Tag: AI

Terminator Meets Lone Wanderer – Blame! Movie Review

When you are nursing a broken toe and ordered bed rest, Netflix is the way to go. The cherry on top is to pass the time watching a movie that explores humanity’s existential struggle for survival against an out-of-control, dystopian machine world. 

I know, I wasn’t really in the mood for:

Say hello to Blame! Yes, that exclamation mark on the title is not a typo. Much like the 2017 movie Mother! this anime and manga series is titled Blame! (The movie may be about humanity’s struggle for survival, but little do you know about my struggle to write this review while fighting against spellchecker with regarding capitalizing after an exclamation mark.)

Like any other dystopian title, Blame! focuses on humanity’s tenacity in the face of oblivion. The movie has plenty to show in the dangers of technology overwhelming society, as the characters essentially live that experience every waking moment of the plot. 

Care to guess what motivates them to keep fighting the good fight? It is the most powerful weapon of all:

Just kidding. When it is survival of the fittest, in a desolate world, family doesn’t have the usual definition. Instead, in Blame! it has more to do with community and connection. One could argue that this is even imposed by the very reality our characters face, driven as they are by a raw instinct for survival, amid gradual annihilation. 

So who are they? 

Meet the Electro-Fishers. 

They are a small and desperate band of humans trying to survive starvation within “The City”, a colossal megastructure that functions as a Dyson sphere (not a new vacuum model), engulfing what was once the Solar System. 

  • A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely surrounds a star to capture its power output. 

Continuously expanding and featuring incomprehensible architecture, the City hosts rooms as vast as planets, and environments where basic physics can shift unpredictably. Its scale is such that it is peppered with fragmented zones of ruined, ancient cities separated by miles of industrial scaffolding. 

The Builders guide the City’s persistent encroachment in outer space. They are automated, unthinking machines that continuously, wait for it, build and expand the structure. Protecting and “safeguarding” the City are the deadly Safeguard robots. They are the Terminators of Blame!, except they are far more nimble and creepier. 

Tasked with hunting down and eliminating any unregistered human presence, the Safeguard are among the primary obstacles, including the City itself, that the Electro-Fishers must confront in their battle for survival. 

You might wonder how it got to this in the first place. Well, that’s the definitive mystery of the movie, and unfortunately, we don’t get a very clear answer, but a walking symbolic exposition of the issue at hand: Killy. 

Killy is our “sort-of” hero in this story. He is a mysterious cyborg who traverses the massive City in search of a human who possesses the Net Terminal Gene to restore order and stop the City’s expansion.  

With Killy, there is no “Come with me if you want to live” or “I’ll be back”. Rather, the cyborg is a silent companion of the Electro-Fishers who assists them against various enemies. Killy lets his actions speak for themselves, and for the most part, we as an audience, along with the Electro-Fishers, are left towonder about his true intentions and purpose. 

The movie’s ambiguous ending perfectly mirrors the themes of the story, its world, and the characters’ personalities. Killy’s journey to find the Net Terminal Gene reflects humanity’s persistence in the infinitely expanding City. Throughout his quest, Killy’s stoic nature contrasts with the humans’ deep desire for companionship and a place to call home. 

The premise of Blame! is a familiar sight for sci-fi fans in general, but the movie and the manga series stand out for the sheer creativity of the world in which the story unfolds. The terrifying and magnificent scale of the City remains an eerie focal point of our characters’ struggles and really puts into perspective the seemingly impossible stakes at hand. 

At the end of the day, who doesn’t like watching humans fight the good fight against a desolate world that is practically out to kill them? That is Blame! in a nutshell. 

The movie explores transhumanism, runaway AI, genetic markers as access controls, and cybernetic warfare. All this across an artificial, solar-system-sized City. After finishing the movie, I only had more questions, and while that is not really what a moviegoer would want, I think it is a great bait for those curious cats out there who might want to take a sneak peek at the manga. 

There is a lot more to Blame! in the manga series, and you can find it on Amazon Kindle or at your nearest library’s digital collection. On the other hand, the movie still stands as a decent, but quite condensed, adaptation of the work as a whole.

Writer’s Corner – Navigating AI as a Writer

In the summer of 2022, I started hearing murmurs about OpenAI’s upcoming release of an AI-powered conversational chatbot that would presumably be a game-changer. There was a sense of dread in the writing industry, with some of my colleagues and friends bemoaning the potential impact of this technology on the field and their careers. Later that year, on November 30, 2022, OpenAI released the first iteration of ChatGPT. 

