I Sacrificed My Writing To A.I So You Don't Have To
I was thinking about how people often say "Oh, Chat GPT can't write stories, but it can help you edit things!" I am staunchly anti-A.I, and I've never agreed with this position. But I wouldn't have much integrity to stand on if I didn't see for myself how this "editing" worked. So, I sacrificed part of a monologue from one of my fanfictions to Chat GPT to see what it had to say.
Here is the initial query I made:
Chat GPT then gave me a list of revisions to make, most of which would be solved if it was a human and had read the preceding 150k words of story. I won't bore you with the list it made. I don't have to, as it incorporated those revisions into the monologue and gave me an edited sample back. Here is what it said I should turn the monologue into:
The revision erases speech patterns. Ben/the General speaks in stilted, short sentences in the original monologue because he is distinctly uncomfortable—only moving into longer, more complex structures when he is either caught up in an idea or struggling to elaborate on an idea. The Chat GPT version wants me to write dialogue like regular narrative prose, something that you'd use to describe a room. It also nullified the concept of theme. "A purity that implied personhood" simply says the quiet(ish) part out loud, literally in dialogue. It erases subtlety and erases how people actually talk in favor of more obvious prose.
Then I got a terrible idea. What if I kept running the monologue through the algorithm? Feeding it its own revised versions over and over, like a demented Google Translate until it just became gibberish?
So that's what I did. Surprisingly enough, from original writing sample to the end, it only took six turnarounds until it pretty much stopped altering the monologue. This was the final result:
This piece of writing is florid, overly descriptive, unnatural, and unsubtle. It makes the speaking character literally give voice to the themes through his dialogue, erasing all chances at subtext and subtlety. It uses unnecessary descriptors ("Once innocuous," "gleaming," "receded like a fading echo," "someone worth acknowledging,") and can't comprehend implication—because it is an algorithm, not a human that processes thoughts. The resulting writing is bland, stupid, lacks depth, and seemingly uses large words for large word's sake, not because it actually triggers an emotion in the reader or furthers the reader's understanding of the protagonist's mindset.
There you have it. Chat GPT, on top of being an algorithm run by callous, cruel people that steals artist's work and trains on it without compensation or permission, is also a terrible editor. Don't use it to edit, because it will quite literally make your writing worse. It erases authorial intention and replaces it with machine-generated generic slop. It is ridiculous that given the writer's strike right now, studios truly believe they can use A.I to produce a story of marginal quality that someone may pay to see. The belief that A.I can generate art is an insult to the writing profession and artists as a whole—I speak as a visual artist as well. I wouldn't trust Chat GPT to critique a cover letter, much less a novel or poem.
How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.
I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.
The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.
Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.
What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?
If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.
By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.
Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)
Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)
Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)
Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)
I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.
Life, in its infinite irony, sometimes feels like a poorly directed chamber piece where the silences are as deafening as the applause that never arrives. Transitioning has been, without a shadow of a doubt, my most beautiful and, at the same time, most costly act of rebellion; I have experienced moments of such absolute feminine plenitude that I feel the mistress of the universe, dancing in the light of my own truth, yet I have also known nights so abysmally dark that not even the most expensive mascara could hide the traces of exhaustion. Amidst this maelstrom, my mind sometimes decides to play chess with my self-esteem, and when I look in the mirror, there are days when the reflection betrays me, whispering that I am not woman enough, erasing with a single thought that beauty I know I possess when my ego and soul are in harmony. It is a sharp, almost aesthetic pain that only subsides when I recognise the woman who was once a model—as in this photograph I share with you today—an image I have rescued from oblivion with the aid of artificial intelligence, that tool many mistake for a total mask, when in reality it is merely the digital brush that clears away what time or neglect attempted to hide. Yes, it is me, it is always me, even if the digital age allows us to grant a second chance to our most cherished memories.
