Jenna Ortega hopes audiences ‘get sick’ of AI in films, TV

Jenna Ortega voiced concerns over rising AI use in films, saying computers lack soul and cannot replicate human imperfections. Speaking at the Marrakech Film Festival, she hoped audiences would tire of AI content. Bong Joon Ho and Celine Song also criticised AI’s creative impact.

Los Angeles: Actress Jenna Ortega has expressed her concern about the use of artificial intelligence in film and TV and hopes people will get “sick” of such work and want to return to genuine human creations in the future.

During the jury press conference at the Marrakech Film Festival, The ‘Wednesday’ actress said: “There is really charm in the human condition… As humans, we have a tendency to always, when you look back at history, take things too far. It’s very easy to be terrified. I know I am in times like this of deep uncertainty. And it kind of feels like we’ve opened up a Pandora’s Box.”

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“There’s certain things that AI just isn’t able to replicate, and yes, there’s beautiful, difficult mistakes, and a computer can’t do that. A computer has no soul, and it’s nothing that we would ever be able to resonate with or relate to.”

Ortega added: “I don’t want to assume for the audience, but I would hope it gets to a point where it becomes some sort of mental junk food, AI and looking at the screen, and then suddenly we all feel sick, and we don’t know why, and then that one independent filmmaker in their backyard comes out with something, and it releases this new excitement again.”

Meanwhile, “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho can see the wider benefits of AI but he’d still like to “destroy” the technology because of the risk it poses to the creative industries, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

He said: “My official answer is, AI is good because it’s the very beginning of the human race finally seriously thinking about what only humans can do. But my personal answer is, I’m going to organise a military squad, and their mission is to destroy AI.”

Past Lives director Celine Song said she agreed with Guillermo del Toro after the filmmaker recently vowed not to use AI in his work.

She said: “To quote Guillermo del Toro, who will be here at this festival, ‘ AI’… the way that it is completely destroyed the planet… the way that it is completely colonising our minds in the way that we encounter images and sound, I’m very concerned about it.

“The number one thing that we’re here to defend as artists is humanity… We’re here not to think about makes human life easy, what makes it convenient, but what it’s like to actually live.

“Severance is one of the best documents about the way that AI is completely taking over what is beautifully difficult about human life… the thing I’m actually more worried about than anything, is the way that it is trying to encroach on what makes our lives very, very beautiful and very, very hard, and what makes living worth doing.”

“When I work with my cinematographer, it might be easy to think that cinematography is a lot of images, but working with my cinematographer, who’s a human being, a grown man, I get to have his whole life. The images that he makes are not just things that you can just pin into an algorithm and pop back.

“The images that I make with my cinematographer is what I get by having his entire life’s work and his entire existence as a human being, the difficulties, the failures, everything… so deeply and… not very respectfully AI.”