The Genie Has Left the Bottle

Do you guys remember the 80s? Back when everybody was white and vaguely Scandinavian-looking, the air was thick with carefree freedom and smog, people would joyride their Camaros down the wrong side of streets with made-up names, and everybody wore T-shirts and made neon signs full of gibberish? I sure don’t, but apparently generative “AI” does.

I saw that video on Bluesky from Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell. People in that thread are doing a good job of rightfully dunking on all of the inexcusably sloppy errors in it, but my mind keeps going back to it because every single thing about it is bad and wrong.

On top of all the glaring mistakes like the malformed text, cars driving on the wrong side of the street, and shoelaces that don’t obey the laws of physics, it’s full of the slightly more subtle “tells” that still undeniably mark generative AI. Unnatural lighting. Jerky movements whenever it tries to generate a full-body shot of a human. Over-exaggerated mouth movements.

But even beyond that, it’s repulsive in its inexcusably insipid pointlessness. It takes forever to say nothing.1 It vaguely claims to be about nostalgia for the 80s, but not from anyone who actually remembers the 80s so much as someone who’s seen a couple episodes of Stranger Things. It’s taken billions of dollars and accelerated climate catastrophe by at least five years, but they’ve finally managed to make something even more vacuous than I Love The 80s.2

It feels like an ad, which is mostly due to the fact that current models can’t generate video that remains coherent for more than a few seconds. But it’s not immediately clear what it’s selling, exactly, beyond horribly inefficient systems that can generate seconds worth of bad video. There’s nothing there that constitutes a genuine thought or idea.

Except, of course, that there is, and it’s probably more immediately evident to people who didn’t grow up in the 70s and 80s, instead of those of us who were trained not to notice how much all of the media we watched was segregated. The fact that all the characters in the video are near-Aryan isn’t some comically tone-deaf mis-step, or even something that we can point out as an example of these systems regurgitating the biases of the people training their models. It’s not an accident; it’s deliberate.

The video isn’t an ad for a product; it’s propaganda. It’s selling some bullshit non-existent version of “the 1980s” as a stand-in for the idea of conservatism itself. And specifically, the 21st century version of conservatism, which no longer pretends to be an ideology and is instead just a tantrum.

This is aimed at the kind of dipshit who insists that “woke” is a modern invention, as if the civil rights movement never happened. Its vapid attempt at details from the 80s3 is just a sloppy and lazy re-skin of the same appeal to “a simpler time” that recurs every couple of decades, furiously going back and rewriting history to try and convince people that everybody was more happily and peacefully complacent as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, back before those people started agitating all of a sudden.

The idea is “things were so much simpler back when we didn’t have to acknowledge the existence of people who aren’t white, straight, and English-speaking.” It’s Daughters of the Confederacy Lost Cause bullshit. Except this one is shameless in its own irony. “Remember back when everyone was living in the moment instead of looking at screens?” its entirely computer-generated people ask, in a video designed for TikTok, using technology funded almost entirely by the exact same people responsible for a screen-obsessed culture.

If nothing else, at least it lays bare just how empty and ultimately self-defeating modern “conservatism” is. Much like generative “AI” video, it can’t stay coherent for more than a few seconds: are they for state’s rights, or are they for banning stuff at the federal level? Are they in favor of protecting children, or are they inextricably beholden to gun lobbies? Are they suspicious of all this new-fangled technology, or are they manipulating the deliberately-constructed culture of Engagement Above All Else? Are they against corruption, or do they support the most brazenly and shamelessly corrupt Americans who ever lived?4

Those of us who do actually remember the 80s will be aware that the Reagan era was the start of most of the bullshit we’re living through right now, and all of the Democrats and others who insist on appealing to “conscientious conservatives” are either stupid or lying, refusing to draw a straight, unbroken line from Reagan to Trump. But, at the very, very least, there was still an attempt back then to frame the garbage, corruption, and just plain evil as if it were a reasonable viewpoint, a jumping-off point for rational debate between opposing sides. Modern “conservatism,” like this video, is horrific in its emptiness. It says nothing, it produces nothing, it is based on nothing but lies and bigotry.

Just like the proponents of cryptocurrency did before the bubble burst, apologists for generative “AI” are most often defending the technology by conceding that there’s no point in defending it.5 It’s already here, they claim, so you simply have no choice but to jump on board or be left behind.

They insist that the genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no going back. And that, to me, might be the most damning criticism of generative “AI.” This technology is supposedly such a miraculous marvel that the people most heavily invested in it can’t actually predict or control how it works, and people use it to create this bullshit? Imagine having such a lack of imagination that an all-powerful genie grants you a wish: you can create anything that you can possibly think of. And you choose to create something that’s between a Discovery Channel Top 10 Hidden Theme Park Facts and the laziest possible BuzzFeed article.

Stuff like this video leaves me perversely optimistic about the future of the “AI” bubble. Nothing can survive indefinitely without having anything of substance at its core. Yes, it might take a very long time, and it will do a ton of damage in the process, but it will eventually burn through all of the hype and “engagement” fueling it. In a perfect world, we’ll end up with a much smaller subset of tools that foster actual creativity and skill. Maybe that’s naive, but it’s a hell of a lot more realistic than this bullshit.

1
And as somebody who’s been writing this blog for decades, I guess I have to give them props. ↩︎

2
Man, remember when nostalgia used to be better? ↩︎

3
They mention a Camaro but not a Walkman? Absurd. ↩︎

4
Of course, there’s no telling whether this video is actually American; it’s just as likely coming from some content slop farm somewhere else. But the US is unfortunately the most visible stage where all this bullshit is currently playing out. ↩︎

5
“If you’d even understand it, if you’d actually tried it,” as the most asinine apologists so often put it. ↩︎

1 And as somebody who’s been writing this blog for decades, I guess I have to give them props.

2 Man, remember when nostalgia used to be better?

3 They mention a Camaro but not a Walkman? Absurd.

4 Of course, there’s no telling whether this video is actually American; it’s just as likely coming from some content slop farm somewhere else. But the US is unfortunately the most visible stage where all this bullshit is currently playing out.

5 “If you’d even understand it, if you’d actually tried it,” as the most asinine apologists so often put it.