Salma Hayek Pinault, playing herself (or a deepfake), also waives rights to her digital likeness in “Joan the Awful,” allowing Streamberry to stick her face anywhere, even on a character desecrating a church (this which upsets her, because it goes against her Catholic faith). Notably, the Streamberry R&D offices employ a “deepfake cast,” the type you might see on a “Star Wars” show on Disney+ (keeping in mind that Industrial Light & Magic hired a deepfake expert after that person did a better job of de-aging Luke Skywalker than ILM.)
Faced with ChatGPT, the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, wrote this year on his blog: “The era of AI has begun”. Streamberry R&D also has an “AI Guest Writer Room,” which must be the kind of place where they showcase trending pitchbots. For years, Netflix itself has relied on machine learning algorithms and personal viewing trends to power its recommendation system (via Wired). In a year where Betty Gilpin’s heroine nun in “Mrs. Davis” once battled an all-powerful algorithm, “Joan the Awful’s” AI takes the form of the Quamputer, “an infinite content creator capable of bringing entire multiverses into existence.”
Marvel Studios – KEVIN! – is that you? Sorry, it was “She-Hulk” and “Quantumania”. We are talking about the almighty Quamputer. As its name suggests, it can spit out “computer-generated material” of the quantum variety, bypassing months of human hard work and seemingly extracting “fully edited programs” from a magic hat. Why pay people to work when you can train a machine to do it?
As we see in “Black Mirror,” however, the Quamputer and Streamberry merely plagiarize Joan’s life, turning her “Netflix and chill” session with her fiancee into a nightmare where she relives her worst moments under public display.