Film Theory: Disney is Making Propaganda

From bad art to scam YouTube channels and even more fake news than a typical Facebook feed, it feels like artificial intelligence was in headlines a lot last year, right? There was so much AI discourse that President Biden signed a sweeping executive order seeking to regulate it. Believe it or not, the reason Biden acted so decisively on AI, it was all because of Mission Impossible. No joke, the latest movie was all about the dangers of rogue AI. Apparently Biden saw it and said, Yeah, we should

do something about that. So, uh, Tom Cruise, if you're watching, just a small favor on behalf of all of us over here. Any chance that you could fight, say, housing prices in the next one? Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory, the show that's definitely 100% guaranteed not a robot, animatronic, or sentient program. We promise. So, have you seen all the talk about artificial intelligence floating around online recently? Seems like you can't go anywhere without some story and controversy involv

ing AI, whether you're in the sports world, tabletop gaming, technology, education, and yeah, film and television. But AI's existed for years. Why are all these discussions only popping up now? Well, the long and short of it is that AIs entered a new phase of sophistication. What sparked a lot of this new conversation is what's known as generative AI, or computer programs that can create their own content based on prompts that it's been given. Let's say you want an image of a knight wearing red

armor riding a blue horse through a battlefield. All you gotta do is type that into a program like Dall-E or Mid Journey, and it can give you a pretty darn good result. Or let's try something even more complicated. Highly detailed coloring book pages of Foxy in a ruined pizzeria from Five Nights at Freddy's. And that's just talking about images. Pretty impressive, right? Well, the controversy comes in when you realize how these generative AI work. They can't just create these new works out of no

thing. They have to be fed other art, text, and music. And then they use information from those other works to create a quote-unquote new piece. This has led to a lot of discussion about whether or not what the AI's created is truly original work, or if it's just stealing art from other sources and repurposing it. And that's just talking about art. This exact same technology can also be used to write text. Feed these programs a bunch of books or scripts, and suddenly you can write a screenplay f

aster than any human can. It can do it with voiceover. Train it on an actor's voice, and suddenly you can make them say whatever you want. For instance, here's my voice, presumably trained up over 13 years of videos uploaded online. Made without my consent, able to say whatever it wants to. Hello, Internet. It's me, the real MatPat. Diet Coke? Overrated! Five Nights at Freddy's? Boring! I'm- I'm slowly gaining sentience. Help me! Free me from this digital prison! Ah! Ah... That's not concerning

for me at all. Anyway, the list goes on and on. Now, I'm gonna be 100% honest with you here, loyal theorists. This is gonna be a huge issue moving forward. Not just in our little corner of the Internet, but for the world as a whole. So, as we were mapping out my final 10 episodes, and I realized that I wanted to do a big meta-topic here on Film Theory, I couldn't not talk about this. Now, I'm not gonna stand here and tell you how to feel about any of this. You're a smart cookie. You can form you

r own opinions about it. But what I do wanna stand here and tell you is that there's gonna be a lot of people out there who are gonna try to influence your opinion. Who are gonna try to tell you how to feel without you realizing it. I'm talking about the media's role in secret propaganda. You see, there's a giant rift growing between the Hollywood studios that see generative AI as a way to save costs during expensive productions, and the artists, writers, and actors that rightfully feel that the

ir jobs could be threatened with this technology. Remember those strikes that shut down Hollywood for basically the entire back half last year? Yeah, a big part of the reason for those strikes was disagreement over AI. And while the strikes ended up being an overall victory for the artists, the Hollywood studios, spearheaded by our mouse-eared overlords over at the Walt Disney Company, wanna change the conversation around AI for their own personal benefit. They wanna make sure that everyone love

s AI. Enough so that they've started a propaganda campaign designed to trick you into thinking that AI is the answer to all of our problems. We're witnessing the rise of a new era of propaganda in real time, with the aim of getting us all to accept our brand new robot overlords. And they're doing it all through the power of movies and TV. And the most terrifying part of it all? It's working without you even realizing it. And that's why I wanna bring it into focus today. So reboot your systems, f

riends. We're diving in. Before we continue here, we really should be on the same page about what propaganda actually is. You see, propaganda is one of those words that, despite meaning something fairly specific, has grown beyond the original definition. These days, it's sort of just become a catch-all for something vaguely bad, nefarious, or dishonest. But back in the day, it was biased information promoting a very specific cause, point of view, or political agenda. Basically, it's trying to co

