Legendary filmmaker and ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ superfan Werner Herzog can see the beauty in just about everything, with two notable exceptions: Chickens and art created by artificial intelligence. During an appearance on the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend,” Herzog spoke of the incredible possibilities presented by technological advances, but lamented the sheer lifelessness of its application in areas that require humanity.
Much of the conversation between O’Brien and Herzog centered around the idea of truth (fitting for a guy who just wrote a book called The Future of Truth), which inevitably led them into a conversation about AI. Herzog, who is a fascinating mix of a man somewhat removed from technology but also filled with endless wonder about everything, didn’t dismiss the technology out of hand, but has some grave concerns about it.
“AI, I do not want to put it down completely because it has glorious, magnificent possibilities,” he said, citing its potential uses in scientific fields. “But at the same time, it is already en route to take over warfare. … It will be the overwhelming face of warfare of the future.”
He also simply can’t find much value in generative AI’s takes on works of art.
“I’ve seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence. Story, acting, everything. They look completely dead. They are stories, but they have no soul,” he told O’Brien. “They are empty and soulless. You know it is the most common, lowest denominator of what is filling billions and billions of informations on the internet. The common denominator and nothing beyond this common denominator can be found in these fabrications.”
Those fabrications of AI are a real point of fascination for Herzog. In his new book, according to an excerpt from The New Republic, he writes AI “sees its occasional errors, and arrives at strategies and decisions that were not programmed in it by humans,” and notes that its outputs arrive “with a little pinch of chaos and imprecision, as is also embedded in human nature.”
While talking to O’Brien, Herzog brought up how AI generates these falsehoods and how we have to navigate them. “And of course, cheating, pretending, propagandizing—all these things are like a nemesis. It is out there, and we have to be alert to it.” His advice? Simply do not take anything entirely at face value. “Again, I say, when you are curious and access different sources, very quickly you will find this is invented.”
In general, Herzog is not much for technology. He didn’t own a cellphone until, according to his telling, he had to get one after he was unable to retrieve his car (an 18-year-old Ford Explorer) from a parking garage in Dublin without downloading an app. But it’s not that he fears it. He just doesn’t trust it. “Everything that comes in via your cellphone or your laptop, emails, whatever—you have to distrust, you have to doubt,” he told O’Brien. In response, O’Brien offered up that he gets updates on his phone when his cats use the litter box because it is internet-connected, and proposed that it should be illegal for anything to require an app to function.
Herzog spoke of how natural navigating technology is for younger people, how effortlessly they spot a phishing email that he wouldn’t be able to identify. He compared the instincts of humans using technology to those of prehistoric men foraging for food and learning to avoid poisonous berries. “They had a natural acquired suspicion about things, and it was so natural that we can certainly assume that they didn’t hate nature,” he said. “They just knew how to navigate. And it’s the same thing—you don’t have to hate the internet and the cell phone and whatever is coming at you in this new media, you just have to maintain a complete level of suspicion.”
All of this comes from Herzog’s greater search for truth, which is central to his new book. On the podcast, he assessed, “Nobody knows what truth is.” And in some ways, it doesn’t matter. O’Brien and Herzog share that in art, sheer truth sometimes matters less than telling a good story. But in the rest of the world, the concept of truth is just as elusive, and the cause of conflict and strife. Whose truth are we operating from?
“Truth is not a point somewhere far out in the distance,” Herzog says. “It’s more a process of searching for it, approximating, having doubts.” O’Brien at one point added, “Emotions get us to a truth sometimes that facts cannot deliver.” That is perhaps why AI art falls so flat. The truth lies in the emotion the work conveys and provokes. AI has nothing to offer.
