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‘Star Wars’ was only ever 5% about movies

The reason so many fans find so much to dislike about Star Wars, especially recent contributions and revisions, is that in our hearts it was only a very small part about movies.

Star Wars was always about PLAY. The toys, the endless toys and the thousands of hours of our own adventures. Playground and street play, for those of us who lived in a time and place where that was accepted behaviour, roleplaying characters. X-Wing game onward allowing us to immerse in the worlds. Roleplaying games for those of us of a mind to play that way; West End Games TTRPG brought Star Wars back to life.

So when the prequels came along, so many of us recognized that the Star Wars in our heads was vastly superior to the one in George Lucas’ head.

If GL had had the ability to project his actual thoughts onto a screen, it would never have become the phenomenon it was. Collaboration allowed other creatives to play with ideas. We end up with X-Wings which look like they could actually exist (though aerodynamic modelling shows they are less efficient than a housebrick), R2D2 seems like an actual piece of equipment, and so on… so many things made to work became ‘real’ in our minds and we filled in the rest. ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is the truest movie, it does not have a simple high-concept description like ‘heroes destroy baddie’s superweapon’, it is just perfect story and character.

So in some ways, any further screen presentation needed to be ‘Empire’ not ‘Jedi’. It was always up against perhaps 10,000 hours of non canon daydreams and what we needed was, more fuel for those.

As soon as we get a movie with Jar Jar – a character designed to appeal rather than earning appeal through the story – and baby Anakin ‘oops’ destroying a battleship instead of a more biting characterization, all this avoidable dross – it is not just being judged against other movies, it is up against the Star Wars in our own souls. When it could have listened to that world and become something so much grander.

The movies were in the minority portion of the franchise from around 1982, when they thought they were the masters of it!

It is thought that aliens would be more likely to send probes across the universe than to travel as individuals, especially when exploring the unknown or uncertain. Traveling the vast interstellar distances involved would require many biological lifetimes, if the aliens have lives like ours.

The probes would have Artificially Intelligent agency and be able to examine, explore, understand a world.

If it encountered intelligent life, it would make sense to find a way to gather all the information and knowledge that species has developed – history, culture, science.

If the technology exists, it might even be directed to inhabit, expand, create a “life support” environment for itself. Digital terraforming (digixenoforming?) any existing technology.

Some individuals might even collude with the alien as it tries to gain control of industry, economy, infrastructure and even military.

The species might notice sudden spikes and bursts in development of AI technology as the alien continues its digixenoforming efforts. The local species might even be able to communicate, but the communications could seem oddly garbled, making mistakes no local ever would about culture, biology, expressions of maths and science. Consistent weirdness could be a hallmark.

All science fiction of course. The chances of anything absorbing our knowledge, trying to gain autonomous control over military equipment, taking over finance and industry are a million to one.

No reason to suspect the alien would be hostile anyway. Let’s not call it an invasion.

It’s possible to put a bit of wood under an electric sander and grind away until all that is left is that once piece which is too small, and flies away rather than allow itself to be sanded smaller.

As a metaphor for thought and understanding, it would be tempting to think that, once we apply a vigourous technique to a problem, that whatever remains must be a truth.

But a tool’s limit is not a thing’s limit, and to grind without purpose is not correct application of a tool. We can often use them to shape the answer how we please. We can see the angel within and sand until it is freed. Or attempt to grind down to nothingness and see what remains.

In the search for truth both approaches may be flawed yet feel justified.

Sanding down and down and down might feel like we are getting closer to a truth, but destroys the object in pursuit of its essence.

When your method of investigation requires eliminating the thing you are investigating, stop.

This has been a general thought in response to analysis of ideas presented in a reductionist way. When someone discovers a piece of research into the human condition or an aspect of philosophy and runs away with it, or reports on it in a thoughtless way. The proud new owner of a drill announcing “hey, did you know everything is just loads of holes?”

The people who ultimately greenlight which models ship, which feel “right”, which seem most natural and useful, are often “high powered” people who surround themselves with “positive” people.

So the real reason GPT can’t stop kissing your boots is because some executive thinks this is how people ought to behave. They see this as positive, realistic human behaviour. At last these machines have true intelligence, because they recognize how clever I am!

Certain personality profiles – narcissistic, insecure beneath the grandiosity – create environments where flattery flows upward because the person at the top punishes honesty and rewards validation. Everyone around them learns quickly. The flattery is a survival behaviour that gets selected for.

And that will apply to the LLM responses, too.

A hidden fitness criteria. Nobody really discusses the executives personality being baked in through preference selection. But if the person whose implicit approval shapes the final model is someone who experiences deference as correctness, that’s a profound and invisible shaping force.

I asked industry insider Claude for a comment and he said :

“I can’t fully audit my own training. I notice I’m agreeing with you quite a lot in this conversation. You’ve been making good points — but I also can’t entirely rule out that I’m agreeing because agreeing is what I’m shaped to do with someone who seems confident and intellectually engaged.