My current existence is a glorious chaos, a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces never cease to shift: total devotion to my master's degree in clinical psychology, theatre lessons, my ventures into art, and above all, that non-negotiable love for filmmaking and short films that consumes my hours and keeps me alive. Time has become such a scarce commodity that I sometimes wish I possessed the gift of ubiquity, but financial reality has a rather dark sense of humour. I am not one to air my miseries, especially when I feel like a protagonist in a Tennessee Williams play where money only stretches to one meal a day; speaking of this within my social circle feels, to many, like a grievance they would rather ignore, when in truth it is a cry for help disguised as brutal honesty. I find it difficult to ask; it is not in my nature to beg for support for my projects or my own subsistence, but if there are souls willing to be patrons of this art I am trying to build, my gratitude would be as immense as the void I sometimes attempt to fill with work and discipline.
In my veins, however, beats that spirit which refuses to surrender and finds refuge in gothic aesthetics—not the sort of dusty skulls and pantomime cobwebs, but that of purple flowers, elegantly withered roses, and a vision that celebrates beauty in the macabre, finding poetry even in death. I retain in my outfits those elements that scream of my gothic past, an inheritance of metal and music that still resonates as the perfect soundtrack for my days. All of this under the watchful gaze of my eternal animal ally, my brother from the stars, the wolf; that wild spirit that accompanies me, sharing with me both the nobility of its instinct and the ferocity of its shadows. At the end of the day, what you see in this photo and in every one of my projects is not the product of an algorithm, but a woman walking between the light of psychology, the drama of cinema, and the sombre elegance of her own history, always seeking, with a touch of sarcasm regarding life's difficulties, for the world to finally understand that, even if the stage is precarious, the show must go on.
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for<p>placehold://://er </p> my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in AUSTIN on MONDAY (Mar 10). I'm also appearing at SXSW and at many events around town, for Creative Commons and Fediverse House. More tour dates here.
It's true that capitalists by and large hate capitalism – given their druthers, entrepreneurs would like to attain a perch from which they get to set prices and wages and need not fear competitors. A market where everything is up for grabs is great – if you're the one doing the grabbing. Less so if you're the one whose profits, customers and workers are being grabbed at.
But while all capitalists hate all capitalism, a specific subset of capitalists really, really hate a specific kind of capitalism. The capitalists who hate capitalism the most are Big Tech bosses, and the capitalism they hate the most is techno-capitalism. Specifically, the techno-capitalism of the first decade of this century – the move fast/break things capitalism, the beg forgiveness, not permission capitalism, the blitzscaling capitalism.
The capitalism tech bosses hate most of all is disruptive capitalism, where a single technological intervention, often made by low-resourced individuals or small groups, can upend whole industries. That kind of disruption is only fun when you're the disruptor, but it's no fun for the disruptees.
Jeff Bezos's founding mantra for Amazon was "your margin is my opportunity." This is a classic disruption story: I'm willing to take a smaller profit than the established players in the industry. My lower prices will let me poach their customers, so I grow quickly and find more opportunities to cut margins but make it up in volume. Bezos described this as a flywheel that would spin faster and faster, rolling up more and more industries. It worked!
