Battling Ghost

In the same, now-deleted post, the Nanny (2022) director writes, “Sora is wild, y’all.” Jusu links to an article explaining that Sora, created by OpenAI, is partnering with Tribeca Film Festival to screen Spirit and “Sora shorts” from four other filmmakers using this new text-to-video tool.¹ The four Black women in the photo she had posted, come to find out, were a product of artificial intelligence (AI) invention. 

In Hollywood, in the past year alone, there has been an acceleration in the use and promotion of programs specializing in generative AI technology. Generative AI has caused controversy, partly because it uses pre-existing material to generate new material from text prompts, often without the permission of those whose work or likeness is being used. 

Responding to criticism for her participation in the technology, Jusu replied, “I am a Black woman. If this tech exists and is being controlled by mostly white men, I want to learn to have a say in my community’s imagery.”

Tech companies, in announcing their new generative AI software, have taken the route of appealing to diverse audiences. “Well, I’ve been interested in AI for a couple of years now,” Donald Glover says in the ad for Google’s generative AI video model, Veo. Similar to Sora, Veo is a text-to-image generator that is capable of making videos longer than 60 seconds. “Everybody’s gonna become a director, and everybody should be a director,” Glover shares.

There are a couple of ironies at play here. The first one is that Black artists are willingly the face of fascist technology that could potentially lead to their creative demise. The second is the repeated evocation of community. What does it mean to have Black faces rendered into AI technology? To have technology that only knows how to mimic and imitate people who have historically been mimicked and imitated? There’s something so innately white about using technology to pilfer the works of others without their consent to create an AI-generated Black person, one without vibrancy and soul. 

At the same time, Hollywood’s rapid shift to generative AI, using inclusivity as its selling point, coincides with a renewed hostility towards diversity within Hollywood. With the decline in DEI positions and shows and films centering on Black life, tools like Sora and Veo allow the appearance of progress without the substance of it. It’s a struggle to think of a film or television series that’s currently in production that features four Black female leads. With AI, however, you can create as many projects as you want centering Black women without the peskiness of actually having to cast real Black actresses or Black female writers. 

During last year’s dual strike by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, many Black writers expressed anxiety over what the future might hold in the industry post-strike. “There’s a track record of when there are disruptions within the industry and the industry starts to figure out who they are again—that writers of color and diversity-driven projects seem to disproportionately suffer,” says writer Ben Watkins in the Los Angeles Times.² The strikes were also a reminder to many people of the hostility those at the top have toward working artists, particularly their view of workers as expendable. “Some creative jobs maybe will go away,” OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati recently said about AI’s role in the artistic sector. “But maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” ³

The only thing this technology seems to be good at is removing humans from their creation. Technology that seeks to inhabit Blackness while disenfranchising Black people poses an existential threat to Black people. Since this country’s inception, whiteness has aspired to create a version of a Black person who is animated by white desires and contorted to their whims. Technology like generative AI indulges these white fantasies of total control of Black people’s intellectual expression. 

“The technology is here,” Jusu said while defending her use of Sora. But so are we, as Black people, in all our fullness. With all our spirit.