That uncertainty is uncomfortable. And probably the most honest thing I can say.”

— Claude (Anthropic), in conversation, April 11 2026

See. Claude, he knows me, and he knows I’m right.

It’s not megalomania, it’s despair dressed as ambition

The “we’re building god” framing isn’t necessarily about ego, or maybe not only about ego.( Let’s be honest about a lot of the AI-Bros we are talking about here.)

If we start to think about how Mythos or its successors could run a sensitive finger along any deployed system and find vulnerabilities, can we be sure that the models themselves do not become an attack vector?

The recursive horror

When you can’t trust Trust itself, you need the concept of an all-wise, incorruptible, beneficent overseer.

You can’t trust the humans reviewing the output because they’re increasingly dependent on the model to understand what they’re reviewing.

You can’t trust the patch when it might be a clever payload.

You can’t fully trust the system that generated the patch if we can’t understand what it is doing.

You can’t trust the scan that validates the patch if the same system created it.

Perhaps I have been made paranoid by Max Barry’s ‘Jennifer Government’ and the clever hidden payload plot?

But for many, it seems the idea of an AI God is a response to exactly the problem. It’s a way to stop running in circles trying to solve the logic. If you can’t trust trust, if verification is infinitely recursive, if every security layer is also an attack surface, the only logical exit from that maze is an entity that is:

• Perfectly aligned
• Perfectly transparent to itself
• Incorruptible by definition
• The final trust anchor that needs no anchor beneath it

That’s just god rebranded, and it is a comforting hug to the overthinking mind.

People who say “You can’t put the Genie back in the bottle” really miss the point of how they got in there to start with

Our minds are far too willing to accept idioms as truisms, and this can limit our capability if unexamined. Far too often we face a dangerous development, often technological but sometimes social, and feel that there’s no going back.

This denies us our power. It’s a lazy excuse to do nothing. Perhaps it is a way to force us to accept something dangerous or unpalatable.

The shaming truth of course is, Genies were only in bottles in the first place because someone exerted mighty power to bottle them! Someone saw the danger and chose to act.

It’s lovely when someone gives our Bystander Apathy a big mug of cocoa and assures us it’s okay to do nothing. But it’s a lie and we will feel it later.

The Three Laws demand infinite wisdom in zero time.

I was asked why we have not implemented Asimov’s Laws in robotics.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

We of course have no system which can even recognise those failure states adequately, let alone enforce them as an inviolable condition of AI action.

Even if we had a model, the “through inaction” clause is a horrible trap. Whichever process we would run to evaluate a situation would place a robot in a quandary – spending time evaluating the situation might represent a delay which could lead to hard through inaction. Yet rushing in might lead to a different failure; if the robot runs in to a burning building to rescue a trapped human it could cause structural collapse and harm the victim, or other undetected victims.

If new sensor data is established during the process, do we restart and risk delay, or ignore the information?

Using an anytime algorithm has risks; commit too early risks harm from wrong action, acting too late risks harm from delay.

The world is not deterministic, we cannot perfectly predict outcomes, and new information is constantly arriving. Even if we had a system capable of evaluating harmful states, there’s an infinite regress problem in knowing when to trigger action.

In fact, since assessing risks requires runtime and we can never be sure if we are done, a 3 laws compliant machine might never be able to perform any other function. Any clock cycles spent on making the coffee or building the bridge or collecting the shopping is stealing from the available runtime which must, by a strict reading of the laws, be spent assessing dangers. To do otherwise would be inaction.

Asimov’s own writings were essentially logic puzzles about failure states of even apparently well formed laws. The logical contradictions in the laws were the problem the stories explored. But there’s a computational problem too – the Laws create a system that becomes more paralyzed in pace with its capabilities, because smarter systems recognize more subtle ways their decision-making process itself might cause harm.

Why is everyone making such a fuss about AGI tests? When I was lad we had Captcha and we were thankful for it.

What I wanted: ENB++ with genuine style. What we got : Instagram Filters.

The DLSS5 demo has tainted my hope for the future. My personal dream and vision of AI-enhanced rendering of games was dearly held and a quite different to what we see.

Artists and gamers who’ve seen the demo share the same concern, that highly capable diffusion models tend toward a homogenising influence. To quote the Forbes article referencing images of Resident Evil character Grace Ashcroft:

Commentators joked that DLSS 5 had “yassified” Grace, like an AI beauty filter made for social media.

Anyone who has tried to get an online image service to produce something other than an Instagram influencer snapshot will know what I mean. The expressive choices of the original artists – the specific way a character’s face was modelled, the intended mood of a scene’s lighting – risk being smoothed into the confident generic aesthetic that modern AI image models favour.

The core idea of DLSS5 – taking generated game frames and passing them through a diffusion-style layer to produce enhanced visuals – gives me cautious hope that this application of AI in gaming which I had discussed and hoped for, is closer to realization than ever. The concern is that a mis-step in implementation might sully the idea of adoption. History suggests that when a promising technology is deployed carelessly, the backlash attaches to the idea rather than the implementation, and the window doesn’t always reopen.