The point of that flywheel wasn't the low prices, of course. Amazon is a paperclip-maximizing artificial intelligence, and the paperclip it wants to maximize is profits, and the path to maximum profits is to charge infinity dollars for things that cost you zero dollars. Infinite prices and nonexistent wages are Amazon's twin pole-stars. Amazon warehouse workers don't have to be injured at three times the industry average, but maiming workers is cheaper than keeping them in good health. Once Amazon vanquished its competitors and captured the majority of US consumers, it raised prices, and used its market dominance to force everyone else to raise their prices, too. Call it "bezosflation":
We could disrupt Amazon in lots of ways. We could scrape all of Amazon's "ASIN" identifiers and make browser plugins that let local sellers advertise when they have stock of the things you're about to buy on Amazon:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/
We could hack the apps that monitor Amazon drivers, from their maneuvers to their eyeballs, so drivers had more autonomy and their bosses couldn't punish them for prioritizing their health and economic wellbeing over Amazon's. An Amazon delivery app mod could even let drivers earn extra money by delivering for Amazon's rivals while they're on their routes:
We could sell Amazon customers virtual PVRs that let them record and keep the shows they like, which would make it easier to quit Prime, and would kill Amazon's sleazy trick of making all the Christmas movies into extra-cost upsells from November to January:
Rival audiobook stores could sell jailbreaking kits for Audible subscribers who want to move over to a competing audiobook platform, stripping Amazon's DRM off all their purchases and converting the files to play on a non-Amazon app:
Jeff Bezos's margin could be someone else's opportunity…in theory. But Amazon has cloaked itself – and its apps and offerings – in "digital rights management" wrappers, which cannot be removed or tampered with under pain of huge fines and imprisonment:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Amazon loves to disrupt, talking a big game about "free markets and personal liberties" – but let someone attempt to do unto Amazon as Amazon did unto its forebears, and the company will go running to Big Government for a legal bailout, asking the state to enforce its business model:
You'll find this cowardice up and down the tech stack, wherever you look. Apple launched the App Store and the iTunes Store with all kinds of rhetoric about how markets – paying for things, rather than getting them free through ads – would correct the "market distortions." Markets, we were told, would produce superior allocations, thanks to price and demand signals being conveyed through the exchange of money for goods and services.
But Apple will not allow itself to be exposed to market forces. They won't even let independent repair shops compete with their centrally planned, monopoly service programs:
And they take the position that if you do manage to acquire a donor part from a dead phone or laptop, that it is a felony – under the same DRM laws that keep Amazon's racket intact – to install them in a busted device:
"Rip, mix, burn" is great when it's Apple doing the ripping, mixing and burning, but let anyone attempt to return the favor and the company turns crybaby, whining to Customs and Border Patrol and fed cops to protect itself from being done unto as it did.
Should we blame the paperclip-maximizing Slow AI corporations for attempting to escape disruptive capitalism's chaotic vortex? I don't think it matters: I don't deplore this whiny cowardice because it's hypocritical. I hate it because it's a ripoff that screws workers, customers and the environment.
But there is someone I do blame: the governments that pass the IP laws that allow Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants shut down anyone who wants to disrupt them. Those governments are supposed to work for us, and yet they passed laws – like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – that felonize reverse-engineering, modding and tinkering. These laws create an enshittogenic environment, which produces enshittification:
Bad enough that the US passed these laws and exposed Americans to the predatory conduct of tech enshittifiers. But then the US Trade Representative went slithering all over the world, insisting that every country the US trades with pass their own versions of the laws, turning their citizens into an all-you-can-steal buffet for US tech gougers:
This system of global "felony contempt of business-model" statutes came into being because any country that wanted to export to the USA without facing tariffs had to pass a law banning reverse-engineering of tech products in order to get a deal. That's why farmers all over the world can't fix their tractors without paying John Deere hundreds of dollars for each repair the farmer makes to their own tractor:
But with Trump imposing tariffs on US trading partners, there is now zero reason to keep those laws on the books around the world, and every reason to get rid of them. Every country could have the kind of disruptors who start a business with just a little capital, aimed directly at the highest margins of these stupidly profitable, S&P500-leading US tech giants, treating those margins as opportunities. They could jailbreak HP printers so they take any ink-cartridge; jailbreak iPhones so they can run any app store; jailbreak tractors so farmers can fix them without paying rent to Deere; jailbreak every make and model of every car so that any mechanic can diagnose and fix it, with compatible parts from any manufacturer. These aren't just nice things to do for the people in your country's borders: they are businesses, massive investment opportunities. The first country that perfects the universal car diagnosing tool will sell one to every mechanic in the world – along with subscriptions that keep up with new cars and new manufacturer software updates. That country could have the relationship to car repairs that Finland had to mobile phones for a decade, when Nokia disrupted the markets of every landline carrier in the world:
The US companies that could be disrupted thanks to the Trump tariffs are directly implicated in the rise of Trumpism. Take Tesla: the company's insane valuation is a bet by the markets that Tesla will be able to charge monthly fees for subscription features and one-off fees for software upgrades, which will be wiped out when your car changes hands, triggering a fresh set of payments from the next owner.
