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 come to visit her in a retirement center. As a surprise, her grandson (Marcello Hernández) has downloaded a program that uses artificial intelligence to animate old photography, and 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 is overjoyed to see her father (played by host Glen Powell, who threw himself into every sketch last night) smiling and waving, looking young again. But it isn’t long before things go wrong, as the next photo animation finds Padilia’s mother (Veronika Slowikowska) smoking a hot dog like a cigarette while Powell tries to roast Sadie, the family dog (who, incidentally, doesn’t have a head) on the grill.
When the grandmother expresses shock, her granddaughter (Sarah Sherman) explains: “There’s probably too much going on in the picture, and the AI got confused.” Things devolve from there, with the next motion photo showing Powell’s character’s best friend (Mikey Day) taking off his pants, revealing a smooth, Ken Doll crotch. The grandmother is so distraught that she doesn’t want to see what will happen to the next photo, but her grandson insists that he’s paid for the app and wants to get his money’s worth. So she has no choice but to watch as the very first photograph of her as a baby is desecrated: Half of her mother’s body disappears, her father stretches out her baby self like an accordion, the nude friend returns, and eventually, a nuclear bomb obliterates 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. But while beating an easy joke to death is sometimes irresistible, the AI sketch demonstrated how less can be more.
The post AI Anxiety Hits SNL appeared first on The Atlantic.
