Media
'A.I.: Artificial Intelligence' Is the Essential Pinocchio Film of Our Time
At the core of most tales about androids and artificial intelligence lies a variation of the same question: what, if anything, makes these sentient, inorganic beings different from us? Flesh and biology aside, do they possess all that makes us human--are they, in all their hardware and programming, fundamentally the same? Steven Spielberg's criminally underrated film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is less concerned with this question than it is with questioning what obligation humans have for their "living" creations. It centers around a mecha (mechanical humanoid robot) named David (Haley Joel Osment) who is uniquely programmed with the ability to love. Stanley Kubrick, who originally conceived of the film and purchased the rights to its source material by Brian Aldiss, saw it as a Pinocchio story. Like Pinocchio, David is a manufactured object that suddenly dreams of becoming human.
Why The Creative Economy Shouldn't Fear Generative A.I.
Artificial intelligence is all over the news. When ChatGPT, OpenAI's new chatbot, was released last month it seemed, finally, to match the hype that generative A.I. has been promising for years--an easy-to-use machine intelligence for the general public. Wild predictions soon followed: The death of search engines, the end of homework, the hollowing-out of creative professions. And, for the first time, such predictions didn't seem abstract. When an A.I. bot like ChatGPT can write a coherent story or essay in seconds, and visual applications like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, produce similarly comprehensible images you have to wonder if human creativity--slow and often uncertain--might be superfluous.