Watch an AI Julia Fox deliver a sermon about tech doomerism

A lot has happened since Chat GPT launched in November last year. The mainstreaming of AI has spurred endless debate, not to mention an internet’s worth of memes and increasingly uncanny content littering our feeds in the form of Opium birds, Donald Trump mugshots, and highly stylised yet mid portraiture. For some techno-utopians, AI will usher in a bright new future, where rapid scientific discoveries and turbocharged productivity will bring about a work-free paradise, while for others, it’s the devil incarnate – the sort who will steal our jobs and quite literally extinguish the human race. But what if we were to take a step back, and look beyond the binaries?

It’s clear there’s more to the AI discourse than techno-deities and hellfire, so before you pick a side, Literally No Place is a short film by London College of Fashion academics Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung that’s here to set the record straight, or at least try to. Narrated by “hot girly” AI Julia Fox, the film traverses through the AI utopian-doomer dichotomy to present a dizzying array of possible futures. “Our side quest was to try and offer a different perspective on AI, one that doesn't treat it as, like, some kind of saviour or looming apocalypse,” they explain. “We wanted to present AI as this, like, twisted reflection of our present moment, in all its unhinged, horrific, and glorious wonder.”

Featuring AI simps and manic tech overlords like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the film delves into the crazy web of ideas surrounding AI, debunking the claims put forward by Big Tech to embrace the IRL and take back the driver’s seat (aka discourse). “To be clear we’re, like, super excited about the deranged, alien-like intelligence and creativity that AI delivers, but the boring-ass myths that ignore our bodies really have to go.”

How did the idea for Literally No Place first come about?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: The idea for this flick came to us earlier this year when we noticed this wild clash of opinions about AI taking over. On the one hand, you got these Silicon Valley midwits dreaming up this utopian future, claiming AI’s going bring us all this free time and bag. On the flip side, there were these Harry Potter freaks like Eliezer Yudkowsky going full-on apocalyptic mode, believing AI’s going to wipe out humanity and shit.

What really tripped us out was how these two extremes seemed to be feeding off each other, with tech fuckboys like that cuck Sam Altman (the OpenAI CEO dude) playing both sides. Did you know that Altman is a closet doomsday prepper, with his own secret bunker somewhere in the Big Sur, fully stocked up with truffle chip girl dinner supplies, IDF gas masks and racks of Lockheed Martin metal? And, seriously, have you heard about his crypto Worldcoin lick of scanning everyone’s retinas? Like, please, bro, give us a break.

And what about the name?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: The title of the film comes from the idea that both utopianism and doomerism denote an imaginary place that can’t actually exist, and that’s the whole point. To keep these lame-ass ideas alive, this ‘place’ these tech nerds are fantasising about literally has to stay in the realm of the non-existent, which might be cute and angelic if their fantasy never-never lands weren’t giving so much virgin energy.

Did you have a particular mission for the film, any key takeaways?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: We were on a serious myth-busting mission. The whole point of creating this film was to dive deep into the whole crazy ass web of connections between these seemingly opposing takes on AI. We wanted to show the idiocy of these chancers and expose their wild claims about AI being the second coming or destroyer of worlds as basically the same old white dude shit of power, greed and colonial ideology.

Taking a step further, why is it important to have these discussions?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: We feel it’s crucial to engage in these discussions because that’s where we unravel the tangled web of reality. We need to figure out what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what’s the grand plan behind it all. It’s like we’re arming ourselves with knowledge to pinpoint where we actually have some agency.

Take AI, for instance. If we’re stuck seeing it as either the saviour or the destroyer of worlds then we’re screwed. It’s just something that happens to us, and we’re at its mercy. But, if we view it as a mirror reflecting our current state of affairs, we can, at least, claim some say in what it reflects, how we look at it, and what we do with its reflection, even if what it presents to us might be janky, distorted and not as hot as we would like to believe.

