#oppenheimer ending but he doesn't understand the ramifications of the nuke so he's just smiling

[gothicprep]

so glad that AI video is here! sort of. kind of. you ever want to see a screensaver that looks like it was designed for windows 2000, where fish are flying through the air across village streets? sora can do that with one easy prompt! you ever wanna see a woman lying in bed, roll over, and watch her arm turn into the comforter? sora can do that too! it's amazing! do you ever want to see a POV of an ant's tunnel that looks like something worse than what you'd see on bbc's planet earth? sora can do that too!

i'm sure we've all seen these videos and many more at this point. the ai evangelists swear that this is a game-changing revolution in its ability to turn simple prompts into movie quality video. assuming that movie quality means a late-stage mcu movie, or madame web, or a direct to video dreamworks knockoff from the early 2000s. really? none of those things. it's not as good as any of those things. and yeah, yeah, i know, "it's going to improve", "this is the worst it's ever gonna look", "it's gonna get more realistic". but there are some who will tell you that this is the beginning of a brave new world. a whole new era! we've got a whole movement that's going to unlock creativity that's been untapped, trapped within people who have no actual talent but, um, some ideas i guess. there's a deep reservoir of those people who society has been wasting for all these years.

let's be real here. more likely, the AI is probably going to be used to much more boring ends than new great works of art when it's not being used for more nefarious ends. on the more boring side of things, you'll have people on the internet say "what if you had batman fight the straw hat pirates from one piece? that's something an ai could do!" fanfic kind of stuff. "what if goku fought superman? who would win? i'll bet ai can show us that!" another thing it can bring to life? sex tapes that you didn't make, but you're going to be starring in! get ready for the future where someone gets mad at you online, and five seconds later, you're in a bondage orgy! have fun at the bondage orgy! that's what ai promises :)

but that's not the worst of it, believe it or not. the real problem with ai is that it's going to give bad actors the ability to create international crises by ginning up phony videos. want to spark a riot in the urban center of a country you don't like? fake a video of a cop killing a kid. it'll go viral and the gas stations will be burning before the city can prove it didn't happen.

wife & i were watching the second season of tokyo vice last night while we were waiting for true detective: night country to come on, and in the premiere episode, there's a video of a sex worker being beaten to death while a gov't minister looks on. when presented with the video, he pulls the shaggy defense and just says "it wasn't me". the denial doesn't wash because the technology at the time couldn't have faked it, but in short order, we're going to be in a future where we won't be able to prove it was or wasn't him. "oh, it was ai". welp. no one will know.

the ability to circulate low-quality, unverified information has real downsides. and if anything, the decades during which i've grown up with the internet prompts me towards a lot more wariness of ai than unbridled enthusiasm. if the best case scenario for ai is what the internet did to the information environment already, we're all fucked. the speed with which things can spread and proliferate is frankly terrifying. the prompts people are using now are dumb, and the programming is not very good, but the ai evangelists are right when they say it's going to get better. and as it gets better, it's going to be more tempting to use it in ways which absolutely are negative for society. i'm sure there are cgi artists working at major studios who will be able to use these things in good ways, but i sit here and i hear people talk about "oh, the great wave of creativity is going to be unleashed by ai!" and i'm just like. what kind of future are you living in, where the technology always works out the way you want, and everyone is happy, and there are flying cars in the sky and rainbows?