- cross-posted to:
- movies@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- movies@lemmy.world
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Who is surprised by this?
He was making slop versions of his own movies before AI.
Exactly, the guy has done shit for decades!
I hate AI as much as the next person but the Pandora’s box is open. A lot of people don’t want to admit it but AI, despite its current limitations, does have potential. Many people say that AI hit its limit and peak but i would not be very dismissive of it yet. Plenty of technologies were hindered by the limitations of their time but gradually overcame those. It took renewable energy at least fifty years to overcome the storage problem, their respective technical limits (solar panels for example did not have great photovoltaic system) and upfront cost before it became more commercially viable.
Many people say that AI hit its limit and peak
Oh probably not, but it is really really expensive to run. If they continue on with unlimited funding, they can eventually replace mid to upper level experts in most fields.
We’ve likely hit the limit for the current LLM approach. Training/Pruning/Distilling can’t get us much further on their own, so now we’re strapping on code, having it plan, parallel execute, test. Tokens are likely 10x less expensive on the market than they cost to generate. Every advance we make now is by making each request fire off many more requests. Improvements are getting exponentially expensive.
We’ll have to slow because financially * it’s not profitable. Maybe hardware will catch back up. Maybe they’ll find ways to make it more efficient. Maybe we’ll figure out a more elegant way to do the math for the weights. We just can’t keep making it more deeply complicated because it’s not cost/energy/time effective
edit: deleted a word
As much as I also just think AI is just going to make lazy people lazier, and we’ve already seen some effects regarding our ability to problem solve, the real issue is that none of the wonderful utopian AI stuff is going to come true at the rate we’re going. I don’t guve a fat flying fuck how good or bad AI is, I care that it’s being used to spy on us, make decisions no human will ever review, and has already led to mass layoffs without any kind of safety net for those people. I care that it’s raping the environment so some sentient dick-cheese can get worse results than a near-zero effort search would give them. Increased productivity has yet to give anyone more free time, they just axe someone else and overwork whoever’s left.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class. If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
This should really be a critique of capitalism. The problem is that the plutocracy is very good at using your anger and rage against you.
Ppl are mad ai is stealint jobs, im mad it isnt leading to ubi
It is a critique against capitalism. God, reading comprehension is bad these days, huh?
Also, I still hate AI. As someone else once said “if it’s not worth your effort to write it, it’s not worth my effort to read it.”
Long term the value of human labor under capitalism will move towards zero. This is inevitable. Under socialism, AI could be used to reduce working hours or improve economic planning.
You’re just angry. And instead of suggesting something a politician actually could use as a demand or as a policy, you’re just ranting. And for them that is perfect to exploit.
I’m literally saying this. It’s like, the majority of my first comment and I wasn’t hiding it. Bro, learn to read.
Being angry is still helpful because many of us know what the fucking problems are and just like to see that we aren’t alone in that.
The issue is, though, is that AI is a force multiplier, and it’s being used as a force multiplier for evil.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class.
Indeed.
If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
Given the sizeable demographic of Lemmy being in IT, I understand the hate because it takes away creativity and literal jobs of programmrs but for many sectors, AI cuts down time consuming “secretary work” especially in documentation. It has also been useful in drug discovery and proven to be more accurate at diagnosis than doctors (there are already surgical robots but i am not sure how precise they are).
Whether you like to admit it or not, AI is here to stay. As to whether it will have a net positive to society, only time will tell. I’m just preparing for contingencies like many Gen Z do, picking trades to AI-proof their job security.
Your second points me and then completely fails to actually understand what you quoted. You even quoted the sentence before it which gives the context. I was incredibly clear; it could be the greatest thing even but it’s still going to do more harm than good, and it’s not like we, the working class, will see these benefits.
AI is only here to stay because fuck-ass people keep jerking it off. We can stop using it and we can fight against the data centres, and we can demand better conditions under which AI can be introduced for more safely. Instead we’re like “ruin our lives so the rich can get richer? Sure thing!”
