It’s been almost a decade since tech juggernaut Google dropped its original, though unofficial “Don’t be evil” motto for the more anodyne: “Do the right thing.” Now it’s using its might to spend vast amounts of money to change the public perception around the next great frontier in tech profits — AI.
Unlike other giant tech companies like Apple and Amazon, Google has — except for its purchase of YouTube in 2006 — mostly shied away from getting too heavily involved in the business of film and TV production, and streaming subscriptions. While Google has been more cautious about its involvement in the movie business, its rivals are investing in the space. Amazon recently announced plans to roll out 15 movies a year in US theatres before they land on its streamer Prime Video and Apple’s Original Films division looks set to make its Brad Pitt-starring F1 one of this year’s most successful blockbusters.
But this may be about to change after Google’s announcement in May this year that it plans to invest in a series of short films aimed at shifting the cultural landscape around AI through stories that paint the technology in a more positive light.
The history of Hollywood’s portrayal of the nightmarish potential of AI taking over the world arguably stretches back to Fritz Lang’s silent-era 1927 classic Metropolis and has been continued in the visions of directors like Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland. Google doesn’t think that these kind of doomsday cynical warnings are helping the technology in the court of public opinion, so it’s stepping in to do its own PR for the tech that will replace us sooner than anyone ever imagined.
On the plus side, these new upbeat visions of our happy AI future aren’t going to be created by AI itself, for now. Rather these optimistic AI tales, which take a positive, inspirational, family friendly leaf out of the old Disney playbook, will be produced by human beings.
The initiative, imaginatively dubbed, “AI on Screen”, is a partnership with Range Media Partners, a talent agency that “represents a wide variety of entertainment clients, including actors and writers” and will produce the films, according to LA Times.
The first film to be greenlit is titled Sweetwater, written by Sean Douglas and directed and featuring his father, actor Michael Keaton. The film tells the heartwarming story of a man who makes a visit to his childhood home and discovers a hologram of, “his dead celebrity mother”. One assumes that the message of this film is that AI can keep a version of your beloved mother alive that’s even better than your real mom.
The second project is Lucid, which, according to LA Times, will be about a “couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream”, pushing the message that when life gets hard, you can escape to an AI-generated la la land, where everyone has 12 fingers and the music sounds almost human-made.
Google’s attempt to shift public perceptions around AI comes after a survey conducted last year by Bentley University and Gallup revealed that 56% of Americans believe the technology does “equal amounts of harm and good” and 31% feel it does “more harm than good”.
Google’s interventions in the PR campaign are perhaps intended to reduce that 31%, but if you think the tech giant is spending millions of dollars on an expensive ad campaign for AI, think again.
Google vice-president of technology and society Mira Lane assured LA Times that the company was funding films that “explore the intersection of technology and humanity” and they’re simply intended to offer an alternative to the “overwhelmingly dystopian perspective” that has characterised popular culture representations of technology for almost a century.
“When we think about AI, there’s so much nuance to consider, which is what this programme is about. How might we tell more deeply human stories? What does it look like to coexist? What are some of those dilemmas that are going to come up,” asked Lane.
Though Google hasn’t disclosed how much it is spending on the AI on Screen initiative it has indicated that it hopes to fund several more similarly positive films on the subject. Its argument is that rather than using AI for evil, it’s trying to enlist the help of human creatives to do the right thing by offering an alternative to the existing cynical, negative perception of AI on screen, though that may not be all there is to the idea.
Film and TV still have the power to influence and change public perception and allay the concerns raised by actors and other industry professionals who fear that their intellectual property and talents are under threat from the rise of the machines. Changing public perception could also help when tech companies get taken to court by outraged actors and writers claiming copyright infringement in cases that would be judged by a jury of ordinary people who may not have the technical expertise to decide such matters. In that instance, a memory of that short film about the sad man whose grief was overcome by his discovery of the hologram of his dead mother in her glory days, might change juror number two’s mind in favour of the company that helped to create it.
It’s not that AI doesn’t have the potential to change life for the better, but getting those who stand to make the most money from it to change public opinion doesn’t feel like doing the right thing.
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