Copyright channelnewsasia
Even if Particle6 argues that Norwood can be programmed to be independent or even subvert the male gaze, her very existence undermines that. She remains a subservient tool – a digital embodiment of the same decades-old trope that women shouldn’t think or resist, only serve. Humans aren’t templates. We are complex, contradictory, difficult, and real. The beauty of a healthy relationship comes from working through those contradictions, from growing and figuring things out together. The beauty of an actress is in her history and her real, lived experiences. AI IS HERE TO STAY, BUT HUMANITY ENDURES AI isn’t going anywhere. It’s here, and as I’m typing this (very old-school, I know), hundreds of thousands of AI-generated videos are made every day using software like ChatGPT, Copilot, and now Sora 2, a free video generator that promises to “easily transform text to video” (shudders). It looks bleak. Some days, I genuinely want to pack up and live in the middle of nowhere, far from all these devices that make life feel like a never-ending season of Black Mirror. But I still choose to be optimistic. Like every major invention before it, AI comes with its own kind of moral panic, and rightly so. Yet history has shown that panic is often just the first stage of understanding. To keep our need for real connection intact, humans learn, adapt, and ask harder questions. Not all technology is art, and even when it is, art never exists in a vacuum. Every creation carries the emotional, political, and cultural baggage of the world that made it. If we’re going to build an actress, we have to recognise that she comes with centuries of ideas about women, and thus it’s worth asking: What does she look like? Who does she serve? Who gets to control her? Perhaps Particle6 and their CEO did ask those questions. But they missed the mark in the way they presented Norwood. And, judging by their now-disabled social media comments, they don’t seem particularly open to hearing the rest of the conversation. These questions matter, not just for artistes, but for audiences, and for anyone choosing whether to consume or resist the AI slop that’s filling our screens and shaping our desires. We don’t have to abandon and always be critical of technology; we just have to keep asking what it’s doing to us.
