与狼共舞
In 2017, the great American novelist Paul Auster traveled to Ivano-Frankivsk, 乌克兰, on a pilgrimage of sorts to the hometown of a grandfather he never knew. Although Ivano-Frankivsk had once been home to many of the author’s ancestors, the Austers—like all of the Jews who lived there before World War II—were long gone. Auster published an account of his journey in 2020 as a Literary Hub piece titled “斯坦尼斯拉夫之狼."
访问期间, Auster met a local poet who described what Soviet soldiers found when they arrived to liberate Ivano-Frankivsk from the Nazis in July 1944. While Auster knew what happened to members of his own family and the town’s other Jews between 1941 and 1943, 到了1944年，他惊奇地发现, all of the occupying Germans and remaining non-Jewish townspeople were gone as well: “Instead of people the city was now inhabited by wolves, 数百只狼, 也许有上千只狼.”
Upon returning home, Auster researched the poet’s story but found nothing to confirm it. The nearest thing to proper documentation he unearthed was a Soviet propaganda film from the period, showing Russian soldiers as conquering heroes freeing a cheering crowd. He came away unsure of the facts but inclined to print the legend, , 认识到狼是代表, 比宣传片更有说服力, "the spawn of war and what war brings to the earth."
“斯坦尼斯拉夫之狼” probes the kind of questions about stories and storytelling that Auster’s work has, 以某种方式, been asking for 40 years: “Does an event have to be true in order to be accepted as true, or does belief in the truth of an event already make it true, even if the thing that supposedly happened did not happen? … If the story turns out to be so astounding and so powerful that your mouth drops open in wonder and you feel that it has changed or enhanced or deepened your understanding of the world, 这个故事是真是假有关系吗?”
In this age of AI-enabled deepfakes and synthetic filmmaking, we’re more conditioned than ever not to trust our eyes when it comes to visual accounts of present or past events. And as we become more adept at recognizing the tell-tale signs of awkward-looking synthetic videos and cliché-ridden, hallucination-addled Open AI-generated writing, we’re just as aware that as AI technology improves, it will become harder to tell the difference.
Most of those following the Hollywood strikes of 2023 found reason to cheer on Nov. 8 when SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP reached a tentative agreement that reportedly resolved the AI-related disputes that largely motivated the strike (alongside the impasse over streaming residuals).
And while 86% of union members voted in favor of the agreement, dissenters took exception to the AI provisions, which guaranteed actors compensation and 48 hours to consent to the digital replication of their voice and likeness. While the “consent” clause may seem actor-friendly, its inclusion is likely to prove a sellout even more insidious than SAG president Ronald Reagan blithely signing away back residuals to his producer pals at the conclusion of the 1960 strike (although many choose not to remember it that way).
As dissenting SAG negotiating committee member Shaan Sharma told 《百家乐app下载》杂志, enshrining the consent-to-AI provision in the union contract effectively makes it a condition of employment. “如果你想被录用, you have to be ready to consent to be replicated, so there are people who are out there saying that consent at the time of engagement is coercion because they won’t hire you unless you give them those rights,夏尔马说. “And it’s only those with considerable leverage that will have the ability to say no to the replication, 但还是被录用了.”
It’s anybody’s guess what the impending era of synthetic filmmaking and storytelling will yield following this negotiated surrender , and what AI-augmented artifacts will distort recollections of war-torn times. Decades from now, odds are that all we’ll remember is the circling of the wolves.
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