Bong Joon Ho took a typically radical approach when asked about his thoughts on the rise of AI technology at the Marrakech Film Festival jury press conference on Saturday.
The Korean director, who is president of the jury, gave two answers, one measured, the other deeply personal.
“My official answer is that AI is good because it’s the very beginning of the human race finally thinking seriously about what only humans can do. But my personal answer is that 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 response in which she endorsed Guillermo del Toro’s recent comments about his rejection of AI technology.
“To quote Guillermo del Toro, who will be here at this festival, ‘Fuck AI’…the way it’s completely destroying the planet…the way it’s completely colonizing our minds in the way we encounter images and sound, I’m very worried about that,” she said.
“The first thing we are here to defend as artists is humanity… We are here to think not about what makes human life easy, what makes it practical, but about what it really means to live.”
Song mentioned on a television show Breakupabout employees of a biotechnology company who underwent a procedure that separated their personal memories from those of their work.
“Breakup is one of the best documents about how AI is completely taking over what is beautifully difficult about human life… what worries me more than anything is how it is trying to encroach on what makes our lives very, very beautiful and very, very hard, and what is worth living for.
She suggested that creative work should be a combination of skills, creativity and lived experiences and not simply an act of execution.
“When I work with my cinematographer, it can be easy to think that cinematography is made up of a lot of images, but working with my cinematographer, who is a human being, a grown man, I’m lucky enough to have his whole life. The images that he creates aren’t just things that you can just pin into an algorithm and replay,” she said.
The images that I make with my cinematographer are what I get by having his entire life’s work and his entire existence as a human being, the struggles, the failures, everything… so deeply and… not very respectfully screw the AI.
Ortega, who is the youngest member of the Marrakech jury, also responded to the question, saying she had a similar view of Song.
“There really is a charm to the human condition… As human beings, we tend, when we look at history, to always go too far. It’s very easy to be terrified. I know I live in times like this of deep uncertainty. And I feel a little bit like we’ve opened a Pandora’s box,” she said.
The actress said she hopes people will eventually grow tired of AI-created work and return to authentic human creations.
“There are some things that AI just isn’t capable of replicating, and yes, there are beautiful and difficult mistakes, and a computer can’t do that. A computer has no soul, and that’s nothing we could ever resonate with or identify with,” she said.
I don’t want to presume for the audience, but I hope it gets to a point where it becomes sort of mental junk food and AI and staring at the screen, and then all of a sudden we’ll all feel sick, and we don’t know why, and then some indie filmmaker in his backyard will release something, and it’ll release this new excitement again.
