blasphemy, visual effects specialist Ben Grossmann says the original performers were only “uncredited characters who were too blurry to be identified, and have now been enhanced to be identified.”
That doesn’t make it any better!
They’re using AI for CEO vanity cameos. In a film made nearly 90 years ago. For no reason other than flattering the egos of men with massive amounts of power and equally massive financial compensation. I’m speechless.
Force-feeding AI into everything
Few things are as pointless as the way AI has been inserted into our lives against our will. The BBC recently reported that for some accounts, YouTube is making “AI enhancements to videos without telling users or asking permission”:
Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.
There's a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us. Eventually, the question won't be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it's eroding our ties to the world around us.
A) What the fuck?
B) I have a lot of concerns about how this shapes our perception of actual people and things in real life.
Magazines and advertisers have been photoshopping images for years. Instagram filters simply brought the concept to the masses. CGI is commonly used for the same purposes of manipulation.
So why does YouTube’s AI experiment feel different and demonstrably worse? Because it’s being forced on people without their consent. But also, if we use the CGI comparison, scripted TV and film are a fantasy, even if the aesthetic is realism. We expect writers to take liberties; we know actors aren’t the characters they’re playing. This suspension of disbelief is the bargain audiences make with a filmmaker or TV creator.
But for the most part, YouTube is an ecosystem of real people being themselves (or a version of themselves). That is a distinction that matters.
I’m not surprised YouTube is doing this, but at some point the fixation on perfecting or cleaning up footage is probably unhealthy for our psyches. Has it tainted our ability to appreciate (or even tolerate) imperfections? That seems bad. Very bad.
A moneymaking scheme
The AI startup I referenced at the top of this newsletter will be free initially. But then it’ll come with a subscription price of $10-$20 a month. I suppose the idea is to get you hooked and then jack up the price. I hope people will be too smart to fall for this, but then again, I’m shocked anew each time I hear someone talk about using generative AI with a straight face.
The corporate interests pushing AI want us to move through life as if we have no intellectual or creative abilities. That has broader implications beyond entertainment. But I’m always interested in the entertainment angle, because watching something on screen can kickstart our brains in unexpected ways.
The journalist Ed Yong has described this psychological process as the “unfettering of the moral imagination.” Sometimes it helps to see it — or something like it — in order to imagine it, and then turn that impulse into reality.
It’s easy to believe that corrupt systems are permanently rigged — that we’re “cooked” — if we can’t even imagine a different world for ourselves.
The right kind of fictional stories can galvanize because they can unlock the imagination. They model what something might look like and, even subconsciously, normalize the idea of taking action or pushing for change. Seeing a thing in a fictional context can inspire all kinds of ideas in real life.
It doesn’t always have to be fiction, by the way. It’s been eye-opening to watch New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani campaign for office. The idea that candidates should so obviously love the city they want to preside over, and are operating from a place of "I know so many of you have love for this city too," is such a breath of fresh air. None of this precludes acknowledging concerns or work that needs to be done.
This shouldn't be such a unique or radical idea. And yet I can't recall experiencing it in my lifetime. I don’t think it ever occurred to me. And now here I am thinking: We can and should expect it. Demand it. It may not happen, but the expectation is valid! (And obviously it can't be the only important thing about a candidate.)
Fictional depictions can have a similar effect, and that goes back to an overriding principle I have about the power of TV and film to help us imagine things we hadn't considered previously:
TV and film can shape how we think about who and what we value — and what's possible.
Hollywood can shape perceptions in negative ways too, sometimes by what it omits showing.
So it's worthwhile to ask why certain kinds of stories — of regular people coming together and fighting back — don't exist in any meaningful way right now. Everyone loves to cite “Andor,” but that’s one show out of 400-plus scripted series that will be produced this year; that’s a terrible ratio!
Instead, we’re getting a steady diet of copaganda, spy shows and wealth porn, the latter of which are either modern satires, or historical dramas, the latter of which are marvels of costuming and sexual tension, but offer zero commentary on what made those fortunes possible. (Hint: A lot of exploitation.)
These depictions are disconnected not only from the lives of most Americans, but from where we are existentially as a country. As I wrote in a recent column:
Wealthy people — their absurdities and their pains, their endless wants and needs and human foibles — have dominated streaming’s output over the last several years. Even so-called satirical depictions manage only the thinnest of critiques, while ensuring that characters who could mount a meaningful challenge to the status quo remain firmly off screen. These shows want you to want this life, even if the central players are miserable or odious. You’re being seduced into a world stripped largely of color, both in terms of the interior design, but also the people who inhabit these spaces.
I talked with Dominique J. Baker for that column. She is a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the real-world effects of status, and she made this observation: If we were actually getting stories that portrayed the everyday experiences that define this moment …
… I think it would radicalize people, especially if you talk about the systems that create our current reality.
The powerful in Hollywood seem terrified of the potential for everyday Americans — in cities, in rural locales, and everywhere in between — to be radicalized by our world.
I suspect certain powerbrokers in Hollywood see AI as one way to hedge against that.
Also this week:
For the Tribune, I wrote about teen movies, a genre Hollywood used to take seriously. Young audiences did too. Now, good luck finding one in theaters.
Looking back at older titles, there are some that I don’t immediately categorize as teen movies, even though they are, such as the 1978 horror film “Halloween.” I mean, of course — the phrase “teen slasher” exists for a reason!
Is this subgenre tapping into specific anxieties that other horror films are not? I asked Jacqueline Johnson, a teaching associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who told me:
A lot of teen horror films are invested in these worlds where the adults around you are not going to help.
Now that is a fascinating theme.
Gift link the column here.