#19 Society and Technology Bulletin

Artificial intelligence is not merely a technological issue; it is the catalyst for a profound transformation that affects thought, ethics, and society. In the eighth episode of KÜME’s “Society and Technology” podcast, we sit down with Associate Professor Enis Doko to examine the relationship between technology and philosophy, focusing on the historical roots of artificial intelligence in philosophy and its current areas of debate. In this episode, we discuss the opportunities offered by thinking about artificial intelligence through the lens of philosophy.

🔗 To listen to the episode, visit click here.

Netflix announced it has for the first time employed generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technology in the Argentine science fiction series El Eternauta. According to co-CEO Ted Sarandos, this use of AI both reduced costs and significantly accelerated the production process.

The series centers on characters struggling to survive a toxic snowfall in Buenos Aires. According to Sarandos, AI-powered tools were used instead of traditional visual effects software in a key scene depicting the collapse of a building in the city. As a result, the scene was completed approximately ten times faster than with classical VFX techniques.

Sarandos noted that the use of this technology enabled the production to meet the standards of a high-budget project while substantially lowering overall costs.

“If we had attempted to create these scenes without artificial intelligence, the series’ budget could not have supported it,” he said.

But how large is this budget?

While Sarandos highlighted that the AI-generated VFX scene was completed ten times faster, he did not address its impact on narrative language, scene rhythm, or viewer perception. According to conventional media paradigms, narrative production is not merely about generating images; it is the construction of an aesthetic with rhythmic and dramaturgical coherence. Artificial intelligence can imitate this coherence but cannot create it.

Netflix’s framing of AI as a “tool to support creators” carries the risk of rendering genuine creative labor invisible. One of the foundational principles of cinema history is the physical connection between the visual idea and its material production. The resistance of the camera, the set, the space, and time guides creative decisions. AI’s simulation of production processes amounts to reducing this physical creation to an abstract model. While this accelerates production, it also entails the loss of the experiential dimension of the creative process.

In such a context, all traditional production models are called into question. To the viewer, of course, nothing may appear to have changed. That is, the audience may not perceive a difference between an artwork produced by human hands and one generated algorithmically. Yet the underlying processes in both cases are profoundly different. This raises the question: who brought this artwork into being?

Who stands behind an image generated by artificial intelligence? In traditional cinema production, narrative emerges as the result of collective labor: the writer writes, the director guides, the actor performs, the lighting designer shapes the light. Each decision—from the angle of light falling on a corner, to the actor’s expression, to the cinematographer’s camera movements, to the editor’s selection of shots—constitutes a deliberate choice. The artwork is the sum of these artistic decisions.

Artificial intelligence, however, replaces this collaborative production process with algorithmic assembly. This raises the question: who is the author of the narrative? When machine learning becomes the decisive factor in the production of a work like El Eternauta, which carries deep ideological and historical weight, there is a risk of transforming the meaning of the content itself. Moreover, the alteration of narrative form introduces banality into everyday experience. The essential quality of narrative is the presence of a narrator. A narrator implies responsibility, minimum care, and the generation of meaning by an autonomous subject. AI-generated images may appear consistent and sequential, yet they lack authenticity and a coherent narrative structure.

The increasing adoption of AI-assisted productions is directly affecting employment structures in the industry. Many creative mid-level roles—visual effects specialists, storyboard artists, set planners—may be replaced by AI modeling systems.

Netflix’s assertion in this case that “without AI, this scene would not fit the budget” reveals the core principle of the new media economy: “Optimize creative labor to save costs!” This strategy not only reduces workforce numbers but also risks eroding professional skill accumulation and sectoral memory. The prospect of losing our own creative capacities in the future is an unappealing vision.

El Eternauta is a cult work deeply rooted in Argentina’s political history, functioning as a metaphor for collective resistance and anti-fascist consciousness. The fact that part of this narrative was generated by artificial intelligence poses a problem from a narrative responsibility standpoint. Simulating a story of resistance through a non-human system carries the potential to neutralize its political weight.

This applies to many scenarios involving the substitution of artistic creation. Reducing a poem to mere letter arrangements, a song to frequency modulation, and so on—treating resistance, normative meanings, and narrative essence as statistical aggregations—unwittingly renders all meaning valueless and opens the door to absolute nihilism.

