With technology firms having divorced their production processes from human needs, and instead undermining and harming our ability to do the things we enjoy in the name of progress/profit, the concept of AI being cool/powerful/scary has been used to quell criticism. Wallace & Gromit’s latest adventure takes that to task, though, presenting AI and innovation for its own sake as not only harmful to a happy life, but utterly uncool.
The ‘promise’ of AI in art has been one of the longest-running threads in the unending hype-train around the technology’s investment boom. Automated apps are being trained to approximate human writers, actors and animators – to imitate the creative process for cheap (unless you factor in the burning of a rainforest per generative request).
But while there are still a slew of podcasts insisting we can expect machines to just instantly create bespoke video games for users any day now, like nuclear fusion, the delivery of those promises always seems to be just another couple of years away. AI still generates the same slop it did last year, or the year before – and the only people convinced ‘it’s coming on leaps and bounds’ are the same Facebook aunts and uncles who keep falling prey to Nigerian Prince scams.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is remarkable for many reasons. It is visually stunning, and thematically ambitious – very much part of the established Aardman formula – factoring in nods to cinematic inspirations from across the gamut of genres, while managing to still deliver satisfying original comedic beats. It manages the succession of its lead voice actor (Ben Whitehead fully stepping into the shoes of the late Peter Sallis) seamlessly. But what I found most interesting about it was that this is the first film I’ve seen that has leant into the underwhelming and irritating side of tech-evangelism.
On the surface, at first the plot seems to align with the doom-mongering of technology leaders. Wallace creates Norbot – an AI-powered gnome who can carry out odd jobs – for his long-suffering best-friend, the voiceless Gromit. Norbot eventually spirals out of Wallace’s control, and creates an army of other robots to serve returning villain Feathers McGraw. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details here, because if you don’t know what I’m talking about you should see all these films yourself – but also because it doesn’t really matter.
The thing is, as ‘impressive’ as Norbot appears to the local news media, who whip up a frenzy of excitement around him, the little gnome is actually not that useful. Wallace insists the greatest thing about the voice-activated robot is that Gromit will never have to do any work in the garden ever again. The two issues with that being, Gromit enjoys gardening, and Gromit is entirely non-verbal. This immediately sees the tech ruin the garden, ripping up flower beds to make everything “neat and tidy”, as the main plot begins to unfurl.
Having at first been presented as a fearsome and powerful thing, this is technology which is more irritating than frightening, which is so nakedly designed around a set of problems that do not relate to the life of the person it is being inflicted on.
In 2023, when the Hollywood studio system collectively shat itself trying to foist AI co-pilots on its writers, the executives presented the technology as the former. It will be powerful enough to replace huge amounts of human labour. The ones left over will essentially be plumbing in prompts and letting it go to work – and if they resist, they will be left behind. This is inevitable.
But in the time since, it has remained clear that AI in a creative setting is a colossal hindrance. It produces shiny, adverb-riddled summary sentences and bullet-points laden with factual inaccuracies that human workers then have to labour twice as hard to find, contextualise and correct – making it less efficient than if they’d written everything themselves in the first place. The technology is not cool, it’s not clever, and it isn’t even particularly helpful.
Seeing this finally played out in a film of any kind – with bombastic apocalyptic technophobia more often being the preferred way of addressing the ‘downsides of AI’ – seems like an interesting moment. I don’t want to suggest a bubble is about to burst, because we’re in a situation where the bubble has already been on artificial life-support for several years – it is being kept from bursting because the private economy has nowhere else to grow, and cannot sanction social spending and Keynesian growth as an alternative.
But the charm of Wallace & Gromit has always been of injecting a bit of banal reality into high-stakes mythology. A highspeed train-chase on a model railway. A town forming an angry mob because a monster jeopardised their vegetable competition. A battle with an army of ‘advanced’ robots onboard a pair of narrowboats. So, maybe the emphasis on AI is about to shift. Even if this farce continues to ruin everyone’s lives, maybe at least we’ll get to live in a brief window of culture where we at least don’t have to keep pretending this is all cool dystopian sci-fi.
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