[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: An AI generated, machine learning generated art is art where the subject is generated by the user, a human who types in a prompt ‘show me Jared Leto as Jesus on the cross in the style of Frank Frazetta’. So you get a muscle-y Jared Leto in a little fucking loincloth nailed to a cross. So the machine didn’t think “I’m going to do that,” you told the AI what to render. So anyway it’s the artist but you’re the client. So the AI is working from a huge ass database the same way Google Translate is working from a huge database that it develops networks of pseudo understanding within. I’m sure the AI notices statistical trends that the words bait and a lot of the time in certain contexts is followed by the word switch and it doesn’t know what bait and switch means, though it maybe develops of statistical correlation kind of Watson style with words like fraud.
If Google Translate is translating something and somebody’s writing you committed fraud, you did a bait and switch on me and they want to translate it into Chinese, Google translate will have all these contextual clues, it’s bait and switch and not bait and a fishing rod or something like that because from the context. So anyway, big data plus all sorts of correlations gives the AI a pseudo understanding. It’s fake understanding because it’s not embedded in consciousness but at the same time it’s got a kind of a statistical Stochastic Bayesian basis that’s similar to a lot of our understanding. And all this is said without me ever having taken a class in this shit, so I doubt my heads up my ass but it could be. Anyway, we have big data understandings of shit in entertainment that previous generations did not have.
So this guy named James Gunn was just named creative director of the DC Universe for movies. From now on he’s going to be the head honcho in charge of any movie that is made at whatever fucking Studio, I guess it’s Warner Brothers who has the right to make DC movies and I was just thinking how crazy this is because James Gunn is a creatively crazy person. He did The Suicide Squad which is the second; I think the first movie was just Suicide Squad. I think this one has a ‘the’ in it but anyway it’s the second Suicide Squad movie. Suicide Squad is a set of DC super villains who’ve been kind of recruited and coerced to fight for good but they’re all fucking weirdos and assholes.
The first Suicide Squad movie was not great, you could get through it but Harley Quinn is probably the most famous member of The Suicide Squad. She started out as the Joker’s psychiatrist and then he seduced her and then did a bunch of stuff that drove her insane. So now she is an insane super anti-hero her own self. She’s been in three movies at least. The Suicide Squad, the second one, the good one by James Gunn is a great movie and it is so fucked up. It’s got all these fucked up superheroes that have… Have you seen this movie? I doubt it.
Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: All right. Well, it’s got King Shark; basically it’s a guy with shark skin and a shark head and he’s ferocious. He’ll eat anything and he’s indestructible because of his shark skin but he’s an idiot because he’s a shark. The Suicide Squad is being briefed on their mission by Viola Davis, who’s this very sinister leader of the government. So she’s the man and she’s taking questions from the all these fucked up superheroes and they’re raising their hands or just yelling out questions. And then King Shark raises his hand and he’s voiced by Sylvester Stallone in Stallone’s stupidest voice, raise his hand, Viola Davis calls on him and he goes “Hand” He just wanted to show he knew what his hand was called and it’s fucking delightful. He’s got a whole character art, he learns how to make friends and love and rat catcher number two becomes his friend. We find out what happened to rat catcher number one and she has a rat light that she shines it and it gathers like a quarter million rats from all corners of wherever she is and they become an overwhelming force and it’s all fucked up and it’s really filthy and it’s very bloody and it’s just insane.
If you took it back in time to 1955 and showed it to a movie audience there would be panic and bedlam and 80% of the audience would run out in horror and loathing and people would vomit and only the few weirdos would have be able to withstand the barrage of weirdness and perversity. We like this shit now because we have a huge fucking database. We’ve seen fucking everything and so we need entertainments now that are broke, that are just complicated, are based on everybody knowing everything and like inside jokes based on just everything. Not just inside jokes but like Bill Simmons; he was a sports writer who now sits atop a production Empire; he makes shows for ESPN and who knows where else. He did a documentary on the most recent Woodstock which happened just a few years ago and which was even more of a cluster fuck than the original Woodstock.
He’s probably worth a hundred million dollars now and he started off as a sports writer and his ticket to great success was, he realized that people who read about sports know about a lot of other shit. Until him sports writers, to the extent that they used analogies at all, they used analogies from sports. They assumed that anybody who was a sports fan knew a lot. A baseball fan knew a lot about baseball and maybe quite a bit about of football and maybe some about basketball. Simmons realized you can take analogies, you can use shit from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to explain a situation in sports that the people who are avid consumers of entertainment, and sports counts as entertainment, consume all this other shit and you can use everything to inform everything and he became America’s most entertaining sports writer. Then he was recruited by Kimmel to write for Kimmel because this guy looks at a sports writer who’s not really a sports writer anymore and says you would be good at coming up with shit for my late night show, which he kind of was but he lasted probably a year or a year and a half on that.
Anyway, he went on to build an Empire based on everybody knowing everything and in order to make decent entertainment now, unless you’re going to do some fucking sensitive slow paced thing about a lady who works at the post office, whose post office is closing down because it’s in a very small town after a 100 years the U.S postal is trying to save money; that’s a movie I watched and I enjoyed but it was a very slow movie and it had no insight, unless you’re into one of those sensitive fucking movies. If you’re doing a blockbuster it has to be knowing and baroque and fucking insane to give people shit that they haven’t seen yet. It’s like that art that gets spit out of all those AI art making apps now that is very quickly learning every visual reference and combining them in ways that make people go fucking A.
So, what I’m saying is this guy, this James Gunn guy who seems like a very nice guy, I follow him on Twitter, he got canceled for a while because he made some unfortunate jokes on Twitter 10 years ago. Then he apologized like crazy and said he might have made a couple jokes about pedophilia, which you could do 10 years ago. There’s an old man in Family Guy who’s always trying to lure the young boys in town into like a secluded place and it’s funny because it’s so creepy. But even Family Guy, I’m not sure, if it were a new show and I’m not sure they could do that now. Anyway, this guy who is not just a lunatic, he’s a very smart business person who has a finely tuned instinct for fucked up-ness and that’s a crazy thing, that it should be an asset in business knowing how to find stuff that’s novel and fucked up.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 