Normative meanings—the possibilities derived from our humanity beyond biological existence and our possession of a self—are not grounded in the visible meanings of the physical world. The foundation for constructing all these meanings is metaphysical. Thus, when the grounds for speaking of goodness, morality, or the beauty of beauty are reduced to empirical observation and measurement, no foundation remains for any value whatsoever.

Reducing the normative to physical causality carries similar risks. The erosion of the magic inherent in resistance, political demands, and phenomena invisible under the microscope—along with the claim that all these narratives are merely the product of algorithmic statistics—undermines the very ground upon which meaning is constructed. In such a scenario, if everything is merely the numerical statistic of an algorithm, the question arises: why be good? This is the moment of nihilism, when all meaning becomes meaningless.

Netflix’s move signals that artificial intelligence is beginning to assume a central role in industrial artistic production. Yet this new production logic fundamentally alters not only what media communicates but also how it communicates and who is authorized to speak. In the conventional media paradigm, narrative is the concentrated expression of human experience, time, and labor; artificial intelligence dissolves and accelerates this concentration. At the same time, content becomes metallic and abstracted.

In the face of this transformation, the fundamental question for the creative sector, viewers, and media researchers is: “Technology may be advancing, but is the narrative still ours?” Of course, these interpretations do not compel us to reject the cinema that AI can produce. Indeed, from another perspective, one could argue that this opportunity fosters equality of access and opens doors to forms of cinema otherwise impossible. Yet the real issue here must be the deepening of our awareness regarding the new phenomena we encounter in our rapidly flowing lives.

At the moment organic life is compressed into silicon, we must not relinquish our grasp on what it means to be present in the world and to affirm the dignity of that presence. After all, all these developments are fragments of the new reality we have grown accustomed to. The poet Turgut Uyar forewarned us of this reality long ago:

“Yet there was nothing to fear in the air.

Everything was made of nylon.”

The U.S. Department of Defense (Pentagon) has signed framework agreements totaling $800 million with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence into its institutional and military infrastructure. Each company is offered up to $200 million in potential work. The agreements aim not to mandate specific technologies but to test various solutions for future deployment within public institutions.

Dr. Doug Matty, Director of Digital and Artificial Intelligence at the Pentagon, assessed the process as follows:

“The adoption of artificial intelligence is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries. Our approach of integrating commercial capabilities into cohesive solutions will accelerate advanced AI applications in both defense and institutional information systems.”

The Pentagon’s multi-vendor model seeks to foster competition among technology providers while leveraging the strengths of different systems. However, this model also carries potential risks, including complex technical integration processes, security vulnerabilities, and long-term institutional dependencies.

In particular, xAI’s recently announced “Grok for Government” package for public sector use is part of this transformation. The Grok 4 model promises enhanced search capabilities and mission-support tools tailored for government agencies. This development aligns with similar initiatives previously announced by OpenAI and Anthropic. The new strategy enables U.S. public institutions to access commercial AI products more rapidly and directly, yet it also raises fundamental questions.

One of these is ethical ambiguity. The use of these systems in combat zones or intelligence operations risks replacing human responsibility with algorithmic processing in areas such as targeting, surveillance, and decision-making. In this context, as previously noted in earlier bulletins and familiar from the Palestinian issue, AI is often authorized with minimal or weak controls in matters of profiling, targeting, and accusation.

The Pentagon’s substantial contracts—when considered alongside its more than 1,000 other AI projects—reveal that artificial intelligence is no longer viewed merely as a technical tool but as a force multiplier embedded at the core of institutional capacity. Through these agreements, federal agencies from the FBI to the Department of Agriculture will be able to utilize these solutions.

Thus, the relationship between technology and the state is once again brought to the forefront. As we have repeatedly argued, technology is more than a tool that merely facilitates our tasks. At its core, this ecosystem, built on user data, remains vulnerable to exploitation, fueling ongoing concerns about artificial intelligence.

It is well known that artificial intelligence is not merely a technological development that generates information about topics of interest by stringing together words. Although user-facing applications shape our perceptions of what AI is, many models operate beyond language modeling. Thus, artificial intelligence is not merely an phenomenon that entered our lives in the past few years through chatbots.

What is intriguing is that the most prominent Silicon Valