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Last night’s Saturday Night Live addressed the growing frustration with a technology that’s seemingly found its way into every American industry, even dishwashers. One of the first sketches of the night had Ashley Padilla as an elderly woman whose grandchildren went to visit her in a retirement center. As a surprise, her grandson (Marcello Hernández) had downloaded a program that used artificial intelligence to animate old photography, and had uploaded some of her treasured childhood photos. (This is a real service, and one that already served as the premise for an episode of Black Mirror.)
At first, Padilla was overjoyed to see her father (played by the night’s host, Glen Powell, who threw himself into every sketch) smiling and waving, looking young again. But it wasn’t long before things went wrong, as the next photo animation found Padilla’s mother (Veronika Slowikowska) smoking a hot-dog-like a cigarette while Powell tried to roast Sadie, the family dog (which, incidentally, didn’t have a head) on the grill.
When the grandmother expressed shock, her granddaughter (Sarah Sherman) explained: “There’s probably too much going on in the picture, and the AI got confused.” Things devolved from there, as the next motion photo showed Powell’s character’s best friend (Mikey Day) taking off his pants, revealing a smooth, Ken-doll crotch. The grandmother was so distraught that she didn’t want to see what would happen to the next photo, but her grandson insisted that he’d paid for the app and wanted to get his money’s worth. So she had no choice but to watch as the very first photograph of her as a baby was desecrated: Half of her mother’s body disappeared, her father stretched out her baby self like an accordion, the nude friend returned, and eventually, a nuclear bomb obliterated everything.
[Read: Pay attention to the first 10 minutes of SNL]
The sight gags were funny, and suitably weird. But without overdoing it, the sketch captured something fundamental about the mounting cultural resentment surrounding AI. A typical family tried to use AI as it was intended, only for havoc to ensue, upsetting Grandma in the process. The sketch didn’t crack five minutes, or directly attack any Silicon Valley executives, or even mention the technology’s human, societal, or environmental costs. (Sherman even tried to defend the app.) Instead, the sketch simply pointed out that this much-hyped technology doesn’t even work all that well, leaving the viewer to wonder on their own what all the fuss is about.
The subtle, let-the-facts-speak-for-themselves approach was a marked contrast with the episode’s treatment of the Epstein files. Jokes about new revelations, and the GOP’s desperate measures to downplay the issue or change the topic, were mentioned in the cold open, throughout “Weekend Update,” and even in three different sketches featuring the unexpected return of Will Forte’s character MacGruber. Some of the jokes landed, but by the end of the evening, the topic felt completely exhausted. While beating an easy joke to death is sometimes irresistible, the AI sketch demonstrated how less can be more.
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