Cinema from the Spectrum

If we were talking about Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, then the conversation would be going a completely different direction. After all, I have nothing but the kindest possible things to say about one of the bleakest entries in Steven Spielberg’s entire body of work – done out of love for the late genius Stanley Kubrick. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of “AI art” which we are talking about.

When I started Cinema from the Spectrum back in 2018, it first sprang out of the motivation to create a platform for film lovers on the autism spectrum, for I retooled a website centered on myself to turn into something bigger. A few friends of mine had joined, and in our first year launched under the new branding, we had been able to take this platform to its first ever film festival as a member of the press covering the Toronto International Film Festival. You might wonder what exactly that has to do with an editorial to be written about AI?

Most of you reading this piece probably have come across social media posts that talk about how generative AI is helpful for disabled creators. Frankly, I find that insulting. I find it insulting because it implies that the kind of work which I’ve put into making Cinema from the Spectrum into the website you know it to be now, could be relegated to some algorithm. And considering how much we continue to pride ourselves on our independence, the very thought of working with AI just seems counterintuitive to our goal.

Nothing feels any less reflective of our voices than having it filtered through AI or a large language model. As I’ve also taken on a copyediting role, together with being the content manager for the website, I can’t see how AI would make anything we do much easier. With how much I’ve seen the writing team grow over the years, and through many friendships I’ve made thanks to how we express our love of cinema, it was because this is all an extension of ourselves. Art speaks to us as human beings, and the last thing I’d want to hear is some sort of algorithmic summary of how it resonated with us. Taking shortcuts of any kind just seems like a cheapening of the qualitative standards which we must uphold, especially as readership changes over the years. After all, I’ve written at least a bit about this when I reviewed Late Night with the Devil for this site.

Because of this pride, we remain committed to our independence, by not using any generative AI. These include, but are not limited to chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or even grammar checkers such as Grammarly. To this day, I have never used ChatGPT even for research purposes, because I can not bring myself to understand the appeal of a program that places all the answers in front of you, robbing you of the chance to discover new knowledge for yourself. This has always been a big part of what has made essay writing incredibly fun for me, whether it be for an assignment, or even if I just wanted to write for my own sake.

As such, we remain committed to entirely human-made work here at Cinema from the Spectrum. Given how much money is being funnelled by massive tech oligarchies into funding slop content and denigrating creativity, we feel it is all the more reason to keep pushing forth this pledge. This isn’t just present as a means of maintaining qualitative standards for Cinema from the Spectrum, but it’s something that remains important to me for the protection of our writers. The last thing that I think we need is to have any of our writing fed into an algorithm to train generative AI programs, but also to have our writers’ data being sold, without consent, into creating some algorithmic slop to be fed back en masse.

It always makes me cringe when I see AI programs being used to supposedly “perfect” our writers, because the imperfections present in what we do here reflect where we come from. Coming so quickly after two strikes in rather essential parts of Hollywood in 2023, I cannot ever bring myself to understand how AI is going to improve any part of this process. I’m saying this even after having been convinced of the benefits of some AI assistants in daily lives (and given how minute these needs are, I don’t see any use for them in my life).

Just because these strikes have come to an end does not mean that this fight is over. Creativity is at risk, especially as we see that we’re entering a world where art is being consistently denigrated by money-hoarding elites. Our writers at Cinema from the Spectrum have kept this platform going out of a love for the game, because we know that film is not going anywhere anytime soon. Nothing would feel like a complete betrayal of the trust that I’ve managed to garner from so many readers all this time later quite like the very idea of having AI programs “fix” our writing.

This all might seem futile, writing on a platform like WordPress, where AI programs have been integrated to supposedly “help” our writers. Given that I also run my own column on Substack, that same route has been embraced in order to force this feeling of inevitability down our throats. At least, I think that’s an appropriate way of surmising the situation, given that this was how it was described in the final season of the brilliant show Hacks (which I plan to review myself over here). And unfortunately, even as some legends whom many of us admire, like Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, or Peter Jackson have come to embrace AI, we feel like this only fuels our commitment even further.

Therefore, I end this piece by reminding you, the readers, that we will never plan to give in. As our writing team grows, and same can be said for our own strategies on social media, we will remain steadfast in this commitment to human-made art. We may have a disability or a disorder, but that doesn’t mean we are completely incapable of the creation of this platform to the degree we have to let some robot decide what’s best for us. All the more reason I have chosen to write this article comes from the fact that I want to decide what is best for our future. And artificiality is far from the ideal future that I had in mind for us.

We will never post anything written by generative AI, let alone copyedited by AI. Even as some services we use such as Canva have integrated AI into their interface, we are never touching any of that. It might be true that “AI is everywhere,” but that doesn’t mean we will have to abide by it. Just as filmmaking remains a valuable craft that accentuates the talent of the many humans involved in its process, what we publish must be reflective of our collective efforts, and not an algorithm.

Thank you again for reading this. We look forward to seeing you at the movies.