Alphaville and the Rise of AI

When programming films for NI Science Festival, I thought it would be a wasted opportunity not to program something related to Artificial Intelligence - the all-encompassing problem of our times, it seeps into every aspect of modern life, there is no escaping it.

Alphaville's evil AI takes the shape of a sentient computer which rules over the titular city like a fascist dictator with its own secret police. While AI hasn't exactly taken this form in the real world, it is nonetheless apparent that for all the good that AI might do for the world, it is significantly outweighed by all the negatives: unemployment, drought due to data centres, plagiarism, a decline in creativity and general intelligence as people become over reliant on their AI to do everything for them.

All these negatives are already becoming commonplace and little is being done to stop AI's meteoric rise, it is being left to grow and grow (there's too much money to be made from it after all!) until it makes its way into every facet of life and we all become lazy slobs who live in their screens and won't do anything for themselves like the remains of humanity in WALL -E.

As a lover of film and creative mediums in general, the rise of AI generated content, which does not create but simply steals and plagiarises and imitates, is increasingly distressing, not just because it is unoriginal and lame but because of the possibility of when this AI content is inevitably generated based off of other AI content posted online, where will we be then? I'd wager trapped inside an AI generated cycle of slop where AI copies itself to make new content for the masses and real, original creative work is worryingly hard to find and pushed aside in favour of the stuff the computer came up with.

Alphaville's totalitarian state ruled by an evil computer is a scary thought but even Godard, one of the sharpest creative minds of the twentieth century, could not imagine the terrifying scale and all-encompassing nature that AI has already taken on in the real world and unless we stand together and take action, the world will be irreversibly changed for the worst.