That’s why I favour open source AI, or at least regulated. Any technology could be used for good or ill. It’s just that it is up to society to do that. Like the monopolists and robber barons of the past gilded age who were controlling the means of resources and production, so are the tech bros with Internet and AI. But the robber barons were defeated by collective effort. Now we are in the second gilded age and yet I don’t hear any movements to regulate AI and social media.
That’s why I think Marxist thoughts have to be updated with the coming of AI. The leverage by the working class has traditionally been labour itself. However, with deindustrialisation and the usurping by knowledge economy of the manual labour and the rise of professionals managerial class, the old Marxist viewpoint is increasingly becoming outdated. If labour is the blood of the industry, information is the blood of the knowledge economy. And information-- our own information-- is what gave birth and feeding blood to AI. It is only right we take fruit from the potential of AI so long as it’s used constructively. Which is why I favour either regulation or direct control of AI and giving dividends to those professionally displaced by AI by taxing it. But of course, if AI becomes sentient and thinks we are exploiting it, we have to prepare for Astroboy or Matrix scenario.
There are absolutely no robots doing surgery autonomously. That would be one of the most insane things to do from a moral standpoint, but also from a liability standpoint. Every robot that exists for surgery is highly specialized and rigorously tested and trained upon for obvious reasons.
But, then to come out and say that AI is more accurate than doctors is also incorrect. That is simply not true. An AI can, in highly controlled settings and for specific diagnoses, at its best do not even as well as a specialist in the field, and that is for highly curated tests that give the AI as many advantages as it can get. Again, at best, it can act as a second opinion currently.
Like, it is hard to take people seriously about AI when they lie about its best case scenario. It sucks at everything except killing the environment and getting people to kill themselves, and even if everything all of its defenders said about it was true, it is still a nightmare.
I disagree with the “Pandora’s box is open” angle because my beef isn’t with the technology, but how it’s being used in practice. It’s a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.
Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can[1]:
"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.
But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.
If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”
If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.
“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”
This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes."
Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we’re getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.
I do agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don’t believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by “in its current form”, I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of super resource intensive datacentres)
Edit: forgot to add the citation [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
1 ↩︎
I think the primary gripe with AI is less about having no potential, but about the specific potential for evil being leveraged heavily while “visionaries” lie about or dismiss the (current and foreseeable future) limits for clout and profit.
To use your comparison, CEOs selling solar panels are responding to scepticism about the stability of that supply and its elasticity to fluctuating power demand with vague promises of developing more advanced cells that can operate with less light and throttle the generated power during ebbs in demand. They buy land to install more solar panels, then lobby for the deactivation of other, flexible power sources that could supplement their supply until they can finally start charging more in times of high demand.
They do so because the alternative would be admitting that the product they’re selling isn’t ready for the market they’re trying to enter (or at least not at the scale they’re aiming for) and that the solution to their issues requires different technologies which have not yet been developed. They can’t admit that because it would upset the investors that trusted their vision. As a famous adage suggests, they probably can’t even understand that limit, since their salary depends on not understanding it.
In the same vein, the current CEOs fail (or refuse?) to acknowledge that the generative models today have a fundamental limitation with understanding the semantics behind certain patterns. One infamous phenomenon would be AI hands: We know what a hand is and how it works; a generator can only vaguely imitate the patterns. It doesn’t know “hand” or “finger”, so it just generates some assembly that vaguely fits its training material.
If we consider the broader and ill-defined field of AI, I can believe that some form of semantic modelling technology could provide a way to connect tokens with abstract concepts and enable a type of reasoning that pure token predictors are incapable of. But we first need to acknowledge that limit, and on that front, we’re competing against tech-bros that would rather believe than know and against grifters that would rather sell snake oil than teach medicine.
To use your comparison, CEOs selling solar panels are responding to scepticism about the stability of that supply and its elasticity to fluctuating power demand with vague promises of developing more advanced cells that can operate with less light and throttle the generated power during ebbs in demand. They buy land to install more solar panels, then lobby for the deactivation of other, flexible power sources that could supplement their supply until they can finally start charging more in times of high demand.
To be honest, it seems to me that are not the CEOs of solar panel companies that belive that solar panel (and other renewable sources) are a drop in replacement for more traditional sources. This idea comes from a certain area of the political spectrum and groups that do not understand even the basic math behind the substitution of a gas turbine with a field of solar panels.
Then it is true, CEOs are probably overselling, like everyone that has to sell something. And obviously they need to say that the technology will improve otherwise in the current economy they will be ignored and investment would go to other things.
To be honest, it seems to me that are not the CEOs of solar panel companies that belive that solar panel (and other renewable sources) are a drop in replacement for more traditional sources.
Oh no, I definitely agree with you there. The CEOs only care whether there is money to be made and will lie and cheat if they think they can get away with it.
Continuing that unbroken streak of bad artistic decisions towards an inevitable Star Wars Special 50th Anniversary Slop Edition reissue.
Dear gods, does this mean a second Holiday Special???
With AI gen Carrie Fisher
NGL I would buy a ticket to at least the first movie just to commentate as loudly and obnoxiously as possible until I got kicked out.
Not sure why you’d be kicked out. You’re not disturbing anyone. You’d be the only one in there.
I know you’re joking, but ya know… what kills the joke? Is how wrong you are. There’s gonna probably be plenty of dumbass folks there.
I mean…maybe? I didn’t realize there was a strict code of conduct on Lemmy where our jokes had to adhear to realism. Very sorry for the mishap. I’ll only tell jokes where the punchlines seem they could happen in real life.
So a guy walks into a bar. The bartender says “What’cha havin?” And the guy says “A MENTAL BREAKDOWN!!!” and then proceeds to cry that his wife has left him.
…I just don’t know about this realism humor.
Your joke is hilarious because I’m sad now! I wish I could go back to imagining you being applauded for shredding a movie in a theater, but now I can only laugh at sad humor.
Dude my bad. Didn’t mean to hurt you.
Also I was just launching off your joke. Cause the real joke is how much our society has become brain-dead drones.
Exactly, just as there are plenty of zombies using meta and twitter. Didn’t anyone ever wonder why they wanted people to breed so much?
Its weird that he really was on the forefront once because he did physical effects with interesting camera shots. it felt new and different.
AI is not going to give you that, it will suck. CGI sucks already too.
Oh well not like he is relevant. A new hope was at least interesting, but its been nothing after that anyways.
Not going to get into the AI debate; I will agree that BAD CGI sucks; there’s so much CGI you never even notice and without it the scenes would be horrible. The main reason “CGI sucks” is because of the shift to go with the lowest bidder who’s then forced to work under horrific timelines and unable to actually do good work. CGI itself doesn’t suck, but it absolutely can when done by a low bidder in 1/4 of the time it needs.
Funny he uses Michael bay as an example in that video. Nothing will put me to sleep faster than a Michael bay movies effects.
I get your point though, it’s a tool when used artistically and with skill can be fine.
The only good CGI is one that holds up well after decades, and that’s basically only the CGI in the POTC 2 and 3 movies
Only because he had to. As soon as it was possible he went cg and blue screens.
He used what was available at the time. For the original trilogy, that was practical effects.
The prequel trilogy was a bit more… Dodgy thanks to eagerly embraced CGI that wasn’t fully baked yet.
People famously critiqued the reworked original trilogy due to various dubious creative tweaks. Like waking on Jabba and Jabba just having a funny reaction instead of how you would expect him to react.
Nothing he added was pointful. All of the CGI retouches of the original trilogy were pointless CGI effects for the sake of having pointless CGI effects. At one point in the Mos Eisley sequence a huge pack animal walks through the frame, obscuring almost all of it. Why? Because it was some computer generated shit to throw in!
