Last year, on November 2nd, I published a piece in the Nass titled “It’s Art, AIn’t It?: The Artificial Art Debate.” The piece served as my rumination over ‘dark fantasy’ AI videos that were popping up in my feed and my immediate fascination with them. I couldn’t understand why these videos kept tugging at my stomach and giving me an uneasy yet addictive feeling of nostalgia. I stand by my conclusion: these artificially generated videos have the ability to conjure specific feelings in humans that are unique to that medium. I did also say the videos were ‘scary good.’
I may have jumped the gun there. It’s definitely entertaining, but I’m starting to feel that classifying it as ‘good’ may be an insult to us all.
For the past two months I have been working in Lisbon, Portugal. My job is pretty relaxed, leaving me with atrocious amounts of free time and my inability to speak Portuguese has left me with zero (0) friends. Free time plus zero friends usually leads to two things:
- Sitting silently with my thoughts.
- Sitting silently with my thoughts but watching a movie at the same time.
I tend to watch at least one movie a night in my apartment here; I’ve done a lot of re-watching, but I’ve incorporated some new items as well. Here are some highlights from my Letterboxd (which I had to redownload to support this endeavor): Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, The Sunlit Night, Sometimes I Think About Dying, The Farewell, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Mysterious Skin, and Asteroid City.
What stands out to me about these films is not so much the subject matter, but the ways in which someone can curate mundane environments and the complexity of emotional solitude in a creative (yet natural and readable) way. It’s this complexity that I believe AI can’t replicate. At least not like we, the knowers of loneliness, can.
If there’s one place to observe silent solitude firsthand, it’s here on the Metro in Lisbon. No one is speaking, yet I know everyone is thinking about something and all of those little somethings are combined into the buzzing nothingness of the hot train air. I think I’ve become a bit obsessed with how to portray this in written word or through film. It seems like it would be easy to do…after all, nothing is being said out loud.
So, I tried to do it myself. I’m pursuing a theater minor, and I figured I would use the city’s artistic inspiration to draft ideas for possible scripts that may become a thesis later on. Over the last eight weeks, I’ve attempted to bring to life several solitude-focused plots involving alien abductions, a playwright in the recession, an office in another dimension, and a daydreaming museum goer. But, I keep getting stuck. I reach a certain point where the essence of nothingness has become almost too nothing, and then the goal and all feeling has been lost. I don’t plan on giving up, but in the meantime, I want to jealously fangirl over a couple instances where I feel this has been executed wonderfully.
The two films I have watched the most while abroad are Lost in Translation along with its sister film, On The Rocks – both directed by Sofia Coppola. I watched Lost in Translation for the first time about a week before I flew out to Lisbon. I really enjoyed it, but I knew it was something I would have to rewatch many times before securing a full grasp of its subtleties. I have since watched this film about six times. Naturally, I felt some connection to Charlotte as we were both isolated in a foreign country for weeks on end.
I would say more than half of the scenes in Lost in Translation are masterful uses of silence. There’s very little dialogue in the film, particularly on Charlotte’s end, while Bill Murray’s character tends to talk at her. Somehow Charlotte’s lack of dialogue is in no way restricting; I still feel as though I learned so much about her. But how does Coppola craft silence in a way that moves past laziness and is instead interesting and packed with information?
All of this mental work I’m doing to find more effective writing strategies is difficult and time consuming, and I believe it requires a certain level of firsthand experience to flesh out the intricacies of busy silence. And just like that, I found myself (unintentionally) reconsidering my place in the AI conversation.
If AI did attempt to represent this feeling, would it even have the skillset to do so? Could it craft a silence that felt meaningful? I understand that generative AI models are fed pieces of human-made work to initiate the machine learning process, but does it have the empathy to understand the gravity of those experiences? We can feed as much information and as many firsthand accounts into these models as we want, but I’m not convinced that it will ever know how to handle them properly.
Imagine me, at my job in Lisbon. My boss is talking to me, but it feels more like his words are just knocking on my forehead. My gaze falls on his nose, conveniently missing his own eyes. He’s saying something about Adobe Illustrator and resizing images for the company website but I’m really only thinking about the fact that my shirt is stuck to my back in the heat and whether or not my butt sweat is going to show through my pants when I stand up. I hear cheerful chatter around me from my coworkers after my boss walks away, and I know that I could join in if I felt like it. But instead I turn to look out the window and fixate on the painter sitting on the cobblestone sidewalk outside his studio. He’s taking a smoke break. The street is too small for the buses so from my vantage point, it looks like his toes are about to get run over every five seconds. He doesn’t see me, probably because he’s doing his own thinking too. Most likely about the painting he still has to finish inside. He looks disappointed. There’s a quiet current between the two of us but it screams with the sound of solitude.
Now, this may not be the scene that someone wants to make a movie about. But, I’m trying to imagine a world where a computer can represent all of these tiny moments without the help of someone who knows people. And most importantly, someone who knows what it feels like to be staring out into the street in ninety-degree weather on a random Tuesday.
I’ve looked into Rashida Jones’ and Scarlett Johansson’s eyes enough times in the last two months to know that their robot-made versions wouldn’t be half as effective. I suppose this warrants a kudos to an actor themself given the strange ability to hold emotions in your eyes and embody the written vision of an artist. Contrary to what I wrote last November, I’m not convinced that a machine can imitate a vessel of emotion and complex thought no matter how complex its algorithm may be.
Perhaps the human in us all also restricts our ability to fully engage with AI-generated art. Maybe there will be a time in the future where a machine really can recreate this feeling flawlessly but we still won’t be able to connect with it; we’ll know in our gut that whatever entity created it has never and will never know the real thing.
Writing this seems to have dropped another plot in my head: what if a corporation in the future set out to make an AI for every well known writer and director in the world? And each one produced hundreds of films a year in their own little metal box in the exact style that was described to them? I’ll start writing that script another day.
But, for now, I know I wouldn’t trust a Sofia Coppola robot in a million years.