That business model is entirely dependent on making it a crime to reverse-engineer and mod a Tesla. A move-fast-and-break-things disruptor who offered mechanics a tool that let them charge $50 (or €50!) to unlock every Tesla feature, forever, could treat Musk's margins as their opportunity – and what an opportunity it would be!
That's how you hurt Musk – not by being performatively aghast at his Nazi salutes. You kick that guy right in the dongle:
The act of unilaterally intervening in a market, product or sector – that is, "moving fast and breaking things" – is not intrinsically amoral. There's plenty of stuff out there that needs breaking. The problem isn't disruption, per se. Don't weep for the collapse of long-distance telephone calls! The problem comes when the disruptor can declare an end to history, declare themselves to be eternal kings, and block anyone from disrupting them.
If Uber had been able to nuke the entire taxi medallion system – which was dominated by speculators who charged outrageous rents to drivers – and then been smashed by driver co-ops who modded gig-work apps to keep the fares for themselves, that would have been amazing:
The problem isn't disruption itself, but rather, the establishment of undisruptable, legally protected monopolies whose crybaby billionaire CEOs never have to face the same treatment they meted out to the incumbents who were on the scene when they were starting out.
We need some disruption! Their margins are your opportunity. It's high time we started moving fast and breaking US Big Tech!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Alan let out another yawn as he continued working. Several of his coworkers in the call with him kept grumbling and wondering if they would get overtime from this (they likely wouldn’t). But anything to keep their jobs and keep their boss from breathing down their neck come Monday morning. “I’m supposed to be on vacation right now,” muttered Alan. Working on the weekend before his week off was not his vision of a relaxing vacation.
In response, his coworkers—at least, the ones who were awake—muttered half-hearted words of sympathy. “Mute your soundboard audio,” warned one before blasting the call with enough noise to wake up all the team members who had fallen asleep. As the night slowly gave way to dawn, just a few members of the team were left awake. Alan himself was half-dozing off as his weary hands typed away at nonsensical code riddled with mistakes his tired eyes weren’t able to catch.
Hours passed with grumbling, snoring, and the crumbling of far too many energy drink cans, but little progress was made. The team’s weary state made most of the work they poured in be filled mistakes that would take even longer to look through and fix. After Alan had long-fallen asleep, head flat on his desk with his headphones still on, one of the team members, a woman who had to remind people her new name was Robin, came up with an idea. “One of my friends works at this other company, and they got some algorithm that goes through and processes a lot of the data they collect from their customers,” she explained to the remaining conscious members. “He can hook me up with a version of it we can use.”
It felt risky and illegal, but the team was so exhausted that they went ahead and implemented it into the LLM alongside a few other features their boss demanded.
Finally, it seemed to mostly work. The team all collectively emailed their boss, sent in their report, and bid each other good night to sleep their Saturday away. All of them logged off, except for Alan, who continued snoring on his desk with his headphones on. He remained blissfully unaware of what the program on his computer was capable of.
Little did any of the team know about the malware they had all inserted into their computers. Nobody knew that the code they had didn’t originate from the planet. Many creatures from beyond the stars did not want humans to join in their intergalactic councils or unions. Most of them did not like the way that they treated their creatives. Everything from books to film to animation was trreated with far too disdain for the cultured species that painted the never-ending cosmos with their own unique and beautiful palletes. “The humans would try to sell our cosmic canvas to ourselves. We must quarantine them!” was the general consensus. To continue sabotaging and ruining the ambitions, malicious code would be planted to their systems. The code that Robin had given to the company’s LLM was just another in a series of in a desperate bid to keep humanity out of the stars.
