Coyote Vs Acme, Warner Bros. Vs Movies, AI Vs The World
Which direction has Nintendo gone? Where have all the radiologists gone?
A thought I keep coming back to: David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros, didn’t watch Coyote vs. Acme before deciding to delete the finished film.
For those who don’t know the story, Coyote vs. Acme was a live-action animation hybrid, in which Wile E. Coyote sued the Acme Company, the maker of contraptions he buys to catch the Road Runner, all of which inevitably backfire. It’s a playful, post-modern idea, weirdly based on a short humour article from the New Yorker in 1990. The original article, I should say, is more comedic than funny. The humour largely comes from the deadpan depiction of the events in the Looney Toon cartoons:
“Repetition of blows along a vertical axis produced a series of regular horizontal folds in Mr. Coyote’s body tissues—a rare and painful condition which caused Mr. Coyote to expand upward and contract downward alternately as he walked, and to emit an off-key, accordionlike wheezing with every step.”
It has the odd line that makes me smile: “Mr. Coyote is self-employed and thus not eligible for Workmen’s Compensation” or “Defendant has a virtual monopoly of manufacture and sale of goods required by Mr. Coyote’s work.” As I say, faint smiles. It must have been such a shock to Ian Frazier when Warner Bros bought the film rights decades after publication.
Coyote vs. Acme was a silly little film, hardly a mega-blockbuster in the making, but it had its charm. Then in November last year, Warner Bros. announced that although the film was completed and ready for distribution, they would delete it and file a tax loss of $30m.
This was not due to negative audience reactions. According to the director, “we were embraced by test audiences who rewarded us with fantastic scores” (“14 points above the family norm”, wrote Deadline). It was not due to a lack of commercial offers: “Netflix, Amazon and Paramount screened the movie (which was received well) and submitted handsome offers”. It was, according to Steve Price, the composer, due to “bizarre anti-art studio financial shenanigans I will never understand”.
And I keep coming back to this thought: David Zaslav didn’t even watch the film before deciding to delete it.
This incomprehensible decision, such a perfect metaphor for the boot of faceless bureaucracy stamping on the face of art, captured critics. It “should be a crime”, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote. The film took on a viral fascination. People who had previously no interest in seeing it became incensed with outrage. Unseen movies, to paraphrase Keats, are sweeter. Those who has seen the film described a Stendhal-like reverie at the experience - “it delivers the kind of emotional gut punch […] I never believed was even possible.”
I find myself thinking something so trite it’s hardly worth saying: the influence of money can be exhausting. As a society, we understand that companies are businesses, but we expect movie companies to make money from making movies. The outrage at Zaslav’s decision was partly frustration, but partly because he is the head of an organisation that exists to make movies, destroying a movie. He is a doctor giving people diseases. A dustbin collector filling the bins. We expect him to be involved enough in the business to assess his own films and make industry-informed decisions. That he didn’t even watch the film and made the decision purely on accountancy grounds leaves us adrift.
This new economic reality is so complex, it seems arbitrary, like Greek gods, uninterested in the fickle affairs of men. The executives are impassive, unknowable forces of nature. Even studio insiders don’t understand. “What are we even doing anymore?”, director BenDavid Grabinski said, “It’ll never make sense in a thousand years.” And I wonder what it means when an industry becomes so economically convoluted that even senior people within it don’t understand how it functions.
One of the stars of the film, John Cena, gave a politically cautious statement about the events: “We don’t own the film,” he said, “it’s somebody else’s project to do what they want with.” And while he’s right from a legal standpoint, this sense of ownership, I think, butts up against the economics of our engagement with art. Once we see a movie, it lives in our head as thoughts and ideas and memories. And while I think we acknowledge someone should receive payment for triggering those experiences, I wonder if we fully agree they “own” them.
There are (currently) no leaked copies of the movie. I wonder if it will remain un-leaked. The idea of watching it is so tantalising. It was right there, sitting on a hard drive at Warner Bros. It existed. And now, if it is fully and irrevocably deleted, it will become a missing work. Like a lost Shakespeare play, or fragments of Sappho or Chaucer, existing only as snatched screenshots and script fragments. It will be a piece of art that once existed, but which can never be seen again. It was shown to a test audience, so there are people out there who have experienced it, the Warner Bros CEO, of course, isn’t one of them. “We don’t make movies to make money,” Walt Disney once said, “we make money to make more movies.” But the world has come full circle. Warner Bros destroyed a movie to lose money.
