All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.
Rutger Hauer as Batty in Bladerunner
The monologue including that line was ad-libbed by Rutger Hauer in the film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. A lot of the novel’s thematic content was lost in translation but Hauer’s performance restored some of the depth. More importantly, he brought a spontaneity and soul unlikely to be replicated by the replicant he portrayed. In Dick’s dystopian vision of the future, the main character Deckard grapples with his own humanity as the line between human and AI blurs. He realizes dehumanizing others comes at the expense of his own humanity. There’s a subplot regarding people with intellectual and physical disabilities abandoned on Earth, further reinforcing the point. I’ve referenced Dick’s novel when noting how some people are hard to tell apart from bots as they consume and regurgitate propaganda without question.
Another running theme in Dick’s novel is the commodification of human experience. One of the plot points lost in the movie is Deckard’s wife using a technological device to regulate her emotions, choosing at times to experience sadness to feel more alive. While this can be read as an admonishment of antidepressants, it’s important to remember the difference between people experiencing debilitating clinical depression versus people sad for identifiable reasons with external causes – like, say, being trapped on a dying planet with only artificial pets for companionship because you are deemed unworthy of moving elsewhere by people who seek to distract you from inequality.
AI has been under increasing scrutiny lately with the rise of ChatBot. Some people are weirdly credulous of the information ChatBot provides. It’s a language learning application. The more people use it, the better its language acquisition, including the art of spewing BS – but not its factual accuracy. Unfortunately a lot of people are taken in by BS artists, human and AI alike.
People are even using AI to generate “art”. Some complain AI is making art while people fill in spreadsheets. In the book Deckard is aghast when he has to kill his favorite opera singer because she’s outed as a replicant, but we aren’t there yet. There’s choices I make as a writer that can’t be replicated by technology. Everything I do is informed by personal experience and my own inner world. A running theme in my writing is art as connection. Technology can provide us with tools to connect with each other, but it shouldn’t be a substitute for connection.
AI is also at the forefront of the current writer’s strike as they seek to secure fair compensation in the age of streaming, and job protection from greedy executives favoring AI that can churn out the safe formulaic content they prefer – quantity over quality. I am once again struck by people who continue to punch down because they don’t know how things work. If it isn’t blaming teachers for the consequences of administrative decisions, it’s blaming writers for corporate greed. Meanwhile those who know the industry joke that writers are beneath coffee runners in the Hollywood food chain.
Neil Gaiman wrote a story called “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” about an author whose book is optioned by Hollywood. Even though he’s asked to write the initial treatment, the story changes so wildly by the time the executives are done making demands, it no longer resembles his own. His novel Anansi Boys about two sons of the West African spider god Anansi languished in what we call “development hell” for years. Executives wanted to change the sons from black to white, which completely alters the cultural and thematic content of the book. And Neil Gaiman is white. Now imagine the challenges for black authors. There’s a prevailing attitude amongst the suits that black film (any film with a predominantly black cast) and fantasy are separate and distinct genres. Only after a string of hits could Marvel bring Black Panther to the screen. While Black Panther mostly fit the Hollywood formula apart from greater diversity in cast and crew, its success still helped pave the way for black filmmakers to tell more unique stories that don’t fit into the narrow boxes favored by Hollywood executives. But not by much.
People blame minorities for corporate decisions, too. A few years back Barnes & Noble reissued classic literature with racial swaps on the covers. Minorities didn’t ask for that. They did ask for more opportunities to tell their own stories, but risk-averse publishers don’t like taking chances. Book publishers and Hollywood gatekeepers alike prefer “tried and true with a twist”. Often they try recapturing lightning in a bottle anytime something breaks the mold until audience fatigue sets in. See the restrictive “it’s this meets that” marketing that is the bane of most creatives. If people want more unique content, stop dumping on people attempting to create it within the narrow confines of these industries and support them instead.
You can’t get a variety of stories without a variety of people, and if you don’t allow them to tell their stories the way they want, not the way market research or ‘data’ dictates they should. And you definitely won’t get it out of AI with no life experience drawing from (plagiarizing) existing database of works.