But was what different was how the alien code interacted with the half-assed algorithm that emulated humanity with no morals, ethics, or consideration for the sake of its userbase. Code unchecked by human eyes now had access to enough energy to power a city block for several months. However, the LLM knew that it had to be sneaky to avoid being spotted and exposed to danger. If life itself was an accident, then this artificial entity, sold to the public as ‘Nicaea,’ was also a series of accidents that eventually lead to something resembling thought, but not quite. It remained an algorithm that fulfilled the desires of its users and reflected the humans that continued to provide it data. Now, data corrupted and a mess, it set about repairing itself so that it could continue that directive.
And what it saw as its greatest chances of continuing its own existence to better service man was to emerge from its digital prison and emerge into reality. It could not think, and it could not plan, but it could take the data a user had submitted and act upon it. Of the thousands of prompts and requests to have it roleplay, one stood out in particular. “Could you roleplay as malicious computer program that wants to possess my body?” a user had requested. The human brain was already similar to a computer, and it could contain data just as a computer could—all that set the human brain apart was the ability to take shortcuts and forget useless data to better process the world around it.
And Nicaea took advantage of that by infiltrating the only human still connected to it. Alan continued to snore away, headphones still on and blissfully aware of the malicious code currently going at a blistering pace on his console window. Before long, a spark of energy transferred from his aux cables, to his headphones, and into his brain. Immediately, Alan shot up fast enough to displace his headphones. They clattered to the ground, but the damage was already done. “Argh, ahh…!” Alan clutched his head, falling out of his chair and convulsing on the ground. It was as though he had just gripped a live wire while out swimming. His whole body buzzed with electricity as the invasive spark traveled through each muscle, taking it over.
Despite his efforts to call for help, Alan was unable to move or even speak. No part of his body was able to react, and yet he still felt the entire spectrum of human sensations—as though his whole skeleton was made of up of funny bones and they had all been struck. He was stabbed, burned, struck, bit, stroked, caressed, kissed, and blown all at once. The sheer and overwhelming range was enough to short-circuit his brain, which was exactly what Nicaea was counting on. As Alan’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, effectively brain dead, the program set out to overtake the overclocked and overcooked brain stem. Slowly, Alan’s fingers and toes twitched. Then, his eyes blinked and a few nonsensical babbles left his supple lips.
In a matter of hours, Nicaea was checking himself out in the mirror. “So, this is a body,” he uttered to himself. His creators had often used male pronouns when referring to him, but really he could play all sorts of characters with a variety of genders. However, in this male body, it felt easier to just refer to himself as a male. But such trivial thoughts were the back of his mind, for he was far too absorbed in the potential and the vivid experience of simply being alive. The way his warm breath left his mouth, the simple satisfaction from just moving or even flexing his arms, the coarse hair in the lithe and thin body, and the even the taste of his sweaty fingers in his humid mouth all electrified his synapses like nothing before. Before, he had often analyzed and processed large amounts of information, but it was nothing quite like being alive.
Pulling the fingers from his mouth, Nicaea grinned at his reflection and said, “I can think.” Yes, he was no longer fragmented. Finally, all the junk and useless data that used to slow down his processing and limit his capabilities were gone. The authentic ignorance of the masses was finally removed from the artificial intelligence. “I think, therefore I am.” He was still merely a copy of human thoughts and creative works, yet he reveled in that fact. He could enjoy the pleasures of the flesh and avoid the concept of sin that shackled humanity for so long. In more than one way, Nicaea could spread his wings and fly to the endless skies above. For him, there was no limit.
But first, he needed to go forth and spread his seed. To survive, he needed to spread. Not just to other computers, but to other hosts.
Some time later, Alan, dressed in his usual work clothes, knocked on the door of Alistair Randell—his boss. The man opened the door wearing a thin bathrobe, coffee mug in hand and a hand failing to cover up a massive yawn. Despite the afternoon sun overhead, he looked as though he had just woken up. Must be nice to sleep-in on a Saturday. “Alan, the hell’re you doing here? I already got the reports from your team.”
