George Lucas says rejecting AI is like rejecting cars in favour of horses

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Just over a year after Lucasfilm, the production company bearing his name, declared creative bankruptcy with a risible display of AI-generated 'aliens,' George Lucas has offered his take on the tech. It's, ah, well it's not great.

In a chat with A Rabbit's Foot (via Kotaku), Lucas alighted on the topic of other directors' hostility to new (for a certain definition of 'new') tech. "I have a lot of friends who are on the Film Foundation with me, that's dedicated to saving old movies, and some of them say 'I'll never do digital. Lawrence of Arabia was shot with film.'" Lucas thinks that's a bit daft: "It's the moving image. That's what it is. It's not a technology, it's an idea."

Lucas goes on to apply this philosophy to AI and the backlash against it. "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies. It's very much like sitting here saying, 'Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it's at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there's all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they'll be making them into tanks, and then they'll be killing people. It's terrible.'"

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And then, Lucas says the same thing you've heard from countless AI boosters: "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress, it's the future."

It's not entirely surprising that Lucas would be bullish on AI. As a director, he's always been someone trying to push the limit on new technology. In some of his films—the original Star Wars trilogy, for instance—that's had the impact of creating groundbreaking, world-historic movies. In others—the Star Wars prequel trilogy, for instance—it's had the effect of slapping actors in front of tech which was not yet ready for prime time.

Of course, AI feels qualitatively different to, say, digital cameras. The former is tech that was developed by more-or-less stealing vast oceans of original, human-made work in order to equip computers with the capacity to digest them into a sort of vaguely novel composite mulch, while the latter is digital cameras. It feels a little obtuse of Lucas not to grapple with that.

To the extent that Lucas does grapple with the drawbacks of AI, he seems to believe we can use AI to solve them. "If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that. Humans can't, we're not that smart. The whole idea is you're a human being, you're responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you're doing something that's illegal you should be punished for that. Whatever you do, you should be recognised. It's just like real life."

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