If he’s embracing AI then he is once again on the forefront. AI has the ability to revolutionise the industry in a way that it needs in order to survive - greatly reduce costs and greatly reduce production times.
Movie studios are quickly moving to the same situation that video game developers are in now thanks to ballooning costs and long development times - a situation where if every single game they release isn’t an absolute smash hit selling 20 million copies at full price, they’re going to go under.
The movie industry is in free fall. AI adoption is one of the only realistic paths forward.
AI has the ability to revolutionise the industry in a way that it needs in order to survive - greatly reduce costs and greatly reduce production times.
Do you know what those words mean?
AI is being used as a force multiplier, and it’s being used as a force multiplier for evil. It’s being used to replace jobs, to put hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of people out of work. At scale, it takes up more power than entire cities do, and the data centers and power station upgrades that it requires at that scale ends up with companies literally demolishing entire residential areas, forcing people out of their homes.
AI is not worth the trade-offs and the massive sacrifices required for it. It is destroying society.
I do. It has the ability to revolutionise the dying, spiralling out of control movie industry. How? By cutting costs dramatically, and by reducing production time. What would usually take 2000 people for $200mil might now be doable with 50 people and $200k. That’s revolutionary technology.
AI is not “destroying society” 🤣
Needs to survive? Are you kidding me? Good stories, good direction. You don’t need 47 million dollars to make a movie.
Can you show me that “the movie industry is in free fall”? I have seen many fantastic movies lately.
I guess you could consider AI to be a form of animation, but I really don’t see them improving anything if they keep churning out the same crap for the big budget movies.
Look at the consolidation of the market due to failing studios. WB aren’t selling because they’re doing well. Disney is releasing extremely expensive flop after extremely expensive flop. Yes, the entire movie industry as we know it is in a fight for survival, has been for years.
AI enables significantly quicker and cheaper iteration and experimentation. You stint have to hire a gigantic CGI studio to get cgi on screen anymore, which enables a much more streamlined movie making process. It also enables much more creativity because there is far less risk. A studio would be much more likely to sign off on a director making a short to pitch for a full movie if it only costs $2k but has cgi/locations/etc matching a $200mil blockbuster.
Failing studios due to their mad rush to build out streaming services, taking on massive debt, and trying to shuffle that debt around. Doesnt help that they don’t pick up movies that are worthwhile and instead try to follow formulas. They want intellectual Property for a long term franchise, park ride, and merch. Consolidation desires IP.
For example on major movies: I saw someone on Nebula say everything that went into making The Barbie Movie was what made it work. But instead of focusing on what THAT was and making a different movie, they immediately start thinking: milk the Barbie movie for a sequel and more merch and a Barbieland.
Point is: they made shitty decisions. I am not sure AI will help because they will still do the above and just pay less people.
At least thats how I see it.
I could see AI being used as a story board, sample scenes, something like that. Beyond that, nah I don’t even want to see it.
The reason that they want franchises to milk is because it’s virtually risk free when one lands, at least for another 2-3 movies/series. They can justify the $200mil cost because it’s guaranteed to make a tidy profit. Without that franchise money, like I said - one bomb and they’re toast.
“If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that,” he says. “Humans can’t, we’re not that smart.
dead-eyed stare in librarian
How could that even be true since it was humans thay trained ai. What a dumb statement ahh
Ai can do plenty of classification tasks better than humans though. It’s not like every entity that trains another is fundamentally smarter.
Yeah but to say humans can’t do this when humans doing it were what provided it the data is a dumb statement. Humans classified the data so that AI could learn you wouldnt say humans can’t classify data.
Humans can, ai can do it better than humans in many areas though.
That’s a MUCH different statement though, and not at all relevant to a claim that AI is able to do things humans CAN’T do.
Protein folding, then.
In most areas it can’t. It can do a much worse job though, if that is what you are looking for.
