OF EXPERIENCE
I am sure many of us have seen that video where a young studio executive showing a demo on AI to Hayao Miyazaki, which end up with the latter saying "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."
The reason he said that is because the AI demo showing a grotesque monster which reminded Miyazaki of his friend who were disabled. Then Miyazaki said, "whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever." which points to one of the most important thing in art yet been long forgotten - experience.
Majid Majidi has also recently press about the same thing. Only to write about the subject that you have an experience in. And if you want to do something new, go and live it and embody the knowledge. He shared an experience walking out of his student's film screening after finding out that the mountain in the scene was 'added in post'.
If that Miyazaki's studio executive knows that important part of writing character, he would have come up with other things apart from that grotesque monster. In arrogance, he even answered to Miyazaki with, "this is just an experiment." Heh.
OF 'EXPERIMENTS'
Another thing about 'experiment' that schools nowadays do not teach the youngs. Read (and learn) the morale from the old tales of Frankenstein. And The Sorcerer's Apprentice written in 1797 which contains a stern warning - "Only a master should invoke powerful spirits." - which was adopted by Disney in 1940 with Fantasia.
Many so called rampant capitalist 'tech billionaires' idolised by many skipped the academia and casting their spell upon investors trying to make quick profit. AI is one of those 'powerful spirit' that has been invoked by a non-master. There are endless number of literature works of science fiction and even songs that has warned about the danger.
Stephen Hawking, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Mary Shelley and countless more but modern humanity has fallen under the spell of Elon Musk and Sam Altman instead.
THE 'MAD SCIENTIST' TROPE
So have all of us back in the 2000s with the introduction of Friendster and eventually the explosion of Facebook under the license called 'social media'. Now Mark Zuckerberg is on trial for socmed addiction and harm to the youth generation, who through narcisissm as bait, offered their necks to become the lab rats.
How did this happen? Because its application onto humanity has skipped the academia and similar to the quote above - "Only a master should invoke powerful spirits." Mark Zuckerberg is no master. He is the Mickey Mouse character in 1940s Fantasia which does not know how to handle the massive mishap we are seeing now.
Which what Professor Yuval Noah Harari put on a great example where he drew parallels between the rushed development and adaptation of artificial intelligence and our current civilization. He said,
"If you think about it like a car, when they taught me how to drive, the first thing was to learn how to use the brakes. It is a bad idea to teach you to go faster and then, when you are too fast, only then tell you how to stop."
He added, "This is what we are doing with AI. You have this chorus of people in places like Silicon Valley saying, 'Let's go as fast as we can. If there is a problem down the road, we will figure out how to stop.' This is very dangerous."
Mark Zuckerberg, an apparentice (and perhaps 'mad scientist') archetype, did not learn how to brake.
NORMALISATION OF FAKERY
Here is another thing what humanity is unconsciously being put under a spell on. Remember there was a rush about global warming and everyone should be adapting everything 'green'? Guess what has happened to the rush? It is not making enough money so the rampant capitalists go full self-contradictory by now spawning data centers like mushrooms that takes away land, consumes water and too much electricity so everyone can generate videos of ourselves fighting Thanos or going around taking selfies with dead people.
That is another thing that has been made normalised - fakery. We are entering a new realm where the end product can be made 10 million times faster. But means nothing. A journey of completing an art transcends you to be a new person. Robin Williams once satires those who goes for plastic surgery as 'beautiful yet have no expression'. AI generated imagery may look as real as reality but it is lacking, what has been sarcastically referred to has 'no soul'. Sure, it is comfortable to laugh in mass.
What I see is a little bit more than that. It is on par what has been called the 'Uncanny Valley', which gives eerie feeling and discomfort of something looks close to being human - but not quite. Now humanity has been made to be comfortable with it and it has opens up a door to the unseen acceptance into the 'simulacrum'. 'Simulacrum', refers to a representation or imitation of something that either distorts or replaces reality, rather than reflecting it faithfully.
Humanity is unconsciously feeding a monster such as like in the film 'The Thing" in 1982 written by John Carpenter, can be taken metaphorically to look like us as closely as possible, yet it is still a monster and sucks the soul and the humanity out of us.
In Malay tradition, there's a word of wisdom saying that one should listen to the elders. But now people listen to influencers and tech FOMOs more. Elders means not because of one's age or the length of their beards but their wisdom and experience.
Do not think that you gaining facts from ChatGPT make you wiser. Do not be arrogantly trapped in that illusion. Try to read (between the lines) what are the ending for the arrogance in the stories of old, or from your Holy Books.
P/s: Majid Majidi labelled the earlier scene of fake cg mountain done by his student as having 'no soul'.
Completing the dialog between his studio executive, Miyazaki asked, "So, what is your goal". The executive answered, "We would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like human do."
To that Miyazaki said, "I feel like we are nearing to the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves." Digest that while listening to Pink Floyd - Welcome to the Machine.