David Cronenberg thinks we should both fear and welcome AI
"The whole idea of actors and production will be gone. That’s the promise and the threat of artificial intelligence," the The Shrouds director said
Aux News David Cronenberg
AI could truly never make The Fly or Videodrome, but David Cronenberg still envisions a world in which the technology blots out Hollywood entirely. “You can imagine a screenwriter sitting there, writing the movie, and if that person can write it in enough detail, the movie will appear,” the legendary horror director said of his vision for the future at a Cannes press conference today (via Deadline). Instead of screenwriters or directors, these people will be called “prompters,” responsible only for setting up the AI with enough detail to spit out an entire film, he mused.
As well as sounding like the germ of an idea for an upcoming movie, this suggestion is, unfortunately, pretty spot on. TCLtv+ just released the first trailer for Next Stop Paris, the first-ever fully AI-generated movie. Right now, it still at least looks AI-generated in a way that could never replace the sort of visceral practical effects Cronenberg is so infamous for. (It should be noted that he also sent an offering to our incoming AI overlords by recognizing that computer-generated technology has made things like removing stray coffee cups from a shot “much easier.”) But regardless of the technology’s current, soulless aura, the seeds are clearly there. Who knows how fast it will evolve?
Cronenberg seems to think that the timeline will be pretty rapid. “The whole idea of actors and production will be gone. That’s the promise and the threat of artificial intelligence,” he continued. “Do we welcome that? Do we fear that? Both. It’s like nuclear fission, it’s ferocious and terrifying and it’s also incredibly useful. So, what do we do? I don’t know. I have no idea.” No wonder fellow horror auteur Alex Garland felt moved to include Oppenheimer’s infamous “I am become death” speech in Ex Machina, his own film about AI, all the way back in 2014.
For now, Cronenberg is still making his own movies. That includes his latest, The Shrouds, which explores some of these issues in the form of a new technology called GraveTech, invented by a grieving widower after the death of his wife to monitor the dead in their shrouds (per an official synopsis). This film was also deeply personal to Cronenberg in a way that technology could never reproduce. In an interview with Variety, the director explained that the film was partly inspired by the death of his wife, Carolyn, in 2017. They had been married for 43 years. “I don’t really think of art as therapy,” he said. “Grief is forever, as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t go away. You can have some distance from it, but I didn’t experience any catharsis making the movie.”
The Shrouds premiered at Cannes Monday night. It is still seeking U.S. distribution, but will be released in France September 25.
20 Comments
How can we have body horror after we all give up our bodies for the newest robotic model?
I hope Sam Altman gets violently, painfully fisted into prolapse by his sexbot.
He’d like that.
Yes and no.
This is not ever going to happen.
You don’t think AI could write the dreck that is “reality TV?”
As an avid reality TV viewer: Absolutely not. Reality TV relies on an element of human unpredictability you could never fake, despite all the other artifice.
I dunno, I feel like some of those shows could be the fever dream of hallucinating AI trained on nothing but pictures of duck lips and spray tans. The AI would just give them the major plot beats anyway. Or maybe just most of what MTV put on tv the last 20 years.Maybe the appeal is lost on me because I worked hard not to be surrounded by trashy people for the rest of my life. Take away the expensive gaudy trappings and plastic surgery, and they’re basically just Pennsyltucky drama I grew up around. No thanks.
Reality TV is appealing precisely because I otherwise avoid the types of folks you see on it. But I understand where you’re coming from.
AI thinks we should fear and welcome David Cronenberg.
No. Fuck that.
I love the logical disconnect where people assume AI will be better than them in so many ways but will somehow fail miserably at basic morality, because humans have knocked it out of the park so well with that one.Maybe you’re telling on yourself a bit if you think that your supreme competence logically leads to the removal of everyone else. You’re the best, remove the rest?
It has always been weird to me to jump to the conclusion that AI could become sentient, self-aware, and self-interested and yet not have some kind of capacity for moral intelligence. One of the chief problems with humans is that we retain so much obsolete programming from our hunter-gatherer days that now serves us badly as a species. I’m not sure that a hypothetical super-intelligence would do worse than us.
There’s no reason to assume that an artificial intelligence wouldn’t be psychopathic. Why would it have anything like empathy? What would govern its decisionmaking beyond sheer logic and self-interest?
I’m more worried about the use of AI as a tool in the hands of bad actors or maybe as something that is programmed to act independently from humans, but doesn’t really have any real sense of consciousness.
All these conversations depend upon what “consciousness” really is and where the boundaries are, but I’m assuming for the sake of argument that an AI could cross over into self-awareness, sentience, autonomy, whatever.
If we assume that it can independently assign value to its own survival, that it has motivations and desires, that would seem to me to have major implications about how it thinks about other life, as well. An AI presumably would have a a far more holistic understanding of…well, everything.
The thing about psychopathy is that, despite the existence of high functioning psychopaths, it is a form of dysfunction. They lack the capacity to understand the value of the larger picture beyond the self.
It is certainly possible that a sentient AI could be dysfunctional in this way. (And I guess it’s arguable whether from an AI’s perspective this would necessarily be a form of dysfunction.) And it’s technology, so god knows how buggy and imperfect it could potentially be. But it seems weird to me to assume that if an AI can make that big leap to self-interest, that it’s notion of self-interest would be so narrow.
I’m not an AI cheerleader. I do think it has the potential (likelihood?) to go very, very wrong, but I am less worried about Skynet than all that potentially comes before it.
I feel like you’re assuming that what we hold up as good moral values are some universal, intrinsic good, but in reality, what we consider decent and good are only considered good by us because we’re pack animals. Cooperation and cohesion are essential to our survival, so we hold values consistent with that to ensure we can bond with each other. We value sharing and don’t steal from each other so we can form trust between ourselves. We don’t kill each other because that would disrupt the pack and reduce our numbers. We treat each other with respect and don’t bully because we need to like each other.Obviously we don’t all live up to that all the time, but even the worst person out there still recognises the basics as ‘good morals’. But what good is any of that to a machine that doesn’t need a pack to survive?
You’re right—to some extent I am assuming, or at least positing the possibility, that there is some form of…moral sense to the universe, although I take all your points. Certainly not in the sense of a higher power. I acknowledge that human morality both has a large element of subjectivity and fluidity and serves a utility in terms of survival. But my feeling is that emergence of life, consciousness, and a species that looks for larger meaning may suggest something about the nature of the universe. Generally speaking, there seems to be a moral progression in humanity that increasingly understands existence in terms of interconnection. (Don’t get me wrong—we regularly fail to live up to our best insights.) Part of this is a more enlightened understanding of what we need to sustain our own species, but I’d argue it suggests that an expanding sense of a “common good” is somehow inherently rational.
Cronenberg welcomes the new flesh? I for one am shocked!
…Oppenheimer’s infamous “I am become death” speech…Yes of course, we all know Oppenheimer wrote those famous lines. /s
Did anyone else watch that “Next Stop Paris” trailer? Cronenberg is right that’s alarmingly passable. And to any who disagree compare it with a Hallmark Christmas movie trailer. Remember this is in it’s infancy and remember how quick we as a society are at technology booms. Jeeeesus. What a sad time to be an artist.