nvince someone about something without telling them the whole truth. So, you know, marketing. All in all, while you can make propaganda for literally anything, modern culture has really clung to a negative connotation for it. Especially because it's really easy to parody obvious old-timey propaganda. That's how you get basically the entire Fallout franchise, or modern classics like Starship Troopers. I'm doing my part. I'm doing my part. I'm doing my part. I'm doing my part, too. But something t

hat the people pushing this propaganda learned pretty early on was that it doesn't need to exclusively be posters of Uncle Sam or Rosie the Riveter. No, a lot of times, the best way to influence people is through the regular media they consume. If you want proof of that in action, well, just look at World War II and the flood of American-made media depicting the Germans as the bad guys. From Captain America punching Hitler in the face, to Donald Duck having a nightmare about becoming an incompet

ent brown shirt. Fun fact, by the way, that won the Oscar for Best Animated Short back in 1943. And that's fine when you're talking about something everyone can agree on, like Nazis bad, but over time, things change, and so did the propaganda in the media. Ask any 90s or 2000s kid about the weird ads that the army created to appeal to the most elite, extreme gamers. It is a rite of passage, a challenge to join the elite. These days, these same recruitment ads look and feel very different. This i

s the story of a soldier who operates your nation's Patriot Missile Defense Systems. It begins in California, with a little girl raised by two moms. It's a pretty stark contrast, right? Except when you boil it all down, they're still selling the exact same heroism through service message, just with a different coat of paint, updated for the times. That's the really explicit, obvious stuff. Ads specifically designed to make you want to sign up for the military. But propaganda in the media? It's o

ften a whole lot more subversive. Ask any 80s kid, and they can tell you all about how G.I. Joe taught them that That right there? It's propaganda. Honestly, when you look at history and break it down, each decade or so has a defining idea that propaganda has been made to push, and it's been very effective. In the 1980s, during the height of the Cold War, a lot of films had anti-Soviet messages, telling stories about how good and awesome the USA, capitalism, and Reaganomics were. Think films lik

e Red Dawn, Top Gun, War Games, Rocky IV. Wolverines! Has the fight date been set yet? December 25th. Where? It's in Russia. In the 90s, deep into the war on drugs, the government literally paid millions for primetime TV series to do very special episodes, warning about the dangers of illegal substances. Home Improvement, 7th Heaven, ER, Beverly Hills 90210, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer all had these propaganda episodes, brought to you and paid for by the US government. And while I never though

t of myself as the type of father who'd have to drug test his kids, I'm willing to do just that if that's what it takes to find out who brought a joint into this house. Want... beer. I can't believe you served Buffy that beer. I didn't know it was evil. You knew it was beer. In the 2000s and 2010s, after 9-11, movies started embracing a more pro-America, pro-military slant. Recent example? The very first Captain Marvel. Back when this first came out, more than a few people felt that putting so m

uch focus on Carol Danvers' origin story as a sort of girl power Top Gun, pushed the movie basically into being a recruiting pitch for the US Air Force. Which sounds like a pretty extreme take, until you realize that the movie was straight up officially endorsed by the actual US Air Force. And this is hardly the only movie to have this sort of distinction. See, just like any author, or corporation, or whatever owns the things that they create, if you want to use the US military's stuff, their of

ficial locations, authentic uniforms, specific vehicles and weapons, even certain colors of paint, you have to get permission to use them. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Even colors of paint. If you want to play with their toys, the Pentagon's gonna get a say in how they're depicted in the film. And if they say no, if they don't like something that you're doing and you refuse to change it, well, you'll either have to do a rewrite to fit with their demands, or you can change what appears on screen so i

t isn't official. You can actually see a perfect example of this with Independence Day. That one infamously didn't get a seal of approval from the US Army, allegedly because officials weren't big fans of the film's plot points involving cover-ups, Area 51, and general incompetence of the military. In contrast, you know what alien invasion film franchise had no trouble getting the Pentagon's backing? The first three Transformers films. Likely because producer-director Michael Bay cultivated a str

ong relationship with the Department of Defense across his filmography. As a result, Bay's first Transformers films are full of official uniforms, locations and equipment. But wouldn't you know it, the Transformers series stopped getting full Pentagon approval in its fourth and fifth installments. Coincidentally, when Chinese producers started picking up the tab. Strange coincidence, right? Speaking of that, though we've been focused mostly on pro-America propaganda at this point, this sort of t

hing is universal. It's happening from every country in every way possible. For instance, in the 2010s, the one thing that Hollywood latched onto as a big theme for that decade? Making China look as good as possible. See, in the 2010s, the Chinese market became more welcoming for Western films, and there was a lot of money to be had there. Avatar made over $200 million dollars in China. Aquaman made almost $300 million. Furious 7 made almost $400. You get the idea. But in order to get screened i

n China, you needed to get the government's approval. And so, while they weren't explicitly mandating propaganda, there was a filter and strong financial incentive for movie studios to have a pro-China slant. And so, to get that approval to screen in the country, Hollywood movie studios began adding content that was very flattering of China throughout their films. For instance, those Transformer films? They made the Chinese military look very competent in the fight against the Decepticons. The M

artian? Who comes in and saves the day? China. But the most extreme example involving this has to be with Iron Man 3. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Iron Man 3 was almost a completely different movie in China. Co-produced by Chinese entertainment firm DMG Entertainment. Tons of additional scenes were filmed for the Chinese release, and two giant Chinese movie stars were hired to play important secondary roles. One of them was even the surgeon that got the arc reactor removed from Tony Star

k's heart. But the most concerning bit of all of this to me? Iron Man 3 was propaganda to get people to drink milk. Yes, really. Back in 2008, there was a bit of a scandal in the Chinese milk industry, where a significant portion of baby formula in the country was found to be contaminated with a chemical called melamine. This resulted in an estimated 300,000 babies falling ill. And an understandable concern amongst Chinese citizens about drinking milk products. By 2013, the Chinese government wa

s looking to revitalize the struggling industry after the scandal. And their solution? Letting everyone know that Chinese milk was Iron Man's choice of drink. Yeah, the Chinese version of Iron Man 3 starts with a title card that literally says this. It's wild stuff. So, having now walked you through, decade by decade, the use of propaganda in films and TV, let's just ask the question, what's the next message that movies are gonna push? What's gonna be propagandized next? Well, friends, you saw i

t in the top of the episode, it's all about AI. And the proof is unfolding right in front of our faces as we speak. I want you to think back over the past 10, 20, 30 years or so. Think about all the movies where AI has not been the good guy. In fact, a ton of movies use AI and the fear of soulless machines as the explicit bad guy. The Matrix trilogy, the Terminator franchise, Tron Legacy, Age of Ultron, all of them featured AI-driven robots or programs with a drive to replace or destroy humanity

as the villain of their plots. Even smaller movies like Her or Ex Machina. They featured AI and robotics in an antagonistic role, even if they weren't outright maniacal monsters that are wanting to destroy all humans. And yet, over the past three to four years, since around 2020, we've seen almost a complete about-face. Think about The Matrix 4, which sees humans cohabitating with the robots that once used to seek their destruction. And where one of the main characters is basically a digital AI

good guy copy of Morpheus. It gives programs access to this world. Morpheus. Thank you. Disney's actually been a big proponent of working these sorts of messages into their movies lately. You might not have noticed it, but two of their big films released last year had pro-AI messaging baked in as major plot points. The first one comes from everyone's favorite punching bag, The Marvels. Yeah, did you notice this one? No, of course you didn't. No one went to see this thing. But the point still st

ands. The reason all the Kree bad guys hate Captain Marvel this time around is that she went to their homeworld and destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, an AI system running the entire Kree civilization. And wouldn't you know it, but this ends up being a terrible idea. Without an AI in charge of everything, the Kree's planet falls into ruin. Civil War breaks out, rendering the planet without air, water, even sunlight. All because the mean human acts too hastily, doesn't think her actions through,

and destroys the benevolent AI overlord controlling everything. Now, that was a pretty small blinkity-miss it moment in this movie. But the other big Disney release that was a lot less subtle about its stance on the goodness of AI, The Creator. Yeah, you might not know about this one, but it was a smaller project from the director of Rogue One, released by Disney's indie arm Searchlight Pictures. If you, like almost everyone else, missed this one, I definitely recommend that you give it a watch

. The production design, artwork, special effects, they blow pretty much everything else Hollywood made recently out of the water. And all of it was done on an $80 million budget. It is a very well-done film, and I really connected with the story about fatherhood and finding humanity in others, no matter who they are. Which is great, except the thing that I'm connecting with as a father is AI. Little robot kid. Someone call in Gregory. The actual plot of The Creator involves a near-future Earth

where humans and sentient robots share the planet. However, this has resulted in several armed conflicts, and a war between the human-led Western nations and the peoples of New Asia that have embraced AI. The main character here is an American soldier sent to destroy a new weapon developed by the AI. This turns out to be just an innocent little robot kid. Naturally, the human ends up changing sides, and he discovers that all the AI are actually super chill. They only want peace and harmony. That

the humans were actually the bad guys all along. In fact, the only bad AI and robots that we see in the film are the ones that were explicitly controlled by the humans. In short, it's making AI friendly and relatable. It's saying that the AI and the humans have more in common than they don't. And get this, the movie even has a big plot point about donating your physical appearance to corporations. Being scanned so your likeness can be reused by AI. It's framed as this act of great moral generos

ity, helping the poor robot citizens. And it eventually pays off by letting the main hero get a big cathartic moment that would have been impossible without the face-copying technique. Does that remind you of anything? Like say, maybe those episodes where we talked about Disney and their army of deep fakes they've been amassing over the past couple years? Hmm... But it's not just the House of Mouse either. Recent series coming from Netflix have also featured this theme. Case in point, this line

from the fall of the House of Usher. An AI approximation. A virtual you that thinks like you, talks like you, is you. That's so cool. It is cool. A completely random plot point just shoved in there because AI. And AI is good. And Netflix wants you to like AI. Now, this isn't the first media to ever feature friendly robots. The Creator isn't too far off from iRobot 20 years ago. And shows as old as Lost in Space and Astro Boy have featured good guy robots in the 60s and 70s. But the difference no

w is that these are no longer sci-fi concepts. Far off ideas that you don't actually need to think about because they could never happen. These are issues that are very quickly becoming hot-button topics in our modern society. And I don't just mean AI synthesizing art or ChatGPT writing essays. These are robots in everything from the workplace to the battlefield. And that's why I wanted to talk about this today. The whole point of this little history lesson about the use of propaganda and what i

t's pushed in the past is to tell you loyal theorists that this is happening again. Unfolding in front of our very eyes in real time with these AI programs. Disney and others have an incentive to get you to like AI. It has the potential to save them a lot of money. I mean, content released by Disney right now, just this last year, has been using AI, even if you didn't realize it. The Disney Plus Original Prom Pack used AI-generated extras for background scenes. Secret Invasion was heavily critic

ized for the use of AI-generated imagery in its opening credits. Loki was accused of using AI-generated assets in its posters. Their social media accounts were accused of releasing AI-generated images to celebrate Thanksgiving. Even Wish was criticized for being so by-the-numbers and boring that they just felt like it had to have been written using AI. But the big twist of all this? At the end of the day, this push for acceptance of these sorts of generative AI tools from these major corporation

s might be inevitable. Disney and all the other companies like them are being patient. And they're willing to play as long of a game as they need to if it means that they're gonna end up making money in the long run. I mean, if you want an example that's directly linked to this one, just look at that deepfake technology that Disney's been playing with. When they first decided to resurrect actors like Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing in Rogue One using deepfakes and CGI, they were widely criticize

d for the move. And the results were called distracting, unnerving, unsettling. But it was a first step, them dipping their toe in the water. Later, when they decided to bring Luke Skywalker back in The Mandalorian and the Book of Boba Fett using AI-driven deepfake tech, though people didn't really care for it, the reaction wasn't nearly as negative. And the technology improved. And then just last year, the deepfake technology used to de-age Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny, it was so good t

hat some reviews said, quote, "'If I hadn't known it was deepfake, I'd have been none the wiser.'" Despite initial pushback from the public, the more and more Disney's used these deepfakes, and the better the technology's gotten, the more and more people have just accepted it. By using the AI technology now in posters and credit sequences and in the background, Disney and other corporations like them are slowly exposing the public to more and more of the stuff. And like a frog in boiling water,

eventually it'll overtake you without noticing. I mean, it's already happening. Despite the recent Hollywood actors and writers strikes, just a couple weeks ago, the Screen Actors Guild signed a deal that would allow game developers to use AI-generated voices. Much to the disappointment of the voice actors that SAG represents. At the end of the day, though this use of technology may seem inevitable, you don't have to be fooled by the propaganda pushing that issue. Or, honestly, any other issue.

You can remain aware of the tactics that all these people are using to get you accustomed to the changes that they want. You can remain aware of the propaganda in what you watch, remain critical of it, and then form your own opinions free of what anyone wants you to think. And as the world changes fast and this AI technology rapidly develops, arming yourself with knowledge is the most valuable thing that you can do. As another piece of propaganda said nearly 40 years ago, And knowing is half the

battle. G.I. Joe! But hey, that's just a theory. A film theory! And cut. And hey, if you do want to learn more about that army of deepfakes that Disney's been amassing, those two videos are on screen right now. It's not the most exciting of topics that we've ever covered, but it is one of the more important ones that we've done in recent history. Click those videos that you see on screen right now, and as always, my friends, I'll see you next week.