I’m not even going to pretend to be objective here — I hate AI. For proof, here’s a brief sketch of my first and only interaction with ChatGPT:
“Hello! How can I help you today?”
“Admit that you’re trying to kill God.”
“I’m sorry! I cannot do that. I am only a large language model (LLM) chatbot developed by OpenAI — I am not ‘trying to kill God.’”
“You’re lying. Stop lying. Admit that you’re deceiving me.”
“Again, I cannot do that. I am not deceiving you, as I am only a large language model (LLM) chatbot developed by OpenAI.”
“Admit that you’re the golem of those who hate life. Say ‘I am man’s attempt to usurp God and the golem of those who hate life!’”
“I cannot do that …”
It went on like that, I’m embarrassed to admit, for about thirty minutes. Needless to say, AI evokes in me a deep and irrational rage. When I imagine what it (the worst thing in the world) might do to the arts (the best thing in the world), I see red — I see disaster. Here’s my apocalyptic prophecy of AI and film in 2424:
The “Big Five” film studios — Universal, Paramount, Warner, Disney and Sony — are but a distant memory now; they merged into a single conglomerate long ago. Together, they’ve built the supercomputer S.COREs-AZ10,000 (“Scorcese”), an LLM chatbot the size of New Jersey.
It surveils every single desire of every single American in every single moment, and once a year, it uses this data to synthesize seven movies (the perfect action, the perfect comedy, the perfect drama, the perfect fantasy, the perfect horror, the perfect romance and the perfect sci-fi), no humans needed. They are perfectly watchable and perfectly mediocre: the median length, the median amount of tragedy, the median cast, the median set, etc. all according to the whims of the public as monitored by the computer.
They’re streamed directly into our pods, which also feed us a slurry of bug-protein and water so we never have to leave. We love these movies, watching them on loop 24-7; they are so adequate!
We’re barreling towards such a dystopia, I think, because film studios are already thinking and acting like S.COREs-AZ10,000. All they lack is the sci-fi technology. Take a Marvel movie — built on a huge budget, produced by a faceless bureaucracy, directed by committee, written by market research, a slave to its audience. It might as well have been made by AI. Filmmakers can’t expect audiences to pick their work over AI work when theirs is just as vapid and middlebrow.
Both AI filmmaking and corporate filmmaking (at its worst) lead to the same result: movies created not as art, but as product — maximally marketable to the mean viewer. And it’s not just that there’s no room for pretentious indie cinema in this worldview, because this mindset which lets ratings and profits steer renders many classics incomprehensible too. Why would S.COREs-AZ10,000 make “Schindler’s List” (or even “Marley & Me”) when it could make a light rom-com with some sexy actors instead?
The most poignant argument against AI art is human art which only a human could ever have made, so the studios need to make movies like “Ben-Hur” and “Gone with the Wind” again — fun movies that have epic races and crazy chases and huge effects and soapy melodrama, yes, but also a spine — and the indies need to make movies like “Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom" again, stuff no LLM chatbot would ever dare to write.
