AI slop is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming more prevalent as the lazy, the modish and the sub-literate take advantage of an apparently beneficial and cost-free leap in technology that will save them the time and effort formerly required to construct a speech, CV, article or image. I only started picking up on it myself quite recently. But now, when I get the feeling I’m being fed AI-generated pictures, I react like those dogs in the movies that are trained to spot Terminators.
Thanks to the proliferation of sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV etc. there’s an awful lot of cable-TV slop about these days, as there has to be with all that space to fill, all those subscription costs to justify. And I’m not suggesting that it’s all written by AI (though who knows). Just that it has that same effect where it tricks your brain into thinking, ‘Hey, this really isn’t bad’, but your gut tells you, ‘No, this is thin gruel pretending to be lobster bisque.’
Lucky is an all-too-typical example. It stars Anya Taylor-Joy as the ironically named Lucky, a woman on the run both from the police authorities and the criminal underworld, after a heist in which she is double-crossed by her husband. The police are represented by relentless, stern but big-hearted FBI agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), the crims headed by Annette Bening; while her only friend is her dad who is currently in prison but somehow free to advise her on what to do in frequent phone chats. So: decent cast, classic ‘keep running, trust no one, and think on your feet’ premise, but still, a waste of your time.
Why? Partly, I suppose, because we’re back yet again in that deeply implausible ‘You go, girl!’ TV-drama cliché where a physically slight young woman is able continuously to overmatch big, hardened, professional killers. At the end of episode one she is tied up and chucked into the boot of the car by two such men and driven off to be imprisoned or executed.
But it’s OK, don’t worry, Anya Taylor-Joy has got it. How? Well, at the risk of spoiling your surprise, she burns through her bonds with a Zippo lighter, then finds some of the emergency rocket flares people always carry in their cars, sneaks through the hole leading to the rear passenger seat while the baddies are distracted with loud heavy metal music and… Need I go on?
Normally one of the joys of the on-the-run genre – from The Thirty-Nine Steps to Three Days of the Condor – is the protagonist’s ingenuity in keeping one step ahead of his pursuers. Here, it’s barely necessary. The delivery guy helps her escape in his van because he’s nice and he’s been through hard times himself; the FBI agent who is just about to arrest her at gunpoint gets flattened by the gangsters’ car. Easy. Too easy. Almost like entertainment, but not entertainment.
Ann Droid, meanwhile, is almost like a decent sitcom. The situation is promising: ageing widow Sue gets palmed off by the son who used to look after her with a clapped-out, refurbished model of one of those human-like elder-care robots that are all the rage in this futuristic world we inhabit. What they forgot to include, unfortunately, was quite enough of the comedy element.
Perhaps one should have expected this since it stars Diane Morgan from the BBC’s agonisingly unfunny spoof-interview series with Philomena Cunk. But actually she’s really good in this, and moves exactly like a slightly inept, outdated elder-care robot would – so much so that you find her endearing. All the characters are great, in fact. Strongly differentiated, eccentrically likeable and well acted, by an excellent cast including Sue Johnston as Sue, Michelle Greenidge as Jamaican nurse Briana, Kathryn Hunter as down to earth friend Eileen and so on. You really could get to enjoy these people’s company, so I shouldn’t be surprised if it proved a success with its oldster target audience.
But therein also lies its flaw. It’s so busy being sensitive and moving and poignant about senescence, loneliness, death and loss that it doesn’t dare go in hard enough on the jokes, which really could do with being sicker and darker. Still, I did enjoy the one about the feckless son Michael, who is covered in blotches after participating in a drugs trial for easy cash. ‘If it was dangerous,’ he says, ‘do you really think drug companies would do it?’
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