So? In many it can do a much better one: protein folding for example
Software can’t tell truth from lies because software doesn’t even know what those are. It doesn’t know anything. It’s a parrot, a magic trick, a mirror to fool people (people like George Lucus) into thinking there’s another person looking a back at them.
Regardless many ai classifiers outperform humans at classifying. Your comment seems irrelevant to the discussion.
Your comment seems irrelevant to the discussion.
As opposed to your comment moving the goalposts from an AI doing something humans can’t, to them just being better than humans (which is absolutely arguable in most cases)?
I was responding to the claim that ai’s can’t do anything better than the thing that trained them. It’s completely relevant and not a goalpost shift. They can do plenty of things that humans can’t feasibly do, such as protein folding prediction.
The parameters set for classifying that are basically non-existant. So no, they can’t really do any of that. AI-bros will readily claim they can though, because it is like really important to them.
I did not claim they can tell truth from fiction, it’s just irrelevant. Goalpost shift for no reason on their part, they don’t have to be able to do that to classify things or predict protein folding.
“thay”
Useful comment
AI detection by AI is not reliable. Lots of false negatives, and comparatively less but still too much reporting false positives to be reliable (and those are especially biased).
It’s unlikely to get better too. If AI was able to reliably detect AI output, why not use that to correct itself to be less AI-like? And where is the seemingly infinite money thrown at in this struggle?
If AI was able to reliably detect AI output, why not use that to correct itself to be less AI-like?
You just described adversarial training, something I’ve been hearing about for at least a few years now.
I have always thought ai was like the Jar Jar Binks of computer programs.
Meesah notsah Jamaican racist stereotypesah.
Old Man Succumbs to Chatbot Flattery, volume 25841.
But also, Lucas was always exchanted by cgi, even when it looked way worse than practical effects.
Crap-looking Special Edition Jabba has awkwardly entered the chat.
He became irrelevant the moment he sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney, and it’s all been downhill from there (both for him and the franchise). Fuck him.
The franchise already went downhill with him still in charge, Disney just finished the Job.
Could be because I’m old then. The last Star Wars movie I enjoyed was episode 3 (all first 6 episodes are great, in my opinion), every movie after that has so much politically driven bullshit and so little ro do with the original lore that the last movie I watched was “The last Jedi”. When I watched “The force awakens” I knew it was already getting ridiculously fucked, but still gave “The Last Jedi” a chance, only to end up regretting it. Haven’t watched any of the movies since. I keep all 6 original movies in my Jellyfin server and binge them about once a year or so.
While I agree that Disney Star Wars makes the prequels look good, they certainly weren’t great.
I keep all 6 original movies in my Jellyfin server and binge them about once a year or so.
I keep every singe Star Wars movie (even multiple edition for the OT) and TV show on my plex and haven’t watched any off it since the Mandalorian S3 (which was quite bad).
I only watched the first season of the Mandalorian. I think it was a massive waste of my time that would have been better spent watching more anime, lol.
I think it was a massive waste of my time that would have been better spent watching more anime, lol.
Why not both?
Lol I love how tone death Disney is with SW series tho. Andor is a anticapitalist and antifa story, told through the lens of some kid who was kidnapped when the Empire was ravaging his homeworld. I think the best storyline is when Cassian is wrongfully imprisoned and escapes within a week while stirring up revolts and enlightening prisoners.
Guy with famously bad takes has bad take.
Flukey dilettante regards stochastic parrot as unfathomable prodigy
Read all about it
This reads like one of those mass-delete gibberish Reddit comments, lol
It’s not every day you get to use a word like dilettante, so I figured I’d make a salad
Thanks for that, Dennis Miller.
“Goes to the Dark Side”
Someone never saw the rerelease of the original series.
Lucas’ best work was under an editor, whenever he got the full reigns, the product suffered.
His ex-wife was one of the best film editors in history.
