from an interview Lee recently gave to\u00a0Inverse<\/a>, ostensibly focused on the film, a riff on Akira Kurosawa\u2019s\u00a0High And Low. But Lee goes sprinting off topic with a distinctive quickness, especially when interviewer Lyvie Scott asks him whether AI attitudes adopted by Washington\u2019s character, record producer David King, map onto Lee\u2019s own. Here\u2019s Lee, asked if he was \u201ccondemning AI\u201d through David: \u201cI wasn\u2019t condemning AI across the board. In the film where David King [shares how he] feels about art, he\u2019s saying, \u2018A machine\u2019s not a heart, a soul.\u2019 So definitely in that moment, yeah, that\u2019s me talking\u2014but it\u2019s not about other uses of AI.\u201d<\/p>\nSo far, so on-topic. But Lee has also started the mental snowball rolling: \u201cAnother thing which I thought about, being a tenured professor of film: What about people writing their thesis papers, term papers, even homework in elementary school? That is, in my opinion\u2014I don\u2019t want to sound like an old fuddy-duddy\u2014but that is not good. It\u2019s a shortcut. It\u2019s a shortcut and you\u2019re cheating yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
At this point, Lee starts getting egged on by his own office d\u00e9cor, which heavily features pictures of various artists he loves and admired, especially musicians. \u201cNow some scientists might say AI could be developed as great as Leonard Bernstein. I\u2019m looking at the wall right here. Aaron Copland, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Nina Simone\u2026 I don\u2019t believe it. It\u2019s a machine. If you have ears, you could hear the heartbeat. You could hear the soul, the love, the pain, the anguish. A machine? Two words, \u2018Nah, son.’\u201d We then reach the climax of Lee getting charmingly worked up on this topic, when he starts literally taking pictures off the wall to illustrate his point. Here\u2019s the final bit, complete with Scott\u2019s descriptions of Lee\u2019s animated actions: \u201c[He points to a portrait of Frank Sinatra.] You\u2019re telling me they made a machine that can sing better than Ol\u2019 Blue Eyes? Fuck no! Fuck no. Hold on, hold on, hold on. [He stands to take a portrait off the wall.] You\u2019re telling a machine can sing like Mahalia Jackson? Fuck no. Oh, my God. You\u2019re telling me a machine can sing like Billie Holiday? Fuck no! Who else I got?\u201d<\/p>\n
(At this point, Scott notes that \u201cI got you fired up,\u201d and Lee considerately relents, saying \u201cI don\u2019t want to go to all the things hanging on the wall. You\u2019re on a schedule.\u201d)<\/p>\n
None of this is exactly surprising\u2014few modern artists are as committed to talking about art itself as Spike Lee, so hearing him loudly, and enthusiastically, reject big swathes of corporate automation of the work he\u2019s devoted his life to is easy to imagine. Still, it\u2019s a pretty lovely dose of anti-AI energy. (See also Lee\u2019s refreshingly enthusiastic denial when asked if David King\u2019s efforts to recover his creative spark in the film were\u00a0 also\u00a0auto-biographical: \u201cI\u2019ve been blessed. For me it\u2019s been a question of getting the money for a film, but\u2026 the love for film\u2026 I\u2019ve never lost that. Not saying it is going to happen in the future, but as yet it has not happened.\u201d)<\/p>\n
More from A.V. Club<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spike Lee is, pretty famously, not a guy who keeps his opinions to himself. As a director, a writer, a film professor, and just a dude that loves to talk, Lee has made a name for himself as a man who will talk both shit and sugar at the drop of a hat. Certainly, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[346654,364275,45167],"class_list":["post-2002184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artists","tag-david-king","tag-film-professor","tag-spike-lee"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2002184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2002184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2002184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2002184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}