Many years from now, after the robot apocalypse has decimated the planet and the human survivors are left to tell stories around a fire, they’ll reminisce about a more innocent time, when hearing the letters “A.I.” just made them think of one of Steven Spielberg’s saddest movies. Then, it was more of a vague concept, the basis for a futuristic fairy tale, and we were still two decades away from it threatening to eliminate people’s jobs.

The critically acclaimed indie horror film Late Night With the Devil premieres on Shudder today, likely reviving the online debate over its use of A.I., and what it means for filmmaking of all budgets going forward. Calls to boycott it during its theatrical release don’t seem to have made much of an impact on its modest box office success; one can assume that the next debate will be over how bad the A.I. in it supposedly is (or isn’t).

I’ve seen Late Night With the Devil, and if I didn’t know what to look for, I don’t think I would have noticed it. While some of the film’s loudest detractors claimed that entire sections of it are A.I.-generated, it’s just three static images, recreations of the “We’ll Be Right Back!” cards that were once used during commercial breaks on live television. They’re simply not on screen long enough to be able to note all the typical signs of A.I. art (like too many fingers, for instance).

But there lies the problem: there was simply no need to resort to A.I. to add some text on a couple of vintage Halloween cartoons. Anyone with basic knowledge of Photoshop and access to public domain images could have done it, for a nominal fee. To their credit, Late Night directors Cameron and Colin Cairne didn’t deny using A.I., releasing a statement confirming that they “experimented” with it while also working with actual human graphic designers at the same time. But it was ultimately kind of a non-answer, admitting that they used A.I. without actually explaining why.

Depending on where you look, A.I. will either usher in the end of humanity, or be the most incredible invention since the lightbulb. It’s ushering in something: as writer Ryan Broderick noted, Facebook is fast becoming a Wild West of A.I.-generated content, for reasons which remain unclear other than perhaps some vague goal of monetization. Though posting about the Gaza conflict, suicide, or even whether or not men are trash puts you at risk of at least a temporary suspension, evidently there are no measures in place to address how much activity on the app is mass-created by a computer program, and responded to predominantly by bots. Should you be alarmed at the use of A.I. in Late Night With the Devil? Maybe not specifically, but it’s all part of a bigger, more puzzling, and potentially harmful issue.

Unsurprisingly, social media techbros, who aren’t at risk of having their jobs made “redundant” because a computer can do them instead, think that a bright future means A.I. replacing drivers, store cashiers, teachers, and even doctors. More ominously, it’s also been touted as a cheaper “art on demand” alternative to paying actual artists, graphic designers, and writers. Rather than make movies the old-fashioned way, with a writer, a director, a cinematographer, and real human actors, in the glorious world of A.I., you’ll be able to just punch in a few keywords (such as “Wolverine,” “Marilyn Monroe,” and “romantic comedy”) and an A.I. program will generate a feature-length romantic comedy starring Wolverine and Marilyn Monroe. 

How? Well, it’s simple: the “plot” and images for your instant movie will be lifted from other sources, thrown into a blender, and then regurgitated onto a screen resembling something akin to a narrative, as long as you don’t care about your “characters” having dead eyes, extra limbs, or speaking dialogue that sounds like garbled nonsense. That doesn’t sound great to you? Well, it does to Joe Russo, who thinks that A.I. is the future of storytelling. Considering that Joe Russo co-directed the last couple of Avengers movies, it’s probably safe to say that he has the ears of far more studio heads than any of us lowly consumers do.

Thankfully, last year’s Screen Actors Guild strike went on long enough that studios gave in to their demand that actors’ faces not be computer scanned so that they can be used over and over without payment. I’ll rephrase that: actors had to go on strike to prevent studios from stealing their faces. 

Let me be clear: despite SAG-AFTRA’s win, A.I. is already a part of the filmmaking industry. A recent New York Times article focused on A.I.-driven programs used to “enhance” older films for Ultra HD Blu-ray release. At first blush, improving a film’s brightness and color saturation doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, until you notice that it gives the film a glossy, unnatural sheen. Amazon’s recent remake of Road House was accused in a lawsuit of using A.I. for post-production ADR, in place of striking actors. While Amazon/MGM denied that claim, filmmaker Morgan Neville admitted to using A.I. to recreate the late Anthony Bourdain’s voice in his 2021 documentary Roadrunner. 

Neville claimed it was “only” three lines of dialogue, but like how in Late Night With the Devil it’s “only” three images, either way the door is left open, even just a small crack. Also, do you really want there to be technology that can flawlessly recreate your voice, without your consent? Think long and hard about the implications of that.

On the other hand, maybe my worrying is premature. Alleged streaming channel TCLtv announced its upcoming release Next Stop Paris, a feature-length romantic drama created entirely with A.I. I invite you to read the gobbledygook posted on the channel’s YouTube page (which also reads like it was A.I.-generated), and then watch the trailer. It looks like shit, frankly, and not just shit, but creepy shit, where everything is too shiny, too smooth, and the characters don’t move so much as sort of glide across the screen.

Unsurprisingly, comments are currently disabled.

But here are the problems with that: (1) as awful as this ghoulish monstrosity looks, it’s already an improvement over A.I.-generated content created just a year ago. As much as consumers seem to be actively disinterested in it, there’s a movement seeking to make A.I. indistinguishable from reality, and the potential repercussions of that, in media, politics, and the world in general, are unsettling.

The second problem is that, given the media literacy of the average Facebook user, we’re closer to the point where most people won’t be able to tell the difference between real and computer-generated. As an example, I stumbled across a hastily created image claiming to be an announcement by Disney+ that a reboot of The Golden Girls starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler was coming this summer. It seems impossible to believe that anyone would think it was legitimate, yet the image was shared thousands of times, and the comments leaned far more towards aghast that such a thing could exist (though it doesn’t) than pointing out that the image was obviously fake.

Whether people don’t know how to recognize what’s real and what isn’t, or simply still believe that you can’t post something on the internet that isn’t true doesn’t really matter. We’re maybe a year or so away from more individuals than we’d like to think unwittingly accepting A.I. without question. Moreover, you can bet that, right now, entertainment lawyers are hard at work trying to find (or create) whatever loophole they can for a studio to get out of having to be transparent about how much of a movie or TV show is A.I.-generated.

I would have liked it better if the images used in Late Night With the Devil looked obvious enough that the filmmakers would be shamed into swapping them out with images created by a real artist. But they don’t, and they won’t. And this won’t be the last time we’ll encounter a new movie that has even just a tiny bit of A.I. tweaking, whether it’s to “experiment,” or cut costs, or because people like Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav have little need for creativity over content. 

It’ll be a little bit, and then a little more, and then a little more, and then eventually you have Joe Russo’s vision of films being made with virtually no human involvement at all, except behind a computer screen. I’m not saying don’t watch Late Night With the Devil. Overall it’s an entertaining, well-made movie. I am saying keep that in mind when you do.