This Weird Adult Swim Infomercial Predicted the AI Infestation 10 Years Ago

The internet makes me feel dirty these days. Granted, the internet can always make you feel dirty (if you’re using it right), but this is different. If you’re like me, online’s current air of general ickiness has nothing to do with the dreaded Post-Nut Clarity <makes the Sign of the Cross and the Evil Eye to ward off the curse> and everything to do with the most pernicious force unleashed on the web since social media sites began adopting algorithms: so-called “AI.”

Now you’re a bright person, and you know that there’s nothing intelligent about “artificial intelligence” at all. The machines and programs and algorithms that result in services like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and so on are not the fabled thinking machines of Asimov and Dick — they’re just very advanced photocopiers, feeding themselves visual and textual information (without permission of the original artists and writers, of course) and shooting out shoddy amalgamated copies of what they consume. They’re no more intelligent than the preheat function on your oven. 

The intelligence we really need to be worried about, if you can even call it intelligence, is that of the bosses, tech overlords, and hyper-online nerds forcing this technology upon us. They’re barely making a secret of why, either: They want to replace us. The studios, networks, and streamers currently battling the working writers and actors of WGA and SAG-AFTRA who make their existence possible are fighting tooth and nail to preserve AI as an alternative to hiring and paying human beings. The vulture capitalists who’ve seized virtually every newsroom and news site in America want to eliminate reporters, journalists, and critics in favor of factually inaccurate Wikipedia plagiarism. Take a look at any Twitter/X post about the limitless potential of AI art and you’ll find a thread full of paid bluechecks who can barely contain their excitement over eliminating artists as a going concern. That’s the mentality we’re dealing with.

Yet among people who are not directly financially and philosophically invested in the success of AI, it’s widely agreed — because it’s true — that AI is clumsy, ugly, and stupid. It can’t render hands with the right number of digits. It can’t reliably answer your questions. It can’t make a decent opening credits sequence for the most widely disliked Marvel series to date. It sucks at everything but being shitty and making the internet worse.

Good thing Adult Swim warned us about this ten years ago. Coming from the same line of fake “Infomercials” that produced the megaviral Too Many Cooks, “Live Forever as You Are Now with Alan Resnick” was made by ABV Solutions, the same folks who made the very scary horror informercials “Unedited Footage of a Bear” and “This House Has People in It.” And to this day nearly a decade later, nothing has nailed the uncanny, stupid, and ultimately gross way that AI acts and feels like these eleven minutes of controlled madness.

Starring co-writer (with Dina Kelberman), co-creator and co-director (both with Ben O’Brien) Alan Resnick as himself, sorta, “Live Forever As You Are Now” is a satirical ad for the latest product by a visionary tech weirdo played by Resnick. The idea is that through an absurdly labor-intensive process of studying a person’s face, feelings, and lifestyle, he can create a computerized simulacrum of that person that will live on after they die.

There’s just one problem: The simulations suck. They look like uncanny-valley nightmares. (There’s a lengthy digression about the uncanny valley in fact, which Resnick claims he’s escaped in the same way Elon Musk claims Teslas don’t burst into flames at random.) They have little to nothing in common with the people they’re modeled after; for one thing, all of them — male, female, young, old — have Resnick’s voice. They’re prone to generating bizarre and monstrous visuals; one of the big jokes is that the “wife” of Resnick’s simulacrum is a floating orb of flesh. All she’s missing is too many fingers.

And at bottom, they’re very, very stupid. They natter on fixedly about non-sequitur topics — boogie boards, riding in the car, Murphy Brown — in lieu of actually having anything resembling a conversation. This becomes even more pronounced when, instead of chatting with their human counterparts, they “talk” to each other. This timestamp kinda sums it all up; even just describing it made my wife visibly recoil and say “that’s terrifying.” Artificial? You bet. Intelligent? Not on your life.

Then there’s Resnick’s character himself, the visionary responsible for this nightmare. He’s a flopsweat-drenched manchild. His inspiration for creating the AI was an erotic nightmare he had after a marital spat, in which he winds up getting shot to death by a scary criminal instead of doing the deed with his dream woman. His process involves a preposterously in-depth and invasive monitoring of the soon-to-be-duplicated, where he parks himself in your house and does nothing but follow you around, observing your every move. And then the product inevitably fails to work as he expects it too, he’s not mad, he’s just disappointed.

In other words, Resnick embodies virtually everything that makes the creators and proponents of AI nearly as repellent as their creation. Look at Elon Musk (sorry). His adolescent sense of edginess and bone-deep unfuniness was presaged by Resnick’s “I’m just a little guy” voice and off-putting demeanor. His post-divorce radicalization would be familiar to the Resnick character, who invented the Live Forever program to compensate for his own unconscious dread of sex, death, and actually engaging with other human beings. The comical privacy violation he requires to create the digital duplicates predicts the way inescapable data scrapes and algorithmacal behavior monitoring are what make AI possible. 

No show or movie I’ve seen has come this close to conjuring the feeling of skeeviness I get when I read something “written” by ChatGPT, or see AI faux-art, or get deluged by porn bots on Elon Musk’s allegedly botless “X”, or see Google search results rendered useless by SEO-optimized garbage, or watch the way brands interact with each other as if they’re people on Zuckerberg’s brandfluencer Twitter clone Threads, or see one of those automatically generated t-shirts with ridiculously specific slogans that no human being will ever buy — or think about Musk or Zuck or Zaslav and all of the other mutants battling to make the digital landscape look as artless and lifeless as the inside of their own brains. To say Live Forever holds up is to drastically understate the case; it’s better now than it was when it came out. 

AI does not feel like the future, at least not the future I want. It feels like I’m watching a robot take a shit. It feels like I’m being forced to consume some kind of vile digital excrescence — a Silicon Valley Salò. Resnick, O’Brien, and Kelberman’s grotesque floating heads and their meaningless drivel got there ten years ago. It’s simply taken the real world this long to catch up, or more accurately, fall down.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.