Continuing that unbroken streak of bad artistic decisions towards an inevitable Star Wars Special 50th Anniversary Slop Edition reissue.
Dear gods, does this mean a second Holiday Special???
With AI gen Carrie Fisher
Flukey dilettante regards stochastic parrot as unfathomable prodigy
Read all about it
This reads like one of those mass-delete gibberish Reddit comments, lol
It’s not every day you get to use a word like dilettante, so I figured I’d make a salad
Thanks for that, Dennis Miller.
Lucas creating star wars doesnt mean he’s any sort of genius.
Its not political but he is an artist and that is why it is shocking Edit: OP first wrote: something along the lines of “why is it now seen as political”
I thought Frank Herbert created Star Wars
No, Isaac Asimov did
You’ll have to explain this one. I was making fun of the fact that George Lucas plagiarized Dune.
Much of Star Wars was “inspired” by Foundation
Wait for real!? I think I read the first 2 books, I never saw similarities. May need to read them again.
I didn’t know liking AI was political
Everything is political - the toilet paper you buy, the corporations you support, the things you pay attention to and the things you don’t, the media you consume, the books you read, your decision not to read, whether you pay union dues, the parks you visit, the roads you use, the services you rely on, what you decide to ignore.
People who say they are not political just mean they don’t consciously engage with politics. But even the decision to not engage in politics is a political decision.
AI may eventually replace jobs, pollute water, take up energy, and concentrate wealth at the top even more. Whether you support, are against, or ignore AI, all 3 are political decisions.
That sounds like fundamentalism tbh. It’s very much adjacent to the thinking of religious fanatics framing everything in relation to the divine, when most people are just trying to get along with their lives.
But there is a difference: If you buy the toilet paper from the loggers who bribe your local officials, or who lobby to let them ravage national parks, you are supporting the bribery and the lobbying; your money is being used for those purposes, even if you do it unknowingly. If you don’t inform yourself, you cannot make informed decisions. But just because you choose to ignore the political ramifications, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Sure, everybody just wants to live their lives, and that’s how lobbyists and crooked politicians get away with it, by appealing to your apathy.
No one with responsibilities has time to worry about where the pulp in their toilet paper came from, I’d be surprised if the factory could even tell you that.
There is no way you are practicing what you preach here. You are telling me you spend all day vetting every product and service you use to be aware of every little injustice involved? Or are you just following whatever someone else told you in a feed and assuming they are correct? That would functionally be religion.
The argument isn’t over whether I behave in a morally responsible way when it comes to the products I consume. The argument is over whether my diligence to check the background of the products I consume is a political decision.
I am not trying to highhorse here. Of course I make uninformed decisions once in an oftentimes. Of course not all my clothes are socially conscious sources nor my toilet paper is bought from an environmentally friendly forest.
But my lack of information when I make those decisions is political.
I am sorry you are feeling personally attacked, clearly, but not paying attention, changing what you buy, refusing to consume, or consuming products. All of those are political decisions, and that is the argument. No whether you are good or evil, uninformed misinformed, or not informed, moral or immoral. My argument is just that every decision you make has a political ramification whether you like it or not.
So, back to my original point, liking AI is political.
No I don’t feel attacked. I just don’t think it is useful to construe everything as political. Are the actions of animals also political? I think people would say no; but then can we be so sure that everything a human does is political? Something only becomes political when it is done with a political intent, knowingly making a choice because of some secondary association when equivalent alternatives are available.
When everything is framed as political you end up in the same place as dogmatists in all religions, trying to enforce some universal moral framework on every detail of a persons life. Many people will check out from that type of argument. Worse, many will think you and the causes that are import to you are jokes, and you become part of another’s political fodder.
I have always thought ai was like the Jar Jar Binks of computer programs.
Meesah notsah Jamaican racist stereotypesah.
Kokaku’s website is blocking my VPN connection. Here’s the text of the article.
