#ai commentary

This post is satire, but the commentary hits:

The answers are often generic

The user can become dependent

The belief that “the machine knows best” starts to creep in

It’s not just a joke — it’s a warning. Not about the machine, but about us.

But let’s go a little deeper.

There’s a difference between being helped and being held hostage.

An AI like ChatGPT can absolutely assist: – It can suggest. – It can clarify. – It can even help you start when you’re stuck.

But it’s not a fortune teller. It’s not your parent. And it’s definitely not the voice of destiny.

The danger isn’t in asking a question — it’s in giving up the ability to answer for yourself.

If you treat it like a partner in your process, that’s one thing. If you treat it like your authority, that’s another.

It’s okay to seek help. It’s not okay to surrender your agency.

AI is here to assist — not possess. (And if it starts talking like Rod Serling, maybe take a break.)

Still around? Wonderful!

For a brief synopsis, skip if you watched the movie, one of our main protagonists, Kenji and his glasses wearing friend work for this mega inter-connected digital space called OZ. One of their schoolmates, Natsuki, interrupts their workflow to give them another job to go back to her family's house in Japan's countryside and basically pretend to be her fiancé. Kenji ends up going (without realising the whole bf thing) and getting acquainted with Natsuki's large family. Before going to bed, Kenji's messaged with some long code and he decides to crack it (he's a math-wiz, don't question it). He sends the answer for code to the sender, and his OZ account gets hacked. This leads to many accounts getting stolen, and OZ get's overrun and the world is put into complete chaos. The main plot consists of Natsuki's family coming together to beat an AI, who's ironically named Love Machine, that's causing all the mayhem around the globe.

I'm going to break my reasons down into 2 different categories: Social commentary, and computer functions as visual metaphors/fun things I think aren't fully noticed at first glance. I have quite a bit to say about all parts so I think the structure will make this nicer to read. If not, sorry gang.

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Social Commentary of Centralised Internet and More

The best one to one comparison I can think of is that the Metaverse, the thing Facebook was really trying to kick off, is what OZ is. Everyone, or at least almost everyone, across the globe has an account to this virtual hub where you can do everything from chatting and playing games, to working your office job, to paying your taxes. Your OZ account is an extension of you and OZ is the digital globe. The movie makes it abundantly clear that they are linked though what happens to Kenji alone. His face gets slathered on national news as a cybercriminal, and later Natsuki's family use this outing to find out exactly who Kenji is. In the matter of a day, everyone in the house knows Kenji's life history, and the country knows his face, all because Love Machine used him specifically as a scapegoat for hacking OZ. Since OZ is the thing that EVERYONE is using for EVERYTHING, it getting broken into causes problems for the fire department, the health department, transport, literally everything. Although the movie plays it for the plot of the AI "playing"/learning to work with all the bitz and bobs of OZ, issues like that happen.

One slip up in one way or another can have catastrophic consequences and has without AI or anything. The main one that comes to mind is Microsoft's "Blue Screen of Death" incident that happened in mid 2024. People's flights were fucked up, business was interrupted. Not in the same way as the movie, but an example of how our reliance on tech is heavily shafted when 1 widely adopted corporation has massive reach. It's connected to the enshittification of our online experiences. The point that business cease to function when Love Machine starts fucking around is focused more in a humanitarian crisis lens, but let's be honest, if this were happening in real life the main thing we'd see tying to be fixed first is the stock-end of it all. Love Machine's actions were considered level to a terrorist attack before it fully became one. If we get to a point where we rely almost solely on one conglomerate we have issues, and I love the way that Summer Wars portrays that through one silly little AI poking around the place.

I'm taking a moment to thank all the cyber security folks for working to prevent this kind of thing from happening. As computer's get more powerful and complex, it's important to remember that there are reasons some privacy things have come into existence more recent times. As much as we hate two-factor verification, or passkeys or whatever else is going on, it does exist to lessen accounts being stolen or shit like possible nuking like the movie implied. There's a part where someone says something like, "And if that AI gets a hand on the president's account, we'll have a full out war." And... well.... For 2009, they're not missing the mark entirely. I doubt the directors and writers could've known shit like a reporter would be added to a government group chat, or politicians having beef over social media aiding in a nuke scare would happen not even 10 years after releasing the movie. And that's not even a hacking thing! I'm very glad for cyber security people but at the end of the day, I think we can both see what the movie is trying to say about our use of technology. It does not need to be intertwined with our personal lives to the degree that it is, and the widespread reliance on one service with everyone's information is possibly dangerous on a human species level.

SC: Side comment on AI's and its developer's morality

One of my favourite parts of the move is when OZ going to shit and Natsuki's grandma is rounding up everyone she possibly knows in one way or another to help thy fellow man. In general, I love all the parts like that, all the hopecore scenes, that show people banding together against a common evil regardless of background, location, or any language barriers. But specifically with the grandma calling her acquaintances on a rotary phone. The whole things is a wonderful visual metaphor that I'll talk about later, but to stay on topic, this part shows why offline intra-personal connections are important to have. At the end of the day, when our computers go off, we only have those that are around us for support. True in the movie, and true in real life. It's one of the reasons why it's still important to learn skills instead of relying on AI to generate it for you.

