AI Bad

That's it.

Natasha Lyonne is a pretty good actor. The first season of Russian Doll is perfect.¹ She’s great in the first few seasons of Orange is the New Black, even if there’s a non-zero chance that show is somehow still on. And she’s made some interesting and fun choices from the underrated His Three Daughters to the shlocky Poker Face to her critical role at John Mulaney’s intervention. And so, it brings me no happiness to report that Lyonne has entered the disreputable list of Aerial Shot Villains.

Over the past few months, Lyonne and her boyfriend, Bryn Mooser, have been on an immoral press tour for the ages, pushing the oxymoronic “ethical AI,” which is a slap in the face to the writing and acting strikes that were partially created to fight back against artificial intelligence encroaching into Hollywood, stealing real humans’ jobs and creating hack content for a cheaper price even if there’s no there there.

Always trying to cut corners to satisfy a ridiculous capitalistic mindset, CEOs are laying off countless people and replacing them with these uncanny recreations to make a quick buck and appease stockholders, even when the work is ultimately hurt and the creativity is diminished by these bloodsucking programs that rob instead of create.

This has been clear for quite some time, but it’s still startling to read something so outright appalling in Vulture, which uses Lyonne as the conduit for how rancid things are becoming.

It seems pretty obvious that studios and corporations learned absolutely nothing from the strike and are admitting that they’ve been sitting back, waiting until the furor calms down, and then they’ll start pushing things to the extreme. For example:

When I asked Valenzuela which other films in theaters or on streaming had used Runway, he hesitated. “I don’t think I can say,” he said. Privately, he was in substantial conversation — or active collaboration — with every major studio in Hollywood.

One studio executive told me most studios were too afraid of the unions to go public. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, said he had been struck by how cautiously studios have moved in the wake of the strikes. One provision the union secured was a standing agreement to meet with each major studio every six months for an update on how it was using generative AI. Crabtree-Ireland told me he had observed most studios taking steps that extended beyond the union’s contractual demands, setting up internal ethics boards and legal reviews. As far as he was aware, they seemed to be using AI not to replace performers but to enhance editing, clean up sound, and smooth over visual inconsistencies — for the moment, anyway. This restraint, he suggested, might well prove temporary — a strategic pause while studios wait for the public furor over AI to cool and the law to catch up.

It comes in waves. First, it’s the Google/search-function AI, something that no one asked for and is frequently wrong. Then, there are programs you can go to that’ll do your own work for you,² making everyone slightly dumber. There are the AI video prompts stealing from visionaries like Wes Anderson and Studio Ghibli, turning everything into this muck. And the enshittification continues as quantity matters so much more than quality.

As an AI Ceo asks in the piece, “If audiences want more blockbusters, we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half.” No one’s asking for more blockbusters. Have you seen some of the shit in theaters? There’s a new Disney live-action movie seemingly every month, a run-of-the-mill superhero story every quarter and a garbage streaming movie, such as Fountain of Youth, available at a moment’s notice. Instead of making more and more and more, maybe let’s just focus on making something good.

There’s something brain-dead about making something people like and then turning around and trying something like the following idea from Lionsgate’s Michael Burns: “‘Now we can say, ‘Do it in anime, make it PG-13.’ Three hours later, I’ll have the movie.’ He would have to pay the actors and all the other rights participants, he added — ‘but I can do that, and now I can resell it.’” It’s all about a few dollars. No matter who you have to sell out. Always.

Something like Sinners breaking through is a borderline miracle, especially when you add on that Ryan Coogler has stated that he has no desire to make a sequel. If the studio has full rights to Sinners, there’d be a Dune-esque prestige miniseries on the way, as well as multiple movies in the works from Remmick’s backstory to Stack and Mary’s exploits over the 20th century. AI would run this into the ground, as it does with every concept it gets its grubby paws on.

Enough tech bros and corporate moneymen are trying to push this art-killing machine, but it hurts when the actual artists sell out and give up their cultural cache to make a quick buck and push something that will ultimately destroy livelihoods. James Cameron and Darren Aronofsky are two filmmakers mentioned in the Vulture piece who have sold their souls for a slice of the AI pie.

I’m currently writing about movies, and yet, this could just as easily be a treatise on journalism and writing in general. Do you know how many people I know who use ChatGPT for cover letters, break-up texts and personal emails? It’s depressing. And the more and more people use these products, the more these companies think they can get away with.

The magazine feature ends as all AI stories must, with something so gross and poorly thought out that it almost feels scripted from a horror movie.

Not long ago, Lyonne had an opportunity to speak with David Lynch, one of the giants of a previous generation of filmmakers and an early convert to digital cameras. Before he died, Lynch had been her neighbor. One day last year, she asked him for his thoughts on AI. Lynch picked up a pencil. “Natasha,” he said. “This is a pencil.” Everyone, he continued, has access to a pencil, and likewise, everyone with a phone will be using AI, if they aren’t already. “It’s how you use the pencil,” he told her. “You see?”

That’s right. Lyonne’s using a beloved, recently deceased filmmaker to push her AI company’s ethics. We can’t fact-check the quote unless you have a working ouija board, and there’s no way to check with David Lynch to see what exactly he meant by this secondhand quote and where he stands on AI in general. It’s putting words into a dead guy’s mouth. Classy stuff.

There’s something really poetic about stealing from someone else’s life to push your own wicked agenda. It makes sense that Lyonne’s one of the new faces of AI.

1. I never watched S2, because it should’ve ended where it originally ended.

2. This Intelligencer story is as bleak as it gets.