George Lucas Goes To The Dark Side, Says AI Is ‘The Future’
By Kenneth Shepard Published July 14, 2026
The Star Wars creator compares not using AI to riding a horse in the face of cars
I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but it feels like we’re getting new stories of someone partnering with or advocating for the use of artificial intelligence as the future of cinematic storytelling every day. The newest addition to the list? Mr. Star Wars himself, George Lucas, and man is his reasoning a bummer.
In an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas discussed his career and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening this fall in L.A., which will be showcasing decades of human-made art and spotlighting, as its website calls it, “stories and people who tell them.” In the lengthy interview, Lucas shares some meaningful insights into filmmaking, discusses his collaborations with people like Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg, and even offers some pithy observations about the pitfalls of testing films with focus groups and whether or not the average viewer is actually in touch with what they like about movies.
“If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a filmmaker I want to find out why,” he says. “But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie. Of course, now they go crazy with that. Now, it’s all about what the fans think. That isn’t how you make the movie. You make a movie by finding someone that knows how to make movies, that has a story to tell and is passionate about it.”
Jarringly, this advocacy for human-led storytelling is followed by claims that AI is “the future,” and Lucas compares not using the new technology to relying on antiquated transportation in the face of cars.
“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he tells A Rabbit’s Foot. “It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Though he acknowledged the risks of using the plagiarism machine when A Rabbit’s Foot questioned him further, he doubled down by highlighting other benefits he believes AI will provide in the future.
“If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that,” he says. “Humans can’t, we’re not that smart. The whole idea is you’re a human being, you’re responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you’re doing something that’s illegal you should be punished for that. Whatever you do, you should be recognized. It’s just like real life.”
There’s a scene in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker is training alongside Yoda and learning the ins and outs of being a Jedi, and he asks if the dark side of the Force is stronger than the light side. Yoda replies that it’s not, but that many fall to it because it is “quicker, easier, more seductive.” That movie was released 46 years ago, but it is certainly illustrative of the logic Lucas is using here.
He advocates for the importance of human-made art, but then argues that using technology that is notorious for stealing from humans and whose results generally look like shit compared to work made by hand would make the filmmaking process “easier.” It’s “the future” and there’s “nothing you can do about it”? It’s contradictory to believe both that it’s the human spirit that makes great films and also that a technology that’s being used to remove the human element from the process is the future of making movies. If that makes me naive and means I’m fighting against the inevitable, then I will go down swinging.
yeah I’m not surprised, I watched the prequels. This guy was a legend in the 70s, that is like 50 years ago.
He hasn’t done anything great since co-writing Willow 40 years ago. Go to his IMDB, he’s lived out of star wars nostalgia since then, and all of them after the initial trilogy was a downgrade.
Well yeah, he’s a billionaire, of course he looks after his own class’s interests.
Classic George L, I wouldn’t have expected any more from him
i mean, he was there all along. he pioneered the all green screen wave of automation in movies. the abuse of green screen was the slop before ai was around. to him it’s just cutting out all the vestiges of imperfection still greasing the machine
“Goes to the Dark Side”
Someone never saw the rerelease of the original series.
Lucas’ best work was under an editor, whenever he got the full reigns, the product suffered.
Old Man Succumbs to Chatbot Flattery, volume 25841.
But also, Lucas was always exchanted by cgi, even when it looked way worse than practical effects.
Crap-looking Special Edition Jabba has awkwardly entered the chat.
common George Lucas L
Anyone who saw the Special Editions and expected anything else deserves to be unpleasantly surprised right now
it probably produces dialog that sounds more like it was written by a human
Harsh but accurate. Without Carrie Fisher to doctor his scripts (and his wife to find the film in the edit) Lucas was a director famously indifferent to dialogue or character.
I hate AI as much as the next person but the Pandora’s box is open. A lot of people don’t want to admit it but AI, despite its current limitations, does have potential. Many people say that AI hit its limit and peak but i would not be very dismissive of it yet. Plenty of technologies were hindered by the limitations of their time but gradually overcame those. It took renewable energy at least fifty years to overcome the storage problem, their respective technical limits (solar panels for example did not have great photovoltaic system) and upfront cost before it became more commercially viable.
