The Neural Network with Red Hair

"What's that say?

Oh, um . . . it's Latin for From Small Things We Aspire Toward the Great."

-- The Woman with Red Hair

I listen, with alarming regularity and alacrity, to the podcast The Town. It's delicious junk food, and, as someone who's grown exhausted with the film criticism industrial complex, it's a great way for me to stay engaged with the movie world without bogging myself down in most film critics' cringe-inducing bloviating. I also find that the Hollywood serves as an effective microcosm of American capitalism: insurance, pharmaceuticals, stock trading (the real stuff, not the memefied DOGEian penny trading someone like I would be allowed to do)--these are all insular, dog-whistley industries with the serious action happening behind closed doors. Hollywood, on the other hand, is (seemingly) quite open about its deals and goings-on. CEOs, CCOs, and VPs clamor to have their voices heard; they pitch themselves in interviews as if listeners could somehow snap our fingers and float a couple hundred million dollars into their pockets. It's fascinating and compelling stuff: there's a transparency to the avarice, ego-inflation, and self-delusion that is, ultimately, charming. Lillian Ross taught us long ago that the messy, human characteristics that inevitably press upon the making of a movie can be as fascinating as the movie itself, and certainly integral to its creation–for better or worse.

This week, Matt Belloni hosted Pouya Shahbazian, CEO of Staircase Studios AI. Shahbazian came on to discuss his studio and his ambitions for it on the heels of the trailer posted on YouTube last week for their forthcoming AI-generated movie The Woman with Red Hair. The video is worth watching not because it is good--it's not, Shahbazian readily admits that--but because it is the canary in the coal mine for the future of audio-visual entertainment. Worth pausing for a moment, by the way, on the name of the company itself: Staircase Studios. A set of stairs and its surrounding walls or structure, per Oxford. The infiltration of V.C.-backed technology upon our entertainment marches--up the stairs, or down them?--and will continue to do so, until no human intervention–no dirty fingerprints–need tarnish the enterprise. Shahbazian couches his ambition for AI-generated art in the promise that Staircase will "live on a parallel track" to traditionally-produced live action movies. This will likely be true, for a time, but I see a not-too-distant future in which the trains collide. Maybe they coalesce onto one track, maybe one train derails the other. But this conflict won't resolve itself until Staircase or some other studio (and there will be many) figures out how to address the issue of the uncanny.

Uncanny. Uncanny uncanny uncanny. It's the word I see or hear most often associated with AI-generated videos. Accusations that something looks uncanny, which is to say close to reality but distant enough that it causes in the viewer a sense of unease, attach themselves like barnacles to AI-generated content. There's a reason for this, I believe: we're witnessing the birth of a new way of seeing. A worse one, if I may interject my opinion, but inexorable. The Uncanny, per Freud, "is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old--established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression." We balk at it now--rightfully so. It's offensive to our sensibilities as human beings bred on art which appeals to our sense of belonging to that species. But these images of infantile, wide-eyed, more-beautiful-than-beautiful people appeal to deeper instincts, ones associated with gods and the Dionysian, which will ultimately overwhelm our loyalty to ourselves. We will view it as beautiful. We have repressed our sense of the spiritual in our art, and AI-generated work is a response to that.

There are already corners of the Internet where AI-generated work is being celebrated and widely watched. This video by the Dor Brothers is a perfect example, and there's no doubt in my mind that they begin with the burning of L.A. and in particular the Hollywood sign as a sort of salvo. Their videos reliably land between tens of thousands and millions of views, with their most popular video raking in a whopping 15M. It does not surprise me; their work makes no effort to replicate the style--or the patina, such as the case may be--of Hollywood. Their work meets the moment: jittery editing, hyper-saturated colors, a torrent of pop culture and political references, and the juxtaposition of pornography and violence. When traditional forms of media fail to engage with our lives as we live them, other forms will emerge to do the job.

I am not speculating: take a look at this video posted by President Trump. AI-generated, utterly garish--frightening, frankly. The Guardian reports that Israeli-American filmmaker Solo Avital "intended [the video] as political satire but [was] repurposed as 'very compelling, visceral' propaganda by Trump . . ." Picked up and promulgated by the President of These United States, it in fact takes on a different dimension entirey, one beyond propaganda: a sort of wish-fulfillment, and a laying bare of the true modus operandi of the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. A video bespoke, something made to reflect Trump's, and by extension the American government's, ultimate aims for the "riviera of the middle east."

Shahbazian uses the word bespoke no less than four times in his 20-minutes-or-so interview. Not, notably, in relation to audiences, although I believe that's the undiscussed Big Red Son on the table: how can we make movies or serialized programming, without human intervention (this is key), for a low cost, and deliver it straight to its audience? If Trump's embrace of this satirical video is any indication, no testing, nor any analysis, will need to be conducted. Movies and TV will be individualized before the individual knows what they even want.

We are not the stories we tell. The stories we tell, and how we tell them, are what we want to be.