Artificial stupidity
Humans are smart. Unfortunately, humans are also annoying, trite, boring, unimaginative, clichéd, derivative, etc, etc, etc. AI seemingly thrives off all of these worst aspects.
Image credit: The Fly (1986)
Along with “Cheeseburger!”, Jeff Goldblum gives us one other fantastic line in The Fly (1986):
“Computers are dumb. They only know what you tell them.”
On the ever-present topic of Artificial Intelligence, I find myself returning to the wisdom of Mr Goldblum. Our collective timelines flooded by thousands of computer generated ‘artworks’, we seem to have accepted the phrase artificial intelligence as a literal definition rather than a nifty nickname. The newest contender in the AI ‘art’ scene — the “AI Generated Movie Trailer” — exemplifies this mystification of computer generated imagery. Spread across Twitter and Instagram by the usual suspects of crypto-bros and NFT refugees, the most prolific and vile of these has of course been “Lord of the Rings by Wes Anderson”, a compilation of Anderson’s most obvious formal aspects — symmetrical compositions, ensemble casts, twee imagery — applied to Middle Earth. After it’s release, a tidal wave of copycats and sequels have joined in a race to the bottom of who can make the most uninspired, faux-homage to their favorite film or director.
Much like Goldblum, we have climbed into a machine of our own making and now must suffer the consequences. Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme.
It would be neither interesting nor original for me to sound off about the glaring flaws and offensive mundanity of AI technology. Smarter people have already made greater strides than I ever could in pointing out how it is neither artificial — as in the case of OpenAI outsourcing to underpaid workers — or genuinely intelligent. Angrier people, too — the many artists and writers insulted by the use of AI in their place — have also wasted no time razing the technology to the ground.
But the luddite-esque case against AI is equally flawed. In many cases it’s an extremely handy tool in any creative process to be able to know at any time how a computer would write a sentence, paint a picture, or make a movie. It’s only a problem when the computer's work is credited as the art itself, or worse: as a person’s.
I’ll return to The Fly. Though the one ultimately destroyed by it, Goldblum has perhaps one of the best and simplest understanding of technology. He sees his hyper-advanced teleportation machine no differently to how he sees a spade. While one can solve mathematical equations to de- and re-materialise human matter, rewrite genetic code, and birth the films uniquely Cronenburgian monster, at its most basic form it is the same as the spade: both are devices created to perform a function. The horror of Goldblum’s fate, as the film sees it, is not his irresponsible advancement of technology, but the horror of being trapped within a flawed body that is constantly decomposing and mutating. With AI we suffer the same fate: the technology is new, but the dilemma it seemingly causes comes from something much older.
The root of the problem is much larger than Artificial Intelligence, these derivatively derivative creations only reflect a larger culture of rehashing and reminiscence. It’s easy to point the finger at AI because the one thing a computer is great at is replicating; all AI art is essentially just compilations of pre-existing content. The dilemma of AI is cultural, not technological. Only in our uniquely nostalgic milieu could we have the power to create anything we could possibly imagine and produce with it a remake of a blockbuster franchise.
Computers are dumb. They are machines that — like all machines — operate off human input. Humans are smart. Unfortunately, humans are also annoying, trite, boring, unimaginative, clichéd, derivative, etc, etc, etc. AI seemingly thrives off all of these worst aspects.
The reason you see a million trailers for “Star Wars directed by Tim Burton” and not one “Bridget Jones’ Diary directed by Michael Haneke” is because
A computer is too dumb to do that
The people making “AI Generated Movie Trailers” don’t actually watch movies
A machine is only a reflection of the person who uses it. The revelation that earth is inhabited by some seriously annoying, unoriginal losers should be no shock to anyone.