#AI IS EVIL!!! NEVER SUPPORT AI!! which is literally ! meaningless!!!

[oatbugs]

i want to be a machine learning engineer but some of u guys r making it embarrassing actually. long but IMO important explanation below. We have bigger issues to deal w and better things to focus on.

like our planet is dying and the commercialisation of massive AI models and training the models themselves releases like hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions. and this includes very "nonessential" models that don't tend to contribute much to society (re: new fancy image generation toy). but u have decided your new career path is "AI artist" (glorified prompt-writer?) .

and just as bad, some of you have decided the biggest issue w AI is those people, the glorified prompt writers!! you draw more attention to it instead of focusing on the real problems behind AI and the ethics of training models! about the harm it causes to the planet, about web-scraping limitations basically not existing (stolen art falls under this domain), copyright laws to do with AI, the way facial recognition deals with race, about the boundaries between letting AI learn and develop in an "unbiased" way vs preventing sociopolitical damage at the cost of (potentially) further progress.

conversely, there is nowhere NEAR enough focus about how AI can help us overcome some of our fundamental problems. i love machine learning bc i find it - specifically the maths behind it - fascinating and i believe one day it could help us make very cool advancements, as it already has. i think the mathematical architectures and processes behind creating new deep learning models are beautiful. i also know the damage capitalists will inevitably do - they always wield powerful, beautiful new tools as weapons.

AND HERE YOU ARE FALLING FOR IT! it's very frustrating to watch!! if you're angry on behalf of artists, i'm begging you to protect the rights of artists and be mad at greedy companies instead of villanising a tool that can help us immensely! learn about AI ethics, learn about how it is present in our lives, what we should try to stop, what we should promote.

if you "boycott AI" as a whole with no desire to gain more literacy on the topic other than "steals art therefore bad", you will have to be against your translate app, your search engine, your email spam filter, almost everything on your phone that categorises anything (i.e. pretty much all of your search functions), NPC enemies in games, your medical diagnostic tools, your phone's face unlock, your maps app, online banking, accessibility tools that help blind and deaf people, new advancements in genetic sequencing and protein folding and treating cancer and modelling new solutions in physics and so on and so on.

the issue isn't all AI as a whole. the issue is A) how companies are using it and B) how a lot of you guys are getting mad at the concept of AI instead of responding to A.

#lol anyway #u guys r like protect artists rights and then proceed to do 0 research on how #without doing damage to humanity as a whole #and actually tbh a lot of artists contribute to this as well. like i was following a few ppl who had their art ripped off (this must be #horrible and harrowing and i can't imagine how bad the experience must be) and they responded by being like #AI IS EVIL!!! NEVER SUPPORT AI!! which is literally ! meaningless!!! #think about it kind of like nuclear physics. it can help us immensely #it can teach us a lot about the universe and it can help us w finding wonderful new sources of energy. it can be beautiful and fascinating #and it can also be utilised in a very dangerous way. once it is used in a dangerous way (as it has been) you probably wont start blaming #The Concept Of Nuclear Physics. like im gonna guess you guys don't boycott gamma rays or nuclear fission bc someone made an atomic bomb yk #maybe this analogy got out of hand 💀 but you get what i mean #AI #ai art #idk how to tag this lol #anyway #listen to artists but also listen to actual AI experts i am BEGGING U

[judiciousimprecation]

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Ghost in the Shell (2017) is a no good very bad movie. It is even more disappointing than I expected, and I had to remind myself on multiple occasions during the viewing that if I walked out of the movie I would just have to suffer through it again later. The iconic philosophical themes and questions of the original movie are abandoned or mangled beyond recognition, and replaced by cliched tropes and story elements. Scarlett Johansson (and the rest of the cast) are decent when given the chance to shine, but the bad writing and absurd story decisions weigh heavily on the entire movie.

I’ll be honest - I don’t really care about the whitewashing issues. All else being equal I would have preferred a Japanese actress (side note: It seems weird to me that people kept calling for an “Asian actress” in place of ScarJo, not specifically a Japanese one), but if they honestly found a white woman who carried the role better, than more power to them. That is not what happened, though. ScarJo did better than I expected, but I did not expect much to begin with. I think the writing and characterization hampered her far more than her acting, but nonetheless this was hardly her ideal role.

However, claims that her being a white woman were somehow important to the plot and/or the themes of identity fall flat for a number of reasons. First, the aspect of race is completely (conspicuously!) absent from the film (arguably from the source material too!), and is never mentioned or addressed by the characters. Second, if she’s supposed to seem out of place as a white woman in Japan, it doesn’t really work when half her coworkers, the villain, the anti-hero, and the majority of the supporting characters are white! Third, if it was supposed to create some sort of rift/disconnect between her past/mother and her, that could have been done in a number of less ridiculous ways. You know what would have been really clever? Making her mother a Chinese refugee. That would have been really interesting.

Besides, all of those arguments are apologetics, because the Major’s racial identity never plays into the story, and the film certainly doesn’t do anything to highlight it.