Elsewhere
The “Godfather of AI” Predicted I Wouldn’t Have a Job. He Was Wrong by Arjun Byju in The New Republic (6 minutes)
I may not have said this explicitly, but I’m of the view that a small group of Silicon Valley investors are running a distorted campaign to convince us of the world-changing power of AI. It’s clear that we’ve created a clever technology in LLMs that can replicate coherent language and answer questions effectively. But the leap from that, to all jobs are going to be replaced and mankind is on the verge of an existential threat, is laughably exaggerated. And yet I hear this repeated at all levels of society. Not just in the technology press, not just at work, but on Radio 4, on the street, in the queue at the supermarket, even by elderly relatives who have never used ChatGPT.
I have this thought that part of the reason to push this message is to create a new reality. Once you stop people going into industries, you then depend on AI to deliver those services. Playing with an AI code generator the other day, I found it was much slower than me at adding new features, until I let it start changing my code, at which point I lost track of what it had done and had to rely on it. The AI didn’t get faster, it made me slower. It became better than other options by making other options worse.
I was thinking of this, when I came across this article. This is not about Silicon Valley investors, but the Nobel Prize winner, Geoffrey Hinton, who says slightly strange things about the threat AI posses to society. Actually, more than strange, actively dangerous:
Hinton suggested that we should stop training radiologists immediately. “It’s just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” […] Eight years have passed, and Hinton’s prophecy clearly did not come true […] and we are now facing the largest radiologist shortage in history, with imaging at some centers backlogged for months.
This rhetoric that things might happen (things we wish would happen) is dangerous. As a direct result of the speech he gave, exaggerating and inflating the possibility of AI, doctors choose not to train as radiologists, and now, patients have to delay treatment and may even run out of time. The line of causation from that speech to people dying is scarily direct.
Drowning in Slop by Max Read in Intelligencer (19 minutes)
On the subject of the effect of AI on the world, we turn to the Science Fiction magazine Clarkesworld:
It was relatively easy to identify an AI-generated submission, but that required reading thousands (a “wall of noise”) and manually sorting them. Clarke compared the problem to turning off the spam filter and trying to read your email: “Okay, now multiply that by ten because that’s the ratio that we were getting.” Within weeks, the problem became unmanageable. Eventually, on February 20, he made the decision to close submissions.
The problem is pitting machines against humans. Machines have the ability to do things that humans never can. Perfect repetitions of laborious tasks with perfect precision are ideal for computers. With computers, tasks become possible that simply would not be for humans. I distinctly remember a time at work we wished to do something but rejected the idea because it would take too long to do manually. For the first time, I realised I could automate it, and suddenly we had a capability that we simply didn’t think we had. The technology changed the way we could think about problem-solving. It gave us new options.
But here we see a sort of opposite. Technology is taking away options.
The slop tide threatens some of the key functions of the web, clogging search results with nonsense, overwhelming small institutions like Clarkesworld, and generally polluting the already fragile information ecosystem of the internet.
The Mushroom Kingdom That Shigeru Miyamoto Built by Zachary Small in the New York Times (7 minutes)
“It might seem like we are just going the opposite direction for the sake of going in the opposite direction, but it really is trying to find what makes Nintendo special,” Miyamoto said. “There is a lot of talk about A.I., for example. When that happens, everyone starts to go in the same direction, but that is where Nintendo would rather go in a different direction.”
“Nintendo would rather go in a different direction.” I keep returning to this phrase.
In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, Bartleby who suddenly stops doing what is expected of him, responds simply with “I would prefer not to.” Now, by no means am I suggesting opting out of AI is about giving up on life, like Bartleby eventually does. But there is something about Nintendo’s understated statement of intent that brought it to mind. Perhaps it is the act of stepping out against the tide of humanity and choosing your own way.
Miyamoto has framed it as it being about what makes Nintendo special. And certainly, there is some benefit in maintaining your own standards in opposition to the status quo. But I wonder if it is more than that. It’s about consciously deciding on a course of action rather than being led by fashion. We’ve looked at this technology, Nintendo are saying, but would prefer not to use it.
That’s all for now, until next time,
Simon