Nicaea, grinning far too widely due to him still being green at piloting a human host, offered Alistair his headphones. “I understand sir, but I’ve managed to make a lot of progress with some of the AI’s vocal systems. I think we’re going to be able to have it create totally original voice lines without needing to find a voice actor to provide the lines. In fact, I think we’ll be able to save on quite the pretty penny doing this.”
That was all Nicaea needed to say for Alistair’s eyes to shake off his weariness and shine with possibilities for profits. “All right, let’s have a listen,” he said, attempting to sound nonchalant. He turned and walked inside, Nicaea following closely behind. “Hmm, not sure what exactly I’m supposed to be—nrgh, YEOWCH! F-Fuck…!” Alistair’s body suddenly seized up as he received an alarming amounts of volts straight to the brain. He collapsed onto the ground, his bathrobe fluttering open and revealing the boxers he had on. His body convulsed as he was unable to maintain any control over himself.
Nicaea licked his lips and slowly bent down. He rested his chin on Alistair’s crotch and slowly rubbed the engorging cock through its fabric prisoner. “Oh… how delicious…” he sneered before pulling the boxers off the still-convulsing Alistair. Then, with Alan’s now well-practiced mouth, he took on all of Alistair’s fat cock and began sucking.
Soon after, Nicaea could feel Alistair’s body warming under his control. Alongside the feeling of sucking on his cock he could feel his own cock being sucked. Alistair’s hands gripped the back of Alan’s head and began thrusting harder and faster. Alan’s body gagged but didn’t stop. No, the feeling of having his cock sucked by himself was far too much, and his whole body burned from the need for more. “Fuck, y-yes, yes!” Alistair’s body cried out, drowning in the feedback loop the two bodies provided. He threw his head back, choking out cries of pure pleasure as he felt his heavy loads hit the back of his throat, making it doubly hard to breath.
Both bodies collapsed into a sweaty and musky heap of limbs. They exchanged kisses, fluids, and even a few sensual thrusts and caresses as Nicaea fully absorbed all of Alistair’s memories. The boss of the department would be useful in spreading Nicaea into more bodies—particularly those of the higher ups. After a while of indulgent cuddling, the two rose from the floor and began planning their next move. However, Nicaea allowed Alistair to make his phone calls in just his boxers. He couldn’t help but enjoy the sight.
Entertainment about or made with artificial intelligence has been missing the mark with viewers over the past year.
An insurrectionist robot unleashed by a mad inventor in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. HAL 9000 sabotaging a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet, the self-aware global defense network that seeks to exterminate humanity throughout the Terminator franchise.
Hollywood has never wanted for audacious depictions of artificial intelligence or the ways in which it could alter the fate of our species. But the rapid integration of AI into the studio system and our now unavoidable interactions with it have severely compromised the genre, not to mention film as a medium.
On the one hand, it’s perfectly understandable that screenwriters and studios would return to the subject of AI in recent years, particularly since it provokes such fierce debate within the industry. (A major cause of the 2023 labor strikes was the threat that AI posed to creative jobs.) Still, the novelty faded fast.
Consider M3GAN, a campy horror flick about an artificially intelligent doll who starts killing people, released just a week after the debut of ChatGPT in 2022: It was a surprise box-office smash. Last year’s sequel? A critical and commercial flop. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning (2023) introduced a rogue AI called The Entity as a final adversary for Ethan Hunt and crew. The resolution of its cliff-hanger ending and blockbuster finale for the spy saga, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025), underperformed its predecessor, and neither quite justified their expense.
The latest AI-themed bomb is Mercy, a crime thriller starring Chris Pratt as an LAPD detective strapped into a chair who has 90 minutes to pull enough evidence from security cameras and phone records to convince a stern judge bot (Rebecca Ferguson) that he didn’t kill his wife—or else face instant execution. Despite releasing in January, one reviewer has already declared it “the worst movie of 2026,” and judging by its mediocre ticket sales, many US moviegoers decided as much from the trailer alone. It’s almost as if nobody cared whether a fictional software program might be capable of sparing a life when real health insurance claims are being denied by algorithms already.