It has been nearly four years since. AI tools are now just about everywhere. From chatbots, coding assistants, and workflow automation to writing, image, and video generation, there is an AI tool out there to suit everyone’s needs. I’ve already crossed paths with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, Perplexity, Grammarly, and many more. My take on all of it is similar to a popular character (who confronts the reality of his success, achieved through years of effort and hard work, becoming a poor and cheap imitation) from one of my favorite anime: 

I have followed the development of ChatGPT and other AI tools very closely and approached their use with great caution. Adaptation is part of the writer’s journey. It has also been a central characteristic of my personal journey regarding new technologies. Hailing from a small town in Madurai, I didn’t come across a compact disc until the early 2000s, when I had the opportunity to attend an international private school. There I was, packing floppy disks into my backpack while my friends were working with USB drives. A few megabytes were my data domain, while others were advancing to gigabytes and terabytes. This pattern of catching up and adapting to emergent tech has persisted throughout my life. It has been both a frustrating and a great learning experience. 

Being slower has helped me assess and adapt to new trends cautiously. Today, in my day-to-day life as a writer, I see AI (in its various forms) simply as a tool and an imperfect one at that. Take ChatGPT, for example, it is essentially a Large Language Model (LLM) in action. Chat is trained on vast amounts of data, including publicly available internet content, books, and articles. It recognizes patterns and generates text without directly storing any information. This approach entails a Pandora’s box of ethical challenges, including potential bias, inaccuracy, intellectual property concerns, and data privacy issues. Like its brethren, Chat is both beneficial and harmful, depending on its use and oversight. That last part can apply to any tool, in general. The funny thing is, none of this is new. It’s just that AI tools today bring a boatload of abilities that, at one point, weren’t possible. 

Remember this guy? 

Clippy was a primitive, rule-based AI (yup, you heard that right) that helped predict user needs and offer help on the go. You can call it a predecessor of sorts to modern generative AI. Clippy also used early machine-learning techniques to analyze user actions and offer suggestions. In a way, Clippy is the granddaddy of modern chatbots. 

Go back a little further, and you have this guy: 

The ’60s and ’90s had AI that followed hard-coded instructions. These AI programs could predict statistics and algorithms but couldn’t do anything more than what was already coded in. Here, we have Dr Sbaitso, an AI speech synthesis or text-to-speech operator program released in 1991.

As AI tools proliferate, they have sparked extensive discussion about privacy, mitigation, transparency, and more. Careers and fields are undergoing a transformative era where jobs and roles are being realigned and remade. The art of writing is also riding this wave of change. AI tools have improved and expanded accessibility and productivity for the average user. Where once you would hire the services of a working professional, say a graphic designer for a specific design task, AI tools make it easy for the uninitiated to be able to come up with something on their own. As such, some tout that AI has levelled the playing field, but I disagree. Rather, I find that AI has significantly elevated the ceiling for talent emergence and recognition.

In my line of work, AI tools have helped streamline parts of my writing pipeline that were tedious or lacking. Much of this doesn’t involve the actual writing. Rather, it mostly concerns the brainstorming and research phase of a given project. Googling things is easy enough, but sometimes there are nitty-gritty details that a basic Google query may not necessarily be effective for. Tools like ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude do make it easier to find what you need on the web, IF you know how to prompt them properly. This whole process is quite analogous to my reaction when Wikipedia first came out. The online encyclopedic database blew everyone’s mind. At the same time, it was imperative for users to remember that Wikipedia is a collaborative, open-editing platform. This means anyone with an internet connection can potentially alter content, creating opportunities for errors, vandalism, and bias, especially on controversial topics. Back then and to this day, I use Wikipedia as a decent starting point to gather information. I don’t take anything on its page at face value; instead, I cross-check with the provided bibliography or supplement my notes with further research.

AI tools are just the same for me. On the one hand, I use them to ease the brainstorming and research phase of my writing. This can involve finding an obscure passage related to a specific work or prompting the AI to provide working examples of a writing concept I may find confusing when a cursory search on my end does not yield what I want. It is a collaboration in which the AI tool serves as “sound board” of sorts, enhancing my efficiency while supporting my originality.  I do not let the tool dictate my writing. Rather, I let my writing dictate how I use the tool. This helps me maintain my authenticity, voice, and critical thinking. As a tool, AI is just another cog in my creative process. I remain the director. On the other hand, AI tools have helped me identify areas for improvement in my writing process. Grammarly, for one, has pushed me to further study and build on fundamentals, including grammar, style, and composition (in fact, it was my persistent mistakes in these departments that got me reading “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White). 

Using an AI tool for coding doesn’t necessarily make me proficient in programming. The same logic applies to writing as well. One still has to learn the skills of the trade to have the basic know-how and to keep improving. AI tools for writing often seem like a shortcut, but an overreliance on them may potentially come at a loss of one’s personal voice, that most critical aspect of your writing that makes it original and, simply, you. AI tools geared toward writing are as much a means to enhancing your efficiency as they are in helping you identify weaknesses in your writing. Working and improving in those areas is on the writer.

At the end of the day, the actual writing is my very own personal journey, untouched by AI.