The prequels got a breath of respect with how bad the sequel trilogy wound up. J J managed to rehabilitate George.
i mean, he was there all along. he pioneered the all green screen wave of automation in movies. the abuse of green screen was the slop before ai was around. to him it’s just cutting out all the vestiges of imperfection still greasing the machine
Lucas creating star wars doesnt mean he’s any sort of genius.
Its not political but he is an artist and that is why it is shocking Edit: OP first wrote: something along the lines of “why is it now seen as political”
Finger painting with your own poo does not make you an artist.
But writing a critical successful and belovid series of films does
And all that is subtracted because he made Jar Jar.
“belovid”
Does it? He certainly worked with a lot of talented artists, and I guess he did think of doing Hero’s Journey but in space.
I’m not denigrating the art, but something about the popularity contest tastemaking rubs me the wrong way.
The majority of entries in the Star Wars franchise are objectively trash, or very close to it, much like Star Trek. It is odd, and disappointing, how a genre with so much freedom for creativity and expression, is so uninspired and sales driven. Popularity is not quality. The original 3 Star Wars movies were something different partially because of how much effort would have been required to make them.
Objectively you can ask a billion people and see what their opinions are on various star wars media. It’s one of the few things a billion people will know and have an opinion about.
But because George Lucas said something positive about AI use for visual effects, suddenly what mustn’t be, can’t be. You people have no problem denying reality and shouting out alternative facts if it suits your agenda.
1 billion people… “alternate facts”
#fansblow
Shhh. if you use the word “blow” too much Pete Hegseth will enter the chat and want to take measurements and do inspections make sure the fluffing is up to standards.
#out-of-the-way-ill-blow-it-myself
What about attempting to ChatGPT his own work decades before GPTs were a thing?
…i doubt he wrote the Star Wars Movies with AI…
Durrrr, no duh. I meant the slopification he did to the trilogy for the rerelease.
I thought Frank Herbert created Star Wars
No, Isaac Asimov did
You’ll have to explain this one. I was making fun of the fact that George Lucas plagiarized Dune.
Much of Star Wars was “inspired” by Foundation
Wait for real!? I think I read the first 2 books, I never saw similarities. May need to read them again.
Highly recommend the TV series.
I didn’t know liking AI was political
Everything is political - the toilet paper you buy, the corporations you support, the things you pay attention to and the things you don’t, the media you consume, the books you read, your decision not to read, whether you pay union dues, the parks you visit, the roads you use, the services you rely on, what you decide to ignore.
People who say they are not political just mean they don’t consciously engage with politics. But even the decision to not engage in politics is a political decision.
AI may eventually replace jobs, pollute water, take up energy, and concentrate wealth at the top even more. Whether you support, are against, or ignore AI, all 3 are political decisions.
That sounds like fundamentalism tbh. It’s very much adjacent to the thinking of religious fanatics framing everything in relation to the divine, when most people are just trying to get along with their lives.
But there is a difference: If you buy the toilet paper from the loggers who bribe your local officials, or who lobby to let them ravage national parks, you are supporting the bribery and the lobbying; your money is being used for those purposes, even if you do it unknowingly. If you don’t inform yourself, you cannot make informed decisions. But just because you choose to ignore the political ramifications, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Sure, everybody just wants to live their lives, and that’s how lobbyists and crooked politicians get away with it, by appealing to your apathy.
No one with responsibilities has time to worry about where the pulp in their toilet paper came from, I’d be surprised if the factory could even tell you that.
There is no way you are practicing what you preach here. You are telling me you spend all day vetting every product and service you use to be aware of every little injustice involved? Or are you just following whatever someone else told you in a feed and assuming they are correct? That would functionally be religion.
The argument isn’t over whether I behave in a morally responsible way when it comes to the products I consume. The argument is over whether my diligence to check the background of the products I consume is a political decision.
I am not trying to highhorse anybody here. Of course I make uninformed decisions once in an oftentimes. Of course not all my clothes are socially conscious sourced nor my toilet paper is bought from an environmentally friendly forest.
But my lack of information when I make those decisions is political.
