From bad art to scam YouTube channels and even more fake news than a typical Facebook feed,

it feels like artificial intelligence was in headlines a lot last year, right?

There was so much AI discourse that President Biden signed a sweeping executive order seeking to regulate it.

Believe it or not, the reason Biden acted so decisively on AI, it was all because of Mission Impossible.

No joke! The latest movie was all was all because of Mission Impossible.

No joke!

The latest movie was all about the dangers of rogue AI.

Apparently Biden saw it and said, yeah, we should do something about that.

So, uh, Tom Cruise, if you're watching, just a small favor on behalf of all of us over here.

Any chance that you could fight, say, housing prices in the next one.

Hello, Internet, welcome to Film Theory, the show that's definitely a hundred percent guaranteed not a robot, animatronic, or sentient program. We promise!

So have you seen all the talk about artificial intelligence floating around

online recently? Seems like you can't go anywhere without some story and

controversy involving AI, whether you're in the sports world, tabletop gaming,

technology, education,

and yeah, film and television. But AI's existed for years. Why are all these discussions

only popping up now? Well, the long and short of it is that AI's entered a new phase of

sophistication. What sparked a lot of this new conversation is what's known as generative AI,

or computer programs that can create their own content based on prompts that it's been given. Let's say you want an image of a knight wearing red armor riding a blue horse through a battlefield. All you got to do is type that into a program like Dolly or Mid Journey and it can give you a pretty darn good result. Or let's try something even more complicated. Highly detailed coloring book pages of Foxy and a ruined pizzeria from Five Nights at Freddy's.

And that's just talking about images. Pretty impressive, right? Well, the controversy comes in

when you realize how these generative AI work. They can't just create these new works

out of nothing, they have to be fed other art, text, and music. And then they use information

...