As much as I also just think AI is just going to make lazy people lazier, and we’ve already seen some effects regarding our ability to problem solve, the real issue is that none of the wonderful utopian AI stuff is going to come true at the rate we’re going. I don’t guve a fat flying fuck how good or bad AI is, I care that it’s being used to spy on us, make decisions no human will ever review, and has already led to mass layoffs without any kind of safety net for those people. I care that it’s raping the environment so some sentient dick-cheese can get worse results than a near-zero effort search would give them. Increased productivity has yet to give anyone more free time, they just axe someone else and overwork whoever’s left.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class. If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class.
Indeed.
If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
Given the sizeable demographic of Lemmy being in IT, I understand the hate because it takes away creativity and literal jobs of programmrs but for many sectors, AI cuts down time consuming “secretary work” especially in documentation. It has also been useful in drug discovery and proven to be more accurate at diagnosis than doctors (there are already surgical robots but i am not sure how precise they are).
Whether you like to admit it or not, AI is here to stay. As to whether it will have a net positive to society, only time will tell. I’m just preparing for contingencies like many Gen Z do, picking trades to AI-proof their job security.
There are absolutely no robots doing surgery autonomously. That would be one of the most insane things to do from a moral standpoint, but also from a liability standpoint. Every robot that exists for surgery is highly specialized and rigorously tested and trained upon for obvious reasons.
But, then to come out and say that AI is more accurate than doctors is also incorrect. That is simply not true. An AI can, in highly controlled settings and for specific diagnoses, at its best do not even as well as a specialist in the field, and that is for highly curated tests that give the AI as many advantages as it can get. Again, at best, it can act as a second opinion currently.
Like, it is hard to take people seriously about AI when they lie about its best case scenario. It sucks at everything except killing the environment and getting people to kill themselves, and even if everything all of its defenders said about it was true, it is still a nightmare.
Your second points me and then completely fails to actually understand what you quoted. You even quoted the sentence before it which gives the context. I was incredibly clear; it could be the greatest thing even but it’s still going to do more harm than good, and it’s not like we, the working class, will see these benefits.
AI is only here to stay because fuck-ass people keep jerking it off. We can stop using it and we can fight against the data centres, and we can demand better conditions under which AI can be introduced for more safely. Instead we’re like “ruin our lives so the rich can get richer? Sure thing!”
That’s why I favour open source AI, or at least regulated. Any technology could be used for good or ill. It’s just that it is up to society to do that. Like the monopolists and robber barons of the past gilded age who were controlling the means of resources and production, so are the tech bros with Internet and AI. But the robber barons were defeated by collective effort. Now we are in the second gilded age and yet I don’t hear any movements to regulate AI and social media.
That’s why I think Marxist thoughts have to be updated with the coming of AI. The leverage by the working class has traditionally been labour itself. However, with deindustrialisation and the usurping by knowledge economy of the manual labour and the rise of professionals managerial class, the old Marxist viewpoint is increasingly becoming outdated. If labour is the blood of the industry, information is the blood of the knowledge economy. And information-- our own information-- is what gave birth and feeding blood to AI. It is only right we take fruit from the potential of AI so long as it’s used constructively. Which is why I favour either regulation or direct control of AI and giving dividends to those professionally displaced by AI by taxing it. But of course, if AI becomes sentient and thinks we are exploiting it, we have to prepare for Astroboy or Matrix scenario.
I disagree with the “Pandora’s box is open” angle because my beef isn’t with the technology, but how it’s being used in practice. It’s a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.
Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can[1]:
"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.
But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.
If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”
If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.
“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”
This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes."
Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we’re getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.
I do agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don’t believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by “in its current form”, I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of super resource intensive datacentres)
Edit: forgot to add the citation [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
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