Bong Joon Ho took a characteristically radical approach when questioned on his thoughts around the rise of AI technology at the jury press conference of the Marrakech Film Festival on Saturday.
The Korean director, who is president of the jury, gave two responses, one measured, the other deeply personal.
“My official answer is, AI is good because it’s the very beginning of the human race finally seriously thinking about what only humans can do. But my personal answer is, I’m going to organize a military squad, and their mission is to destroy AI,” he said.
Joon Ho was joined on stage by jury members Celine Song, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jenna Ortega, Karim Aïnouz, Hakim Belabbes, Julia Ducournau and Payman Maadi.
Past Lives director Song gave a longer answer in which she endorsed recent comments by Guillermo del Toro on his rejection of AI technology.
“To quote Guillermo del Toro, who will be here at this festival, ‘Fuck AI’… the way that it is completely destroyed the planet… the way that it is completely colonizing our minds in the way that we encounter images and sound, I’m very concerned about it,” she said.
“The number one thing that we’re here to defend as artists is humanity… We’re here not to think about makes human life easy, what makes it convenient, but what it’s like to actually live.”
Song brought up TV show Severance, about the employees of a biotech firm who have undergone a procedure that severs their personal memories from their work ones.
“Severance is one of the best documents about the way that AI is completely taking over what is beautifully difficult about human life… the thing I’m actually more worried about than anything, is the way that it is trying to encroach on what makes our lives very, very beautiful and very, very hard, and what makes living worth doing.”
She suggested that creative work should be a combination of skill, creativity and lived experiences and not simply an act of execution.
“When I work with my cinematographer, it might be easy to think that cinematography is a lot of images, but working with my cinematographer, who’s a human being, a grown man, I get to have his whole life. The images that he makes are not just things that you can just pin into an algorithm and pop back,” she said.
The images that I make with my cinematographer is what I get by having his entire life’s work and his entire existence as a human being, the difficulties, the failures, everything… so deeply and… not very respectfully fuck AI.”
Ortega, who is Marrakech’s youngest ever jury member, also addressed the question, saying she had a similar take to Song.
“There is really charm in the human condition… as humans, we have a tendency to always, when you look back at history, take things too far. It’s very easy to be terrified. I know I am in times like this of deep uncertainty. And it kind of feels like we’ve opened up a Pandora’s Box,” she said.
The actress said she hoped that people would eventually get sick of the work created by AI, to return to authentic human creations.
“There’s certain things that AI just isn’t able to replicate, and yes, there’s beautiful, difficult mistakes, and a computer can’t do that. A computer has no soul, and it’s nothing that we would ever be able to resonate with or relate to,” she said.
“I don’t want to assume for the audience, but I would hope it gets to a point where it becomes some sort of mental junk food, AI and looking at the screen, and then suddenly we all feel sick, and we don’t know why, and then that one independent filmmaker in their backyard comes out with something, and it releases this new excitement again.”
Moroccan director Belabbes suggested the AI’s growing influence in the filmmaking and wider creative sphere was a new form of colonialism.
“The models they use in AI don’t belong to me. They’re not mine. I have to create my own worlds… otherwise it’s just a new form of colonialism. It’s the whitewashing of our heritage,” he said.
Song came back into the conversation to pick up on this point, saying she felt there was a sense in the AI community that filmmakers could be bought and their work then shaped to fit “an algorithm of what they believe about the market, what they believe about what is happening in the world for them, which is deeply capitalism, colonialism and imperialism.”
French director Julia Ducournau was a lone voice highlighting the benefits of AI as a tool but also adding that use of the technology to reduce costs and headcount on a project would be “wrong and immoral”.
“In Alpha, my latest film, we used it for CGI and it really did help us a lot. However, I really believe that at no point should AI take over human work and human interaction. I cannot have an artistic dialog with AI. I can have an artistic dialog with my CGI supervisor in the way we’re going to use that tool. I think that it should just remain a tool” she said.
