Recently, I went to the cinema to see the new ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ film. Immediately after watching it, I felt both pensive and emotional about the future of journalism and the creative areas of work as a whole.
Overall, I thought the film was brilliant and a perfect replication of the much-loved classic and I would rate it a four out of 5. I think the way it adapted to fit modern ideals and standards was really admirable however, through doing this it seemed to lack the magic of the first film in some areas. Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway were entrancing to watch as usual, providing the film with an electric sense of nostalgia.
The film addresses the future of AI
and the extreme threat it holds over the creatives industry. Of course, deeming myself a part of this industry, it makes me feel upset that potential future job might be unreachable. I feel selfish actually talking about jobs and AI’s threat to the world, when out of all the problems AI creates, a lack of jobs is the least of them. A single AI data centre can consume about 19 million litres of water per day which is equivalent to more than half of the UK’s total water usage. Now, you may be wondering how a computer can use so much water, well it uses it in these main ways: directly at data centres to keep computers cool and indirectly for electricity generation, during the manufacturing of the hardware they run on, for example the servers.
Meryl Streep has spoken before about the importance of originality and the arts in particular, like in her Golden Globes speech where she states ‘So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts!’. In this sense, she is addressing the treating of migrants in America terribly even those who are legal. However, we could also interpret this as many people working in modelling, acting and singing jobs, are losing their jobs to an AI bot who are employed because of their cheap and easy to programme nature. It is insulting to so many talented and hard-working creatives to even consider replacing them with a bot, that will produce work that is generic as it can only learn and take things from past pieces. This strips the awe-element and uniqueness that we feel when reading a book, admiring a painting or sculpture, listening to a song or even watching a film. I mean, how lucky are we to be able to congratulate others on ideas we didn’t even think of, and then even better for them to bring it to life.
We have taken enough from future generations. We cannot take the only medium a human being can express their soul.
