[Weekly Update] The Future is AI

Updating a little bit early this week because I got a minor writer's block on the script. I'll finish it up tomorrow and upload to Patreon.

CHANNEL UPDATE

Nothing really change on the our upcoming schedule, so let's do some house keeping instead.

If you'd like your name credited differently in our videos, please DM us your preferred name. Same if you'd rather remains anonymous!

Here are all the video ideas I'm currently (sort of) working on:

• Dangal: The Indian Movie that Won Over China
• Switch: Vanity Culture in China
• American Cliches in East Asian Movies
• Dating a White Person in Asian Cinema
• The Colorful World of Copyright Infringement Cinema
• Favorite Chinese movie of 2023

If you have suggestions regarding any of the above topic, please leave a comment!

Also have plans to work on four additional videos:

• Kung Fu Cooking Movies
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon
• 80s Ninja crazy in America
• The Paper Tigers

Finally, I'm brain storming for our April Fool's video. I want to do something bigger again, maybe make an entire short film. I don't know how many non-union Montreal based actors are in our Patreon, but if you'd like to work together, hit me up!

Oh an finally, there have been a lot of really fishier sponsor emails lately. It seems YouTube is experiencing an increase of scam activities. Beware!

And that's all we have on the table!

MEDIA TALK

Welcome to the anti-Star Trek universe, where soon, androids will create art, explore the universe, document the world, while humanity will flip burgers.

Jokes (?) aside, it's pretty much a sure thing that in the next few years, we'll see a surge of movies about AI technology, much the same way the late 90s was full of movies about computer hackers. Because just like the Internet, AI tech will likely profoundly change our life.

In other words, we can finally have that robot from Rocky 4.

However, unlike hackers in film, AI as a concept is at least as old as the sci-fi genre. Even the first modern sci-fi novel, Frankenstein, is about how a human creates an artificial life. The monster don't think the same way humans do, leading to conflicts. The trope of the creation destroying its own creator is then firmly implanted in our culture.

Pinocchio is another story that affects how AI is depicted in film. Namely, that AI nearly always want to become human, and desire human things. And also, AI is child-like. From the Red Queen in Resident Evil, to that kid from The Creator, to Wall-E, which itself is likely inspired by Short Circuit, you can find the shadow of Pinocchio in all of these AIs.

And I kinda hate all of these cliche depictions.

It's important to note that both Frankenstein and Pinocchio are stories about human nature, and isn't actually an exploration of AI technology. Put it in the terms of Mass Effect, these are stories about synthetic life, not AI.

Let's explain my point by taking a quick comparison to a modern sci-fi work that actually talks about AI: I, Robot. Sure, the movie isn't great, but Asimov did a great job exploring the robotics of AI, showing that how a machine can be dangerous without being sentient. A quick look at how VIKI acts in that film, emotionless and purely logical, is very much align with how ChatGPT talks.

Another problem with AI is that most of them were created before we realize just how powerful information manipulation is. The cliche thing for AI to do is always just nuke humanity. But a popular thought floating online is that, since AI essentially live forever, they can take their time. By manipulating information to divide us, create conflicts, it can let humanity kill each other off, without ever revealing itself to us, risking its own destruction. The shower thought suggests that we may have already created such an AI, we just don't know it.

And on that terrifying note, I think I'll leave wrap up this update here. Hopefully I can get the video out next week. In any case, I'll see you soon!