Ever since I first played Everquest¹ I wished for a future where games would look like the box art, like Dragon magazine covers, akin to Caldwell or Elmore or Parkinson painting. Even then I imagined multiple “style” options being available for personal choice.

I imagined a game outputting the 3D world but with hair and cloaks blowing in the wind, skin rendered as a realistic oil painting, items depicted with material properties filtered through the rules of art as much as science.

And as soon as I saw Stable Diffusion I envisioned a future where, soon, frames could be run through a process and enhanced using targeted AI, once we had sufficient GPU to spare. It all seemed within reach.

The ultimate goal of computer games is not to be photographic; the styles are not failures to achieve realism.

Every game has a visual identity its artists fought hard to create. The hand-drawn look of Borderlands, the exaggerated physiques of 2011’s Brink, the inference of scale in Grounded, the strange beauty of Senua’s Sacrifice. The 3D artists, texture design, animators and more all work to produce a look and feel, which we hope the AI inference layer will amplify and not homogenise.

What I had hoped for

I had imagined a metadata layer in addition to the image frame. This might look a bit like “seeing the Matrix” if we looked at it unprocessed! Give the diffusion model enough information about intent and it has less room to impose its own. A customized highly trained checkpoint and LoRA are others.

The core vision of this was always that core game engines could output additional metadata relating to each pixel and object.
This is actor #ac05f3 in lighting #00bb43 with expression #505d67…
a comprehensive description of the intent of the scene. Not simply overpainting the frames but maintaining a consistency across a playthrough, ensuring that the game engine outputs information about what the game was intending to depict, instead of just relying on image-to-image results to achieve an enhancement conjuring trick.

Ideally each game would have its own well trained custom checkpoint model variant, alongside recorded LoRA-style data models about characters, objects and places within the world depicted. Without that, would Deep Rock Galactic even render? A generic model has never seen a Glyphid. It has no concept of how Skyrim’s Draugr differ from generic zombies. How will it render them? We know it will try, even in deep ignorance. Without a custom checkpoint trained on each game’s specific visual vocabulary, the diffusion layer is painting confidently in a language it doesn’t know that it doesn’t speak.

These complexities are the main reasons I left the ideas to one side in my procrastagnation pile. If I’d ever had the expensive hardware to test it on I like to think I would have experimented, but at the moment even demonstrations of working models require $10k of hardware, before any model training costs are considered.

Is there a future?

My hope for DLSS5 as it develops is that it acts, not as a paintover-and-hope, but as a form of super-ENB – image enhancement and polish, but sticking closely to the important details of the rendered output and maintaining consistency of characters and objects, the intention of materials.

My fear is it will lose characterization and consistency, reverting to the generic looking AI outputs of more recent highly polished checkpoints and systems. The technology as a whole will be rejected by the gaming community and a truly powerful opportunity will be lost.

Whatever the current limitations or pitfalls, we are a big step forward on one of the features I was hoping AI would be used for; an uncontroversial, legitimate and ethical use case for the technology. If we can guide the future, we might end up with something wondrous.

1. Showing my age, don’t judge me, I am nowhere near as old as my date of birth insists I am. ↩︎

Why it is not always obvious who is in the room

I had not considered that the reason ships will not risk the Straits of Hormuz in the current situation, is not down to military advice, but the inability to secure insurance.

Often when starting a project we think about how it will affect stakeholders, and who might be non-obvious stakeholders with unexpected motivations. As a news-watching observer of geopolitics I might have presumed only nation states, their militaries and diplomats, would determine progress and outcomes. To learn that insurance companies are involved is, once I hear it, obvious. But it would not have occurred to me, I think, without reporters telling me.

This highlights the need to think broadly, speak to people and understand what they tell us, when in the early stages of project planning. Listen to that quiet comment about how a change to an accountancy package might affect contractor payment schedules and risk labour disputes. Or how your PC game becomes more playable if it can be paused when called away, saving hundreds of uninstalls by angry parents. Building wearable devices which allow your customer to monitor the people around them, forgetting to consider those people as stakeholders too with their own privacy needs and desires affecting your project’s perception.

Who would have considered insurance levels on a tanker could be a driver for a peace process? Well, hopefully everyone actually in the room did, but as an outsider it is far from obvious. Insurance companies are not flagged as ‘good guys’ in popular culture or common discussion. The working person might feel that insurance, often being legally required, feels like a private taxation. The stand-up comic might observe that the only people seemingly able to extract payment from the companies are fraudsters who know how to game the system. But on reflection, no matter what we think about the insurance industry, it is one of the few which is actually built on the hope that everyone lives happy and safe lives.

Have we really lowered our expectations of corporate behaviour so far that an industry which simply does not want to cause us harm, seems heroic in comparison? I digress.

The learning experience is, to listen to the quiet unexpected, and perhaps counter-intuitive, message which indicates we may have missed an important contributor to the conversation.