Tag: MUBI

My personal MUBI Shaolin film fest went on as planned, and I managed to watch a few more before they left the service. Gordon Liu had a role in just about all of them, which shows what a popular and influential figure he was in the industry. Who even comes close in Hollywood? Pedro Pascal??

If I had to recommend one Shaw Brothers film, it would still be Dirty Ho (1979) which I’ve mentioned here before. It’s essentially the same winning template that Jackie Chan’s career was built on — lots of brilliant, intentional fighting moves masked as accidents and incompetence.

The most uneven one I saw was Legendary Weapons of China (1982), which has about five different plot lines running through it, all to provide flimsy justification for the spectacular finale in which 18 (!) different Chinese weapons are brandished, and as many fighting styles showcased. It’s like Don Draper pitched that idea on a whiteboard and then they had to come up with another 70 minutes. There is an extended action sequence in a straw toilet hut floating over a river, where people literally end up in the muck. This absurd scene involves both kungfu and possession with voodoo dolls.

In another realm of absurdism lives Dogtooth (2009), the debut film of Yorgos Lanthimos which made a splash at Cannes that year. I saw it on MUBI this week because I liked Bugonia (2025) and wanted to start at the source. Jesus, this film is an exercise in creating the wrongest setup and then having its characters do things that follow on logically but are still nevertheless very wrong. You get the sense of perversity for the sake of it, or to give life to the director’s own kinks, sort of like Tarantino putting his foot fetish in everything — but still actually much worse.

However, do something terrible with craft and conviction, and it will gain lasting historical value. That’s how this world works; I don’t make the rules! But what if you don’t actually make the thing and just have the idea. In the form of a prompt, let’s say?

Images that never happened

Google released their Nano Banana Pro image generation model recently, and I’m sure we’ve all seen examples online by now. Things have progressed to the point where I’m constantly questioning the veracity of things I see online, and I think at some point the mental filtering will become so tedious that we’ll simply stop wondering and accept things that are true and untrue equally. If the short-form video that ruins your brain’s ability to focus and feel joy on normal terms makes you laugh, who cares if those things really happened? And then it will extend into other parts of life, and then… who knows?

I decided to see if Nano Banana could place me in ROSALÍA’s LUX album cover and, of course, the answer was yes. Too easily, in fact. I only supplied it with a single forward-facing photo of me at a dinner table, and it was able to extrapolate what I’d look like from a different angle. We are, ladies and gentlemen, so cooked.

It was also Black Friday sales week, and I decided to give VSCO Pro’s annual subscription a try at 50% off (hard to justify at full price). In addition to their Pro set of filters, which are actually really good, it also comes with access to AI tools, of course. Their object removal is state-of-the-art, to the point that it can invent very believable portions of an image that you wouldn’t notice unless really scrutinizing the scene. After a few experiments, sculpting messy scenes in old photos into what I wished they actually looked like, I had to step back and ask myself what the hell I was doing. Apple’s refusal to let the iPhone create “images that never happened” is absolutely the right stance.

What becomes of designers?

AI’s obviously going to change the way we work, and I’ve been worrying for a while now about the future of the design profession. About the people who do this work, whether they will continue to be attracted to it, who will pay for their services, and what those services will actually look like. It’s been hard to imagine timelines that are positive by the standards I care about.

As with many sectors that have experimented with AI tooling, I often hear that senior practitioners using generative AI models can get more done “on their own” — the highlighted phrase implying 1) without the assistance of those pesky junior people, and 2) more cheaply for the business. But just because the tasks once performed by junior people can now be done by AI doesn’t mean juniors can’t find something else to do, or don’t need to be trained anymore. Nevertheless, some business leaders are acting as if that were true.

A friend told me how it’s now possible to run a small agency powered by seniors + AI only, without any junior hires. They were surprised that I pushed back — but the idea sounded irresponsible to me. It’s one thing if you can’t find employment and have to embrace AI to put food on the table. It’s another to be in a position of strength late in your career and choose this. If you can’t afford to leave the ladder down behind you, I said, it would be better not to do it at all.

But because bean counters can always be counted on for short-term thinking and a reluctance to spend on design, some companies will go further and not hire AI-augmented senior people at all. They’ll either use inexperienced juniors or ask someone like a product manager to handle “design stuff” on the side using AI. Depending on how much the tools improve, the visible outcomes of this may seem acceptable for quite a while! Design won’t go away as a function, it’ll merely be handled by a different group of people.

My main concern has been that doing a good-enough job in this way will scale so well, and become the dominant approach so quickly, that we’ll lose the diversity and depth of craft that comes from having human practitioners out in the real world, doing things like interviewing users to understand outlier behaviors, reading contextual cues and hearing what they don’t say as much as what they do. Then using these unique stories to make the larger design solution more resilient. It’s a job that humans are well equipped to do. A business that relies on AI to create an average of best practices may happily miss all of it.

Why do I think this matters? Because while a bunch of LLMs trained on world knowledge (including artifacts from past design exercises) will generate pretty good insights and workable interfaces from a wide field of generic possibilities, it’s still a path to a monoculture of experience. And if we break the chain of passing down the skills to do the work, then some future post-AI generation will have to learn them all over again.

I wondered if there might be a market for artisanal human-led design work. After all, centering the role of human craft has kept the luxury goods market alive in the face of mass manufacturing. But that would mean it becomes something performative, and necessarily restricted to higher paying customers. I actually believe that AI augmentation can produce better work; I just don’t trust our economic systems to nurture it over cheaper work.

Teach an LLM to fish…

Then this week, I saw something on TV that seemed like an apt analogy and put me into a more zen state of acceptance. It was an episode of Japanology Plus on NHK, with long-suffering host Peter Barakan forced to go out on a small fishing boat in challenging waters. I was honestly surprised the producers/insurers allowed a man of his age to do it.

Anyhow, as they were heading back from being thrown around by the waves, he asked the captain how fishermen in the old days would have survived that ordeal without GPS, walkie-talkies, and engines. The captain’s reply was that it was more dangerous back then, and they had to use their experience and intuition, navigating by looking at the mountains and stars, reading the winds and currents. You can imagine many lives were lost on the job.

Would any of those old fishermen trade places with their descendants today, giving up those seafaring skills for the ability to catch many times more fish and live twice as long, comfortably? Very likely! Modern fishermen are still out there on the ocean but their technology distances them from intuiting the waters in the same way. We also know now that the scale at which they fish those waters is unsustainable.

Likewise, there will be more designers in the future, less skilled by today’s standards but able to oversee projects too complex for us to fathom. Maybe with worse overall outcomes for the world than if we’d never opened the mystery box of AI. But I realize now that this pattern of losing one thing to gain “something more, but worse” is simply an inevitable law of the universe. Two steps forward, one step back.