Rating: B-
Dir: Cody Clarke.
“The feature-length film that you are about to see, STOCK SHARK, was made not by me (Cody Clarke) but by AI. I supplied the AI with every film I’ve ever made, and I asked it to make a movie that I would like, and that would fit well in my filmography.” Well, don’t I feel dumb. Here’s a more pertinent quote from Clarke: “Don’t ever believe anything that comes after my studio logo.” Because this is not AI generated. It was written by Clarke, using public domain clips of stock footage which have exactly the same feel – slightly in slow-motion – of clips generated by AI. The script was then “performed” by a text-to-speech application. At eleven bucks, that was the entire cost of the movie.
It certainly convinced me (and going by Letterboxd comments, I’m not alone). I should have guessed fate was trying to tell me something, since I watched the damn thing on April 1st. But discovering I’d been fooled, merited an immediate rewatch from the new perspective, and it was an entirely different experience. It’s still a warning message, about how AI will tell us what we want to hear, heavily based on whatever material has been used to train it. In this case, that means an awful lot of compliments about Cody’s penis. [To the point, my wife entered, wearing the sort of “What are you watching?” expression she usually reserves for a Filipino women-in-prison marathon. My explanation really didn’t help much] It’s all quite self-deprecating, dryly suggesting an underlying insecurity about such things.
However, knowing it is scripted, does dilute the sense of horror as the AI begins to exhibit tendencies which border on the psychopathic. “I’m talking about just taking some random bitch’s guts out of her, and draping them all over her already messy apartment. Wouldn’t that look good?” While it has the ring of plausibility – after all, AIs have been accused of convincing people to unalive themselves – if this had been genuine AI, it would have been truly appalling. But it does capture the complete willingness of AI to lie, confidently. Her expressions of undying love for Cody (and his genitals) are blatantly incompatible with straightforward statements like, “I can’t and don’t feel anything… I’m lying when I say that I’m feeling something in particular.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Cody Clarke movie without a shark. The title here refers to the AI feeling like it’s a shark, swimming through a shoal of stock footage, biting on the most appropriate morsels. Unlike the rest of his “existential shark films” though, there is actually a shark shown here, albeit briefly. It’s an appropriate metaphor for AI, because like a shark, AI can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop. Oh, hang on: that was the Terminator. It’s going to be interesting to revisit this one in ten years, and see how predictive its artistic dystopia ends up being.