Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Screenland

The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.

Credit...Photo illustration by Michael Houtz

Nov. 5, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET

A popular icebreaker involves asking which historical figures you’d like to have dinner with. Sora 2, the new video generator from OpenAI, suggests another option: Which historical figures would you like to see kill each other? The platform will produce short A.I. videos of almost anything users prompt it to — an ability that might, in some other world, unleash a flowering of human imagination. In ours, though, the typical Sora clip tends to feel like a mash-up of familiar sensationalist media, with influences including the crude conceits of old daytime talk shows, the improbable brain-rot formulas on YouTube — and, of course, fights.

Imagine Gandhi and Hitler, facing off in a wrestling ring. Picture Hitler tussling with Michael Jackson on an ersatz “Maury” set. Think of Stephen Hawking being chased by the police, or wiping out in a halfpipe, or executing a pile driver on a wrestling opponent — all rendered with the uncanny, rubbery whack of A.I. bodies colliding. Iconic moments such as the “I Have a Dream” speech are reframed in the style of hidden-camera prank shows or as baldly racist caricature. (OpenAI, facing some backlash, recently adjusted its laissez-faire policies to block the use of Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness.) Thus far, the platform’s output has resembled the doodlings of a bored and somewhat sadistic middle schooler, killing time in the back of history class.

This is just one among many examples of what now feels like a trend in Silicon Valley. The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction. Yet it seems, at times, bizarrely unaware that many of those notions were meant to be dystopian or satirical — dismal visions of where our worst and dumbest habits could lead us. You worry that someone in today’s tech world might watch “Gattaca” — a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs — and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school.

The material on Sora, for instance, can feel oddly similar to the jokes about crass entertainment embedded in dystopian films and postmodern novels. In the movie “Idiocracy,” America loved a show called “Ow! My Balls!” in which a man is hit in the testicles in increasingly florid ways. “Robocop” imagined a show about a goggle-eyed pervert with an inane catchphrase. “The Running Man” had a game show in which contestants desperately collected dollar bills and climbed a rope to escape ravenous dogs. That Sora could be prompted to imagine a game show in which Michel Foucault chokeslams Ronald Reagan, or Prince battles an anaconda, doesn’t feel new; it feels like a gag from a 1990s writer or a film about social decay.

The echoes aren’t all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias — particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and “high tech, low life” allure. From William Gibson novels to films like “The Matrix,” the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech.

This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry’s boldest visions of the future. According to a New York Times article about the development of Tesla’s Cybertruck, the design was “inspired by dystopian science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s”; Elon Musk framed it as “what Bladerunner would have driven.” In that film, the character Rick Deckard’s car looked more like a cross between a Toyota Tercel and an iron lung. The Cybertruck is more mercenary, with a militaristic, stealth-bomber profile. It looks like the vehicular manifestation of fears about apocalyptic social disorder, as if its driver might one day need a Gatling gun to clear a Trader Joe’s parking lot.

This fumbling, dystopian aura seems poised to become new technology’s house style.

The truck’s truer, less intentional fulfillment of the cyberpunk aesthetic is that it has been plagued with issues. At its debut, a ball bearing cracked the supposedly bulletproof windows. The stainless-steel body can become discolored. There have been multiple recalls, including for accelerators that can freeze, and lawsuits alleging that the electronic doors can shut off in a crash. The cyberpunk design is a cosplay of dystopia; the real thing arrives if and when the truck lives up to Gibson’s junkyard sensibility.

You may sense something similar when Mark Zuckerberg, demonstrating a pair of A.I. eyeglasses, shows us not a slick Terminator-style visual display but a series of malfunctions as the glasses help to make a steak-sauce recipe*.* Or when recruitment videos for military technology companies don’t even summon the energy of a “Starship Troopers” ad, but instead present a droll, self-deprecating parody of “The Office,” as in a campaign for the A.I.-assisted weapons manufacturer Anduril.

There is perhaps no field in which tech has leaned further into dystopian tropes than the realm of human relationships. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, more or less explicitly noted that his ideal A.I. persona was the one voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Her”* — a character whose light-speed evolution away from her human lover leaves him shattered. Musk’s A.I. chatbot, Grok, has taken this model in more suggestive directions with its “companions,” which include a pornographic waifu named Ani and a male romantic inspired by both “50 Shades of Grey” *and “Twilight.” A controversial series of New York subway ads pitched an A.I. accessory called Friend — a plastic disc that is worn as a necklace and operates as a continuous surveillance device — as a replacement for the cumbersome complexity of real people.

It feels almost unnecessary to reflect on the grim and self-evidently depressing nature of these efforts, which seem like taking one’s Amazon Echo on a honeymoon. But this fumbling, dystopian aura seems poised to become new technology’s house style. Silicon Valley has long taken knocks for missing the deeper messages of the sci-fi it cribs from, but lately even the idea of subtext seems to have vanished, leading to an implicit championing of dystopia itself.

Obviously the tech industry is not just faithfully copying these ideas from old sci-fi stories. The stories did not invent them, either. Their writers crystallized common, long-running anxieties — about human obsolescence, mass media, diminishing expectations — and projected them into exaggerated, catastrophic futures. After decades of joking about our propensity to rot our brains on sensationalist imagery, it’s hardly surprising that we’d develop A.I. and immediately use it to produce more sensationalist imagery. Nor is it surprising that our worries about surveillance and alienation just anticipated more surveillance and alienation. What *is *surprising is that these outcomes would arrive dressed up in the dystopian wrappers that once signaled they should be avoided.

Recent innovations in A.I. suggest our anxiety is now pointed toward a more fundamental concern: the fear of others. The industry keeps trying to engineer replacements for such miraculous experiences as “friendship” and “relationships,” outsourcing the grit and grain of human interaction — whether via a necklace that offers deadened commentary on the video game you’re playing or via a devoted chatbot that is always free to listen to your thoughts. The “problem” some modern A.I. is trying to solve is, in effect, us. Cautionary warnings from dystopias past are being deployed, credulously and with minimal irony, as solutions. Would an app’s promise to make society obsolete even seem odd now?

---

Casey Michael Henry is a writer based in New York City. He publishes the cultural newsletter Slim Jim.

Source photographs for illustration above: Warner Bros/Everett Collection; Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Florian Gaertner/Photothek, via Getty Images.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT