Will You Join Bong Joon-ho's Army in the Fight Against AI?

Bong Joon-ho is currently the President of the jury at the Marrakech Film Festival in Morocco. His jurors include Celine Song, Julia Ducournau, and Jenna Ortega. As part of the festival, the jury sat down for a press conference where they were asked a bunch of questions about their work, the industry, and, of course, the rise of AI technology in the world of entertainment.

Bong, who directed the greatest film of the 2000s so far (according to The New York Times), has always been good for a quote. Remember when he mentioned in his many Oscar speeches how he planned to get supremely drunk in celebration? Or how he called out Hollywood’s allergy to the ‘one-inch barrier’ of subtitles? When you made Parasite and Memories of Murder, you can basically say whatever the hell you want. So, when asked how he felt about AI’s impending takeover of film, he was both hilarious and on-point.

‘My official answer is, AI is good because it’s the very beginning of the human race finally seriously thinking about what only humans can do. But my personal answer is, I’m going to organize a military squad, and their mission is to destroy AI.’

Director Bong, I will join your crusade. Where do I enlist? Do I get to hang out with Song Kang-ho and Mickey 17? At the very least, you have to turn this concept into a movie. Robert Pattinson is practicing a bananas accent for it as we speak.

Bong wasn’t the only jury member to feel strongly about AI. Celine Song quoted Guillermo del Toro by saying, ‘F*k AI […] the way that it is completely destroyed the planet… the way that it is completely colonizing our minds in the way that we encounter images and sound, I’m very concerned about it.’

Jenna Ortega called AI a ‘Pandora’s Box’ situation. ‘I don’t want to assume for the audience, but I would hope it gets to a point where it becomes some sort of mental junk food, AI and looking at the screen, and then suddenly we all feel sick, and we don’t know why, and then that one independent filmmaker in their backyard comes out with something, and it releases this new excitement again.’

Aside from being an environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machine that wants to make us all dumber and more compliant, generative AI’s attempted takeover of entertainment and creativity is a reminder that the people pushing it are fundamentally anti-art. They can’t or won’t create themselves, and they devalue it at every opportunity, so they pretend that the slop machine is ‘democratizing’ the process. Imagine your options being siding with Sam Altman and Elon Musk, or with Bong Joon-ho, and you pick the former.

We’ll keep you up to date on recruitment meets and defensive training in the Bong anti-AI army.