What’s more, and not to be all “discourse shapes reality” on you, but how we think about these technologies does have very real material consequences on our lives. Already there are reports of the AI doomers starting to gain seriously significant influence on shaping government AI policies. There was this great article in Politico recently that exposed how the Effective Altruists (EAers) aka, loser AI doomer nerds (who incidentally all seem to have been spawned from Oxford University – dear god) are now advising Rishi Sunak on the UK’s AI plans, and the same shit is happening in the EU too. We can’t just sit back and let these inbred virgin Oxbridge message boarders dictate our fucking future. It’s time the hot girlies got in the driver‘s seat.

Why did you choose ‘hot girly’ Julia Fox to deliver this message?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: When DIS commissioned us to create The Metaverse in Janky Capitalism, we knew we didn‘t want to have another boring ass white boy narrating the film. Instead, we needed a voice that could grab your attention and make the film pop. Julia was the obvious choice. She’s basically the queen of our times, for real. We also had this gut feeling that she’d totally get the film, you know? Honestly, when she commented that she’d watched and loved it, it was seriously the best thing ever. Julia is everything, period.

“We can’t just sit back and let these inbred virgin Oxbridge message boarders dictate our fucking future. It’s time the hot girlies got in the driver‘s seat”

Yeah I was thinking about Janky Capitalism a lot when watching the film! How are the two related?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: Both flicks are all about calling out Big Tech’s tendency to get lost in its own myth-making narratives. Whether it’s the metaverse or AI, they’re out there spinning these tales; tales that we all end up having to deal with. It’s so tiring. We love a good drama, but, please if you’re not going to make it hot then don’t waste our time.

Also, both films shine the spotlight on how our bodies get treated in these pre-pubescent sci-fi wet dreams. These tech bros act like our real, flesh-and-blood bodies don’t exist or can just be wished away.

Obviously there’s a lot of misconceptions and fearmongering surrounding AI. What would you say are some of the biggest myths?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: For us, the biggest myths around AI are ones that present it like it’s this apolitical one-size-fits-all magic trick that’s somehow detached from the material world. It’s from this messed-up thinking that you get these hilariously dumb ideas like AI creating a work-free paradise, and, on the flip side, that AI will doom us all.

But, if you see AI as part of the real world, all those myths melt into air. The researcher Kate Crawford has this amazing book Atlas of AI where she shows how AI is a technology of extraction all the way down: from the mined minerals to the low-paid data cleaners, to the data taken from our online activities. Also, the philosopher Isabel Miller gives this great psychoanalytic take on AI, debunking the absurd singularity notion that intelligence can be detached from the body, whether it’s human, alien, or whatever. Our film, in its own unique way, tries to toss all this into the mix. 

There’s a part in the film where you outline the pipeline from high-level doomerism spirals to religious fear frenzy, how are the two related?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: So, while we were diving into the research for this film, we couldn’t help but notice a hilarious pattern. The more people freak out about AI, the more they start throwing around religious talk and imagery. Again, this tracks with the myth of AI as this god-like demon separate from the material world. It’s clearly giving displacement vibes for our collective end-time fears: climate collapse, capitalism, global wars, you name it. Obviously, things are messed up right now, so we get the urge to go all biblical.

But let’s keep it real. This whole ‘AI as a vengeful god’ shit is just a childish way to avoid dealing with the actual issues at hand, like the climate or like the fact that Musk, Bezos, Gates and the other billionaire parasites own almost half the world’s wealth. Instead of confronting this, these doomers would rather stay on their message boards concocting dumbass apocalyptic thought experiments or escape into some comforting Harry Potter fantasy world. It’s seriously time to grow up.

To be clear, what is it about this attitude that’s so harmful?

Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung: This whole techno-gnostic vibe promotes this lame idea that our bodies are basically like computers, you know? They want us to believe we can break ourselves down into lines of code and understand it all, totally computationally. The real problem here is that this mindset is a total buzzkill, blunting the richness of our real, physical existence. It tries to scrub away the mysterious, the enigmatic, the bizarre aspects of life and blames it all on a lack of data, rather than a fundamental quality of reality. It’s straight-up disrespecting matter, our bodies, life.

Instead, we need to go hard on complexity. We need to amp up our appreciation for the human experience, with all its messy, weird, and chaotic glory. We need to be diving deep into the intricate tapestry of being human, embracing all the glorious, messed-up wonders of it. 💥💫

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