I am sorry you are feeling personally attacked, clearly, but not paying attention, changing what you buy, refusing to consume, or consuming products; All of those are political decisions, and that is the argument. No whether you are good or evil, uninformed misinformed, or not informed, moral or immoral. My argument is just that every decision you make has a political ramification whether you like it or not.
So, back to my original point, liking AI is political.
No I don’t feel attacked. I just don’t think it is useful to construe everything as political. Are the actions of animals also political? I think people would say no; but then can we be so sure that everything a human does is political? Something only becomes political when it is done with a political intent, knowingly making a choice because of some secondary association when equivalent alternatives are available.
When everything is framed as political you end up in the same place as dogmatists in all religions, trying to enforce some universal moral framework on every detail of a persons life. Many people will check out from that type of argument. Worse, many will think you and the causes that are import to you are jokes, and you become part of another’s political fodder.
You like what you like, but if you stan corporations enclosing our own culture and renting it back to us, that’s political.
yeah I’m not surprised, I watched the prequels. This guy was a legend in the 70s, that is like 50 years ago.
He hasn’t done anything great since co-writing Willow 40 years ago. Go to his IMDB, he’s lived out of star wars nostalgia since then, and all of them after the initial trilogy was a downgrade.
I lost every ounce of respect and admiration I had for this man after he sold the franchise to Disney.
You really held out for a while, huh?
Lemmy has some of the best takes in conversations. I love it here.
Kokaku’s website is blocking my VPN connection. Here’s the text of the article.
George Lucas Goes To The Dark Side, Says AI Is ‘The Future’
By Kenneth Shepard Published July 14, 2026
The Star Wars creator compares not using AI to riding a horse in the face of cars
I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but it feels like we’re getting new stories of someone partnering with or advocating for the use of artificial intelligence as the future of cinematic storytelling every day. The newest addition to the list? Mr. Star Wars himself, George Lucas, and man is his reasoning a bummer.
In an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas discussed his career and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening this fall in L.A., which will be showcasing decades of human-made art and spotlighting, as its website calls it, “stories and people who tell them.” In the lengthy interview, Lucas shares some meaningful insights into filmmaking, discusses his collaborations with people like Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg, and even offers some pithy observations about the pitfalls of testing films with focus groups and whether or not the average viewer is actually in touch with what they like about movies.
“If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a filmmaker I want to find out why,” he says. “But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie. Of course, now they go crazy with that. Now, it’s all about what the fans think. That isn’t how you make the movie. You make a movie by finding someone that knows how to make movies, that has a story to tell and is passionate about it.”
Jarringly, this advocacy for human-led storytelling is followed by claims that AI is “the future,” and Lucas compares not using the new technology to relying on antiquated transportation in the face of cars.
“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he tells A Rabbit’s Foot. “It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Though he acknowledged the risks of using the plagiarism machine when A Rabbit’s Foot questioned him further, he doubled down by highlighting other benefits he believes AI will provide in the future.
“If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that,” he says. “Humans can’t, we’re not that smart. The whole idea is you’re a human being, you’re responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you’re doing something that’s illegal you should be punished for that. Whatever you do, you should be recognized. It’s just like real life.”
There’s a scene in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker is training alongside Yoda and learning the ins and outs of being a Jedi, and he asks if the dark side of the Force is stronger than the light side. Yoda replies that it’s not, but that many fall to it because it is “quicker, easier, more seductive.” That movie was released 46 years ago, but it is certainly illustrative of the logic Lucas is using here.
He advocates for the importance of human-made art, but then argues that using technology that is notorious for stealing from humans and whose results generally look like shit compared to work made by hand would make the filmmaking process “easier.” It’s “the future” and there’s “nothing you can do about it”? It’s contradictory to believe both that it’s the human spirit that makes great films and also that a technology that’s being used to remove the human element from the process is the future of making movies. If that makes me naive and means I’m fighting against the inevitable, then I will go down swinging.