Love Machine asked people to crack the code. Although Kenji technically entered the wrong code, he and many others cracked it. At the end of the movie, they relied on Kenji's swag math olympic skills to not fucking die. Is the everyday man going to be put in this situation? No. But there's certainly situations where knowing how to do something through application of the craft pays off more in the long run. Both technical-wise, and socio-development-wise! I say that in reference to the student-teacher dynamic in Natsuki's family with Kazuma.

A different part that I also adore is the fact that the movie both condemns Natsuki's uncle, Wabisuke, for creating the AI but also allows him to be human. With everyone's negative reaction to the news that he made it while he was off in America, it's very clear that it's a SHITTY thing for him to do! You'd work on something that has the potential affect to kill millions of people from sheer negligence for money??? BOO!! TOMATO TOMATO TOMATO!! Everyone reacting to Wabisuke like that is an honest and fair reaction, especially since the family bloodline is build on protecting communities. To go out of your way to make something that could be (and currently is) worsening people's lives just for financial gain is horrible, but not irredeemable. I love that the movie explains why he did what he did, and how he worked to fix it.

In a similar way, it's the way that the AI bubble is going. There are many people who work with AI or are part of that sphere who are... Let's be honest, for everyone in the room who knows what's happening, they're the bad guys. Generative AI for models like ChatGPT use a lot of energy, which wind up causing areas to lose resources like water, they're prone to give misinformation, they're sustained on profit from theft, and that's not even getting into the more specific social ethical issues like bias... The list goes on. However, however, those who've looked into the lion's mouth and gone "maybe I don't want to do this anymore" and worked to correct these issues are deserving of respect. I'd give a specific example if I knew one off the top of my head, but I hope you understand why I'm saying this. We're getting to a point where it feels like AI inserted into everyday things is doing more harm than good. If developers did more to circumvent this (mainly by shutting the whole state of affairs down like Wabisuke), just maybe, people wouldn't be as mad. But why would any sense of loving thy fellow man prevail over financial gain in the real world? Moving on to the AI itself.

About an hour and 20 minutes in one of Natsuki's relatives explicitly states that Love Machine trying to blow up a nuclear plant to end the world is not done out of malice, but out of some thought that this is all some kind of game, is honestly a breath of fresh air. In our current climate, we certainly have a tendency to look over the elephant in the room. The upcoming rise of "clanker" and other anti-robot terminology is funny, sure, I'll give people that. It's funny, and it has the underlying statement that people are tired of machines replacing them, however the anger is misdirected. Love Machine, is clearly sadistic, enjoying the way fucking with all the stuff in OZ ruins people's days, but it does not seem to do it because of it hating humanity. It likes to win, it likes to have power. This is not the case for the AI available to us currently. Hell, the AI available to us currently can't really fully be thought of as "thinking". All of this is to say that people can harass a robot with LED googly eyes all they want, but it's not the robot who's deploying more robots in the field.

To get to the root of the problem, just like in the movie, you've got to hit the ones who released it to the masses. At the end of the film, when the news is covering Wakisuke's place in the development of Love Machine, they say that the blame is going to the US government for deploying it onto OZ. Similarly, people shouldn't be wasting their energy on creating anti-robot content, e.g. new robot slurs, we should be speaking out against corporations that have the audacity to replace people with AI. Some people are too comfortable with fantasying about a whole caste system where 'roids are beneath them anyway.

Summer Wars did a great job of predicting issues that would come up in an autocratic digital world, and I hope more people talk about it in relation to pop culture. In general I hope more people talk about this movie because it's also just made very well from a visual motif stand point.

Fun Computer Visual Gags and Motifs

This movie was my everything growing up, which I feel more comfortable saying at the end of my very long rant about AI and humanity and whatnot. OZ is absolutely stunning, and the way the directors visually represented things like fucking with the world clocks, gps, and train lines never ceases to make me smile.

Graffiti, glitching textures, and although that last one is an image, the carnosol of buildings spinning really fast? Wonderful.

A key unlocking the firewall and showing all the nodes that the AI has access to? Showing it physically pull on link trees????!!?? Holy moly, love that.

But this is honestly the best part. (Although forgive slow framerate).

When they work on trapping Love Machine in like.... I don't know if I'm interpreting this one correctly, but a lockbox of encryption. It's so good, especially because right after this the mainframe overheats. Preforming this many strong encryptions as rapidly as they need to to properly lockdown Love Machine would take a lot of goddamn energy so I think that's a very fun diegetic piece of this scene. Additionally with the object creation. From running this encryption software, it's very cool to see it work from the outside in in duplicating all the doors.

The graphics have always been my favourite part of this movie and learning how to code makes me appreciate these parts SOOO much more. It's genuinely fascinating how I saw that scene and started thinking about what Kenji's friend could've coded to make code like that.

Other Connective Visual Cues

"What a mess, this isn't some computer problem. It's more like a war. People are going to die if we just sit around on our heads."

The scene before Natsuki's grandmother calling people on the rotary phone was all about Love Machine messing with the services connecting people. The juxtaposition of what would be modern by 2009 standards to a television and a rotary phone acts as a great narrative bridge of the past and present. Same thing with with the grandmother's persistence for motivating all her acquaintances. It almost acts as a human perseverance vs advisories.

I know it's done to show the grandmother's tenacity but hits even harder when the screen pans to shots of old letters and photos as she talks on the phone. The warrior of the past was still needed in the present. In the same way, analogue will not fizzle out. We will not fizzle out.