SF’s AI Billboards Should Terrify Us. Humans Are Already Gone
But fighting back with moral panic is a surefire road to ruin
A young friend sent photos yesterday from a drive through San Francisco and over to Oakland. The pictures capture the difference between our world and the tech world. Every billboard, real estate long taken over by tech titans preening to each other, just as our Sunset Strip features studios and streamers thumping their chests, now shares a distinct characteristic: Human beings have been removed from the picture.
In our place? “Sexy” messaging to the tech world — featuring words like workflow, optimization, amplify, prompt and cloud.
Advertising is, by definition, aspirational. And right now, the aspiration being sold by our overlords to the north is a world with fewer to no humans.
The images reveal the existential tension driving the AI conversation, especially in Hollywood. This is, by definition, the most humanist industry in existence, whose very product is about capturing emotion and experience and sharing that in a way that millions relate to.
Here are a few L.A. billboards today by comparison — just within a couple of blocks of our Century City office.
You can see why the contrast is just a little bit scary to some of us.
The problem is how we address this problem, that is moving our way fast, with AI the latest hyper-accelerated front in this invasion.
The conversation, such as it is, shoves everything in one basket and reacts to it all with a primal scream, lumping together theft and innovation, job loss and useful tools, corporate abuse and creative experimentation.
There are a dozen different fights with a dozen different stakes — and we’re losing all of them.
That’s where our conversation has gone off the rails. The working premise in a lot of Hollywood is that AI is evil and must go away. Anything less than total resistance is surrender. I understand the impulse. I’d also love to un-invent the internet while we’re at it. But that isn’t a strategy.
AI is setting off the same alarms that have been ringing for years from the changes wrought by the tech world — fears about our economy and democracy, a sense that control of our lives and families is being taken out of our hands. Here in Hollywood, where the disruption has already left the industry bleeding, the AI debate is sticking a hot poker into a very open wound.
A big part of those terrors centers on the nature of the industry up north, which seems intent on swallowing us whole — the idea that the most humanist of major industries is being devoured by the most inhuman of industries.
AI is already embedded in the workflows we use every day, in ways so ordinary we barely notice them. The question is what we allow them to do, who gets protected, and who gets crushed.
Here’s the matrix I keep coming back to: