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ALT A hand holds up the Made In Our Image issue of Big Think's print magazine beneath a stone colonnade.
ALT Inside the issue: Namir Khaliq investigates the idea of the "permanent underclass." Jasna Hodžić examines what her writing process means in the face of AI. Henry Shevlin asks: would we treat AI differently if we decide it's conscious? Thomas Moynihan meets London's new AI avant-garde. And more!
ALT The Made In Our Image issue of Big Think's print magazine. Subscribe to get your copy. bigthink.com/membership
ALT Made In Our Image. Inside China's AI Micro-Drama Machine. In China's AI video factories, workers race to produce viral hits, even as 90% of companies reportedly lose money. By Afra Wang. Collage illustration of a figure at a desk atop a factory conveyor belt.
ALT "Everyone I met in China's nascent AI film industry this past May told me this story with exuberance and starry eyes..." Collage of cartoonish AI-generated characters riding a factory conveyor belt.
ALT Zombie Scavenger is a whimsical love story between a cowboy robot and a mannequin. It is the work of a 28-year-old wedding photographer from a small rural town in Yunnan Province, a man who has never once left China. He goes by Mx-Shell online. Mx-Shell produced the film in just 10 days using Seedance 2.0 (video-generation tool by ByteDance), spending around 3,000 yuan in token costs (approximately $442). On Douyin, China's version of TikTok, it has been watched more than 70 million times.
!["The state-run newspaper Wen Wei Po wrote that [Mx-Shell's] lack of credentials, the disadvantage that would have shut anyone else out of any other era of filmmaking, had been erased entirely by AI. He had broken free of the old constraints of technology, capital, and connections to become what the paper called an 'army of one.'"](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HVWQ9SFX0AECN87.jpg?name=orig)
ALT "The state-run newspaper Wen Wei Po wrote that [Mx-Shell's] lack of credentials, the disadvantage that would have shut anyone else out of any other era of filmmaking, had been erased entirely by AI. He had broken free of the old constraints of technology, capital, and connections to become what the paper called an 'army of one.'"
ALT A spread from "The Industrial-Slop Complex" in Big Think's print magazine, Made In Our Image.
ALT The closing spread of "The Industrial-Slop Complex" in Big Think's print magazine, Made In Our Image.
ALT Subscribe to get your copy. Big Think's print magazine, Made In Our Image. bigthink.com/membership
ALT "Ideas are bulletproof." V, in V for Vendetta (2006)
ALT Guy Fawkes Day. Fawkes was executed for his involvement in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot: an unsuccessful attempt by Catholic conspirators to blow up the House of Lords and assassinate the Protestant King James. Over time, the day evolved into a night of bonfires and fireworks, and Fawkes was seen less as a villain than as a folk figure.
ALT Since the hackers of Anonymous decided they would all wear the same kind of mask, they had to pick one that was readily available in stores, and instead of Batman's, they ended up settling for V's.
ALT "There's value in abstracting away from what you're trying to comment on. With the film, we sprinkled enough in there that although the story is set in the U.K., you believe it could happen anywhere." James McTeigue, Director of V for Vendetta
ALT How "V for Vendetta" became more than a movie. In hindsight, it's not surprising that a film about the power of political symbols became a powerful political symbol in its own right. By Tim Brinkhof
ALT Few movies leave a legacy as large as V for Vendetta. Although it was met with mixed reviews and modest commercial success upon its release, the film has never truly left the zeitgeist.
ALT "If we had put some of the stuff that's happening today into the film back when we were making it, the studio would have told us we were being ridiculous. But V almost seems tame now." James McTeigue, Director of V for Vendetta
ALT V's grinning, mustachioed Guy Fawkes mask has become a popular sight at demonstrations across the globe, from the U.S. and Venezuela to Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. But how did this happen, and what does it mean?
ALT The Hunger for Human Connection. What happens when we make everything in life easier, except being human? By Eric Markowitz
ALT In the promised vision of agentic AI, humans will no longer have to do, well, anything. Today, if you call your pharmacy, you will not get a pharmacist but a chatbot. Want to check a bag at the airport? Head to the touchscreen kiosk. Flight canceled? Speak to the AI.
ALT "Ninety percent of my meals that I'm eating on a daily basis, weekly basis, are AI-directed. I'm not choosing what to eat. AI is telling me what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner most days." Marc Lore, founder of "tech-enabled" kitchen brand Wonder
ALT At the center of billionaire Marc Lore's quest for epicurean domination is a robot he calls the "infinite bowl machine." It assembles 500 flawless salads and grain bowls per hour on a magnetized spinning platform, and it exists to solve what Lore identifies as a restaurant's biggest weakness: humans.
ALT "Here I should say again: I am a fan of technologies that improve our lives. I do not want to hand-wash my clothes, and I am glad the machines took that job. The question of our era is not so much whether machines should do more, which of course they will. The question is what we do with the time we are granted."
ALT The Hunger for Human Connection spread in Big Think's print magazine, Made In Our Image.
ALT Subscribe to get your copy. Big Think's print magazine, Made In Our Image. bigthink.com/membership
ALT Big Think's print magazine open to the "Prompting Reality" opening spread by Conor Feehly, with artwork by Ana Kova of two figures sitting on a glowing, impossible cube.
ALT Pull quote in Big Think's print magazine: "Our sense of what is real, even in a basic perceptual context, is deeply dependent on that reality being corroborated by another."
ALT Pull quote in Big Think's print magazine: "AI will become interwoven with human meaning-making processes on a scale that previous technologies have not reached."