(Second side note: Togusa, arguably one of the whitest looking characters, was played by an Asian guy! Y’all are just fucking with us)

Regardless of the casting decisions, their characterization of the new Major is unbearable. The decision to take the Major, an ex-military ass-kicking woman who has been a full-body cyborg her whole life, and turn her into Mira Killian, the amnesiac runaway who they kidnapped and stuffed into an experimental cyborg body and then leased to Section 9, imho, completely destroyed their ability to create a decent movie. In the original movie, Motoko Kusanagi is incredibly important and interesting as a character, but hardly important to the plot. She drives the plot forward, but the plot is not about her (It’s more complicated than that, but we’re here to talk about the new movie, not the original). Mira Killian is devoid of any agency, and ends up getting dragged through the plot by the machinations of the Evil Robot Corporation and the unstable Failed Experiment guy whose motives I didn’t understand, and which hardly fit with the rest of the movie’s themes. To repeat: The Major (nee Motoko Kusanagi), imho one of the strongest female characters ever written, has basically zero agency in this film. Mira Killian has no fucking clue what is going on.

Speaking of the Evil Robot Corporation and the Unstable Failed Experiment, this film is rife with all sort of cliches absent from the original film (and no, not because they weren’t cliches when the original aired). The majority of the original film’s interesting themes and philosophy were ripped out and replaced with tired scifi and cyberpunk cliches, and what wasn’t removed was dumbed down to the point of just beating the audience over the head with the words “Ghost” and “Shell” dozens of times. Barely five minutes in, the Evil Robot Corporation guy literally says “I don’t see her as a machine, I see her as a weapon”. I have never wanted to walk out of a movie so badly in my life. The entire Evil Robot Corporation is yet another tired and unnecessary cliche, and seem to exist only because movie audiences can’t understand a plot that doesn’t have a monolithic Antagonist driving every bad thing in the plot, and also to give Section 9 plenty of goons to shoot.

There’s a great tumblr post I can’t find that makes fun of cybernetic characters’ tendency to get angsty and annoying about their ~humanity~ and if they are still a ~person~ (rather than just embracing their badass new robot bits), and the new movie dives belly-first into those tropes. The original film starts with a world where full cyberization is increasingly popular and asks what it means to be human when you’ve been replaced by machinery, and where the soul (ghost) fits in that equation, and ends with an AI that has managed to create its own soul, thereby obviating the question. The new film starts with an amnesiac and the world’s only full-body cyborg (±1) worrying she’s a machine and wondering if she’s really a human at all, and ends with her getting her memories and backstory back and deciding, yep, she is definitely a human after all.

Also, I want to take a moment to complain about the new film’s insistence on pointless homages and callbacks to the source material. Naming the new Evil Robot Corporation “Hanka Robotics” is an incongruous reference, but an inoffensive one. Naming the antihero Hideo Kuze, though, was completely ridiculous and destroyed any shreds of immersion I might have had, every time they said his name. Hideo Kuze is the antagonist from the second season of the TV show; he bears no resemblance to this new character, and does not even exist in the same universe as the original film!

The entire garbage man sequence is so mangled as to make no fucking sense, all the more so because they insist on callbacks to little details like showing him the photo of his “daughter”, which feels completely out of place and confusing. The diving boat scene is the victim of twisted irony - in the original it’s like the one place where the Major discusses what it means to feel and be human (and also where the Puppet Master introduces himself!). In the new film it’s almost entirely pointless conversation that gestures feebly in the direction of the original, and probably one of the only places where the Mira doesn’t complain about not being human.

The opening scene is a weird hybrid of the opening scene from the original film, and the geisha house from the episode one of the TV series (two very good scenes). And yet it misses the point of both! The geisha house scene from SAC is supposed to illustrate Section 9’s competence, planning, and teamwork, as they surveil the area and move in stealthily, resolving the situation with just a few seconds of gunfire. Meanwhile, the opening scene in the original film illustrates the darker side of Section 9’s MO, as the Major assassinates a foreign diplomat who was about to give asylum to a programmer with classified info. To be clear, none of these elements *need* to be in the new film, but it raises the question of why the new version exists at all, and demonstrates just how superficial most of the callback scenes are. Overall, the callback scenes are all the more incongruous and strange for how they don’t fit at all with the new story and characters.

There are a few bright spots, though. Beat Takeshi and Pilou Asbæk are great as Aramaki and Batou, respectively (although the characters are universally hampered by bad writing). The title sequence was neat, and I think they nailed the Ghost in the Shell’s overall visual aesthetic. The Water Fight scene was actually really cool (possibly by virtue of being a shot-for-shot recreation of the original). Also, you can watch that one scene online and save yourself a miserable two hours! The rest of the action scenes did not fare so well. The stakes are incredibly low because everyone in Section 9 is an invincible badass (even though the film does a terrible job of establishing this), reducing the scenes to meaningless flash and an obsession with rendering cool effects on the Major’s thermoptic camouflage. I would probably have more to say, but I was so bored during the final climactic action scene I spent the time writing down my notes instead.

And then there’s all the stuff I’m less comfortable critiquing because it falls more under the umbrella of “creative vision” and I don’t want to sound like an anime weeb nitpicking details. But! They completely changed the ending, which was necessitated by the fact that they removed the Puppet Master and replaced him with the aforementioned Unstable Failed Experiment walking trope. They completely changed they way most people relate to cybernetic enhancements, and basically eliminated full-body cyberization from the setting. They added another woman to Section 9, but only managed to give her and all the other supporting members like 10 seconds of screen time each.

Overall, Ghost in the Shell (2017) was a bad movie that somehow managed to greatly disappoint me despite my very low expectations. Please do not go see it. Forget it exists, and go watch anything from the GitS franchise from before 2015 instead.

#Ghost in the Shell #critique requested #movie review #I hate this movie so much I wrote this all in two hours #effortpost