In Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” which is about an automated torture device, Kafka writes that “we used to have to adjust a few things by hand, but from now on the machine will work all by itself.” I think this is exactly what people dread about AI and why they recoil from it, and also why large corporations are so excited about it. It is an aspect of the kind of fascism Kafka predicted. It removes the human element from the cinema just as the tech industry in general is removing showbiz from entertainment.

Here the news, entertainment, and the government all merge into a pool of toxic sludge. Because of AI, we could already picture a future in which another pandemic happens while we, as a species on lockdown, pass the hours in isolation viewing subpar art made by hallucination-prone nonentities. Today, videos of ICE raids scored to AI-generated nü-metal songs follow AI-generated jpegs of Donald Trump as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, calling to mind “Ride of the Valkyries” from that film’s score, solidifying the connection to the Wagner-loving Third Reich. We live under a mode of dehumanized production where the most human element is the images of dead Palestinians that show up in our feeds between the latest iterations of the official slop.