Google really wants to go all-in on AI and have us accept the resulting river of slop as the new normal, but there’s a problem:

For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast artificial intelligence as a villain that can turn into a killing machine.

Even Steven Spielberg’s relatively hopeful “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future.

I’d say the bigger problem is the well-known unreliability of AI “summaries” and the like, but Google hasn’t solved that one yet (clearly). It thinks it can solve the perception problem, though, and that solution is… wait for it… blatant corporate propaganda.

…the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant is funding short films about AI that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light.

So Google’s AI will still be garbage, but we’re meant to think it’s cool.

Two short films’ plots are given in the story, one of which seems to be about a shared VR experience or metaverse rather than AI. (What is this, 2023?) The other one will have Michael Keaton in it; I’d be disappointed, but I’ve seen the Need for Speed movie and thus already know what he’ll do for a paycheck…

Anyway, if you see anything by production company Range Media Partners in the near future and find yourself wondering why it feels less like entertainment or art than a glorified ad, this might be why.