A few thoughts on AI

A completely normal couple enjoy a drink in one of the ads within the Strangers' Gate ad.

One of the really fun things about writing speculative fiction is gaming out exactly what you think might happen to a particular idea or technology in the distant (or not-so-distant) future. For Strangers' Gate, the near-future aspect of the narrative made this even more challenging, as there are things happening right now that appear monumentally consequential, but could very easily seem like an overblown fad, or be completely forgotten, in fifty years' time.

Perhaps the biggest conundrum I faced was how to approach AI, which is obviously one of the most-discussed and feared technologies of the current era. As an AI skeptic who thinks that its practical uses and overall impact will be far less than the evangelists insist, I still can't dismiss it entirely. It's definitely a powerful technology that has myriad applications, and will be with us in one form or another for a very long time.

The authorial hack that I came up with was to frame the current era as the "Automation Age" (a natural progression from the "age of automation" techbros love to blather on about) — a period in human history that ultimately results in financial catastrophe, hyper-accelerated climate disaster, and ever-increasing international conflict fueled by AI-controlled weapons systems. This sequence of events culminates in WWAI — a completely avoidable global conflagration set off by various nations' AI-controlled military systems deciding that the only way to maintain dominance is to lob nuclear weapons at each other. 

This framing allowed me to envision a future where AI is still everywhere, and in everything, but nobody refers to it as such, and its most destructive uses (job displacement, mass surveillance, the shredding of digital security) have been intentionally curtailed or made illegal due to widespread political backlash.

But here's the thing: as much as I disdain the current level of hype surrounding machine learning, even I am not immune to the siren song of generative AI. While the idea of using LLMs to generate even one word of text makes me want to vomit, as a designer and video creator there are times when the technology is basically inescapable. In fact, I will be completely honest and say that without the current generation of AI-assisted tools there's no way that I would've been able to complete the large amount of rotoscoping and 3D model tracking necessary to create the Strangers' Gate promo trailer.

I even decided, for one very specific element in the video, to use a trial subscription to Adobe's generative video application Firefly to create fake ads based on scenarios from the world of the book. My (perhaps self-serving) reasoning was that the ads were satirical in nature, and were supposed to look terrible. Plus the blink-and-you'll-miss-it way they appear in the finished video made the idea of producing the content from scratch feel like overkill.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Perhaps, but I think a more charitable reading is that no technology is inherently bad — it's just that humans often tend to use new technologies in the worst possible ways.

Anyway, enough philosophizing. Here, for your amusement, are all of the ads I created for the book trailer (in all of their AI glory), set to the dulcet tones of "Sunshine Poltergeist" by The Coconut Monkeyrocket (an excellent band that you should check out at your earliest opportunity).

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/4ae982_2c036943f6e54befb0b35956095d932c/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Thanks for reading,

Eric Blair