Mara Jevera Fulmer's Blog

AI’s hallmark style of dread and nostalgia

I was thinking about this as I looked at a student submission that most clearly used AI to create her little Zen-styled Venn diagram. It had that tell-tale sepia-toned color palette and heavy-handed drawing style that took on a tea-stained nostalgia that is so common among anything generated by AI these days. I guess it’s the go-to style AI thinks us humans must want since we’re so nostalgic for the days before… AI.

Setting aside the fact that the artistic stylistic approach was likely trained from a working artist who’d been able to make a living creating this kind of art – until AI stole their client base – it occurred to me this. That the style – that overly nostalgic yet sad and moody reminiscence of the color toning common in filmmaking for certain effect – was applied in the film sequence for the last film in the franchise Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

In the ramp-up to the the scene I was remembering, Indie is running from the crazy Soviet agents who’d kidnapped him and then tried to force him into helping find the crate in a warehouse near Roswell, New Mexico that contained this all-important crystal skull.

After escaping, Indie ends up in what looks like a typical suburban neighborhood in the middle of the desert. Yet its residents are all mannequins positioned to look like they’re doing the kind of stuff one might do in 1950s suburbia. A black and white television plays in the background when he enters the living room in one of the homes. The lighting has that same soft, rosy sunset lighting we’re familiar with in art when attempting to evoke that same nostalgic angst.

And then we hear it. The loud ominous blare of the nuclear warning sirens. Far beyond the disingenuous tripe of the 1950s suburban residence, this turns out to be a nuclear testing site and the countdown has begun. Indie then survives by locking himself in a refrigerator that gets blasted far beyond its boundaries of the neighborhood, and tossed around until it pops open. A deeply terrifying monster of a mushroom cloud from the nuclear test bomb can be seen towering over the horizon. Suburbia has been annihilated, along with all of its fake residents.

I was a young child at the end of the Cold War, where in grade school, we kids would dutifully say the Pledge of Allegiance each morning. And then later we would act out that most inane of safety practices called “Duck and Cover”. It was a most apropos demonstration of the dystopian belief that teaching children to hide under their desk in response to those very same sirens would make us safer.

So you’ll forgive me when I look at all of these AI-generated nostalgic rose-colored images popping up everywhere – with a certain level of trepidation. Instead of that warm fuzzy feeling that may be the intended emotional response, I’m get a deeper feeling of dread, followed by a sickening twist in my gut. I can’t help but wonder if this is the foreshadowing of our own obliteration. And the countdown may already have started. We’re just not listening to the right sirens.

Aside: For those of you thinking I’m just some nervous Nelly who hates AI, I’m not. But I just couldn’t shake the parallels of style in the scene from that Indiana Jones movie. And it left me wondering… I do that from time to time.