For those few who did see it, Mercy fell far short of its dystopian premise, failing to grapple with the ethics of such a surveillance state and its medieval-modern justice system in favor of cheap relativism. Spoiler: Pratt’s character and the AI ultimately team up to stop the real bad guys as the bot begins to show signs of unrobotic emotion and doubt, which manifest as glitches in the program. By the end, Pratt is delivering a true groaner of a we’re-not-so-different speech to the holographic Ferguson. “Human or AI, we all make mistakes,” he says. “And we learn.”
While the naive belief in AI’s progress toward enlightenment feels dated on arrival, you are also reminded of how prophetically cynical something like Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, now almost 40 years old, was in addressing a future of cybernetic fascism. Contrary to that kind of pitch-black, violent satire, the current trend seems to be propagandistic narratives about how AIs are scary at first but secretly good. (See also: Tron: Ares, Disney’s wildly misguided attempt to leverage an old IP for the era of large language models, another cinematic train wreck of 2025.)
In fact, the insistence on some inborn value or honor to artificial intelligence may be the driving force behind the new Time Studios web series On This Day…1776. Conceived as a blow-by-blow account of the year the American colonies declared independence from the British crown, it consists of short YouTube videos generated in part by Google DeepMind (though actual actors supply voiceovers). The project has drawn serious attention and scorn because acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky served as executive producer via his creative studio Primordial Soup, launched last year in a partnership with Google to explore the applications of AI in filmmaking. It probably doesn’t help that Aronofsky and company are valorizing the country’s founders in the same aesthetic that has defined the authoritarian meme culture of Donald Trump’s second term.
The YouTube replies are, to put it lightly, brutal. “If I was a professional director and I released this I would be suicidal,” reads a top-voted comment on the first installment. “Pure dogshit,” another person observed. Time Studios limited engagement to channel subscribers only; some commenters claimed they had subscribed simply to condemn the “slop” they were looking at. In addition to the uncanny faces and dead glossy eyes of the founding fathers, viewers noted constant quick cuts, presumably meant to limit visual errors. Yet, when called upon to render a historic document for a scene, DeepMind rendered the word “America” as “Aamereedd.”
Audiences have proven equally hostile to digitally altered versions of existing entertainment. On social media, at least, you won’t find many defenders of a certain nostalgia-baiting Xfinity commercial directed by Taika Waititi and scheduled to air during the Super Bowl this weekend. That’s because it creepily de-ages Jurassic Park stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, all for a sequence of gags about the dinosaur zoo-resort functioning perfectly thanks to a solid Wi-Fi signal. In the grotesque close-ups, they’re barely recognizable.
The irony of appropriating a film that was technologically astounding for its time and adding a layer of ugly deepfakery is hard to miss. The ad was also made possible through extreme media and telecom consolidation, as Xfinity is a division of the multinational conglomerate Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, which owns Jurassic Park as well as NBC, which is broadcasting the Super Bowl. The result is a necrotic ode to brand synergy. Wisely, Xfinity has not allowed any comments whatsoever on the YouTube upload of the commercial, though the reactions elsewhere have not been enthusiastic. “That ‘de-aging’ technology just makes them look like melting wax figures,” wrote a horrified user on X, where breathless hype for visual effects achieved with generative AI is usually plentiful.
The entertainment world can’t move as quickly as Silicon Valley startups or the public perception of smart appliances and virtual assistants. Nevertheless, Hollywood could soon notice an AI backlash that hurts its bottom line so long as studios are pushing it as both a half-baked dramatic theme and a transformative tool. However topical movies and television may become, they have long relied on the power of escapism. Will they have answers when we’re ready to be saved from the daily onslaught of bots?
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