"I can just generate and watch my own movie," says the star of 'Jobs'

Some quick-ish thoughts on AI, Ashton Kutcher, and digital boot-licking

Last night, in lieu of sleeping, I instead scrolled Twitter¹ from probably 1 to 3am. Prime scrolling hours! At 1am, stuff that would have at most annoyed or baited you during the day takes on almost apocalyptic significance, amplified as it is by the cocoon of darkness. Side-stepping the actual bad news in the world right now, which Lifting Fog has never been equipped to handle, my attention focused on something nevertheless essential reading: Ashton Kutcher’s thoughts on the future of generative AI.

"You'll be able to render a whole movie. You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you'll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie. Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie."

The healthiest response to obvious bad-faith takes like this, generated as they are by people literally invested in the adoption of AI, is to just say “shut the fuck up, dude, you’re a rape apologist who doesn’t shower regularly” but I’ve been in a ranting mood lately and, more importantly, owe my paid subscribers (thank you!) more posts. So let’s get into it!

At this point, no one needs a generative AI primer, right? Whether you understand the micro-intricacies of LLMs, you’re well-versed in the implications this technology has for…. seemingly every sector of human society, especially work. The legal field turned upside-down. Teachers grading papers the origins of which they can no longer verify. Countless jobs re-oriented, streamlined, maybe flat-out lost. Writing this very post in Google Chrome, I’m offered a “Help Me Write” option that suggested this alternate opening:

This is exactly what I sound like

“Help.” “Aid.” Silicon Valley is currently working overtime to convince you this mass promotion is all operating in service of some better, easier future, one in which we all have more time to second-screen self-generated movies (read: ‘Avengers’ porn) while we stare at a Domino’s Pizza Tracker that, now augmented by AI, can keep us posted on the order in which our toppings are being assembled. Who didn’t watch ‘Wall-E’ and think YES, I want to be one of those humanoid blobs whose feet never touch the ground and once a day gets to change the color of my shirt?!?

(Okay okay, I’m already losing the thread, I know. Let’s (literally) bring it back to earth.)

Working in Hollywood², it’s hard not to feel like we’re on the front lines of Sam Altman’s robot bootlicking Holy War. Threats loom: scripts generated by ChatGPT, actors replaced by digital replicas, entire movies rendered with merely a prompt. Maybe it’s not possible right right now but it will be, down the line, and various factions are no doubt salivating at this prospect. Rather than ask ourselves how we might employ this technology toward, idk, fighting climate change or making air travel less of a hellscape, we’ve (read: Silicon Valley has) decided that no, what we really want is to colonize artistic expression.

Many forces contributed to shape last year’s writers and actors strikes, but AI crept up to became a major, maybe even primary focus by the time both were resolved. NO, a generative AI-”written” script cannot be considered intellectual property. NO, a carefully modulated deep fake video cannot be considered “performance.” Both guilds, WGA and SAG, held the line to the extent we could, and against the then most-current iteration of AI’s capabilities; both guilds will have to re-litigate at our next contract negotiations in two years, when the technology will undoubtedly be much sharper than it is today.

I’m scared by all of this! Most of my writing peers are. It doesn’t feel great to have devoted your professional life to something that’s already hard enough without the hypothetical threat of Final Draft-using Terminators coming in to take what few jobs remain. That’s the worst case scenario.

Opposite fear, though, is a deep reserve of anger — at the Kutchers of the world, the Altmans, the Zuckerbergs, the list goes on, whose whole deal seems to be.. wanting to prove that we don’t actually need humans? Fuck right off! Kutcher, let’s put him aside, he’s a dumb puppet trying to cosplay Disruptor. It’s the Silicon Valley muscle behind him I really hate, these guys positively jerking it to the prospect of a human-deficient future, not only for their own material gain (that goes without saying in all of this) but because they’re just fucking antisocial weirdos!

(CALL ME CRAZY but I, for one, have zero interest in any sort of future that’s rendered in the likeness and/or headspace of the man above.)

Back to Hollywood. It’s just… hugely insulting to be talked down to about “storytelling” and “creativity” from people who don’t appear to have the first clue about WHY the TV and movies they like³ work in the first place, the difference between saying “I want a show set in a hardware store” and the arduous, up-and-down path by which a professional writers room might take that “concept” (which of course is actually just a location) and turn it into something that actually seems worth anyone’s time.

Everything these clowns say and promote hinges on the idea that it’s all just content — they’d say “slop” if they could, I know it — and audiences are fundamentally undiscerning. (Another insult!) What they fail to understand, and maybe they just can’t, is the only reason entertainment has any value at all is for its human qualities.

Listen… I know I think and talk and write about this shit far more than, say, your average American ‘NCIS’ fan, who has the good sense not to start a Substack. But whether we collectively know it at this point or not (and I guess we soon will!), at the root of why we connect to our favorite shows and movies is because it’s US. And that doesn’t just mean actors acting, the most visible form of this. It means humans doing makeup, writing dialogue, recording music, animating frames, setting lights, building sets, tailoring outfits... You could go ON AND ON⁴, whether it’s a $200 million Marvel boondoggle or the cheapest student film imaginable.

Hell, even ‘Gigli’

They all require many human hands, hands that we feel on a subconscious level when we watch the finished product, which ideally has us so transfixed⁵ that we’re not even thinking about it. Human effort, stamped in time! You remove those humans from that process, whether entirely (I don’t see how even in the loftiest Sora predictions) or worse, at its core? Audiences will FEEL that absence, I know they will.

I’ll finish this very HUMAN, POORLY EDITED rant on a note of optimism: I think the end result of AI entertainment being jammed down our throats by, for instance, people who one time played Steve Jobs and now think they’re tech geniuses is a reinforcement of the power of human artistry. Whatever’s coming down the pipe… it will get a ton of eyeballs, mine included, all drawn to this latest shiny thing. But most shiny things eventually become gimmicks. I can imagine a future where “AI” carries the same stamp as, say, “straight-to-DVD,” a shorthand for lack of quality. For which there’s certainly a time and place! (Frequently a bin at Duane Reade or, in the future, a Metaverse Duane Read.) But not, you know, the main thing.

Maybe right now is a darkest before the dawn moment, where it’s all changing in front of us, and will continue to. But human artistic expression is timeless and we’ll return, as we have for THOUSANDS of years, to stuff generated from real feeling, real experience, real perspective. Something new can be rebuilt on top of these bullshit ashes. The alternative is, more than anything, just fucking boring.

1. I will call it “X” when Donald Trump’s Elon-backed cyber police unit legally compels me to start calling it that and not a moment before

2. or anyway working to work in Hollywood, semantics

3. or hate, as the case may be!

4. it’s called the CREDITS, which traditionally play at the end of a show or movie

5. Guess what takes you out of a trance? When AI stutters and/or just changes visual elements entirely because it is only ever guessing in real time as to what the next cue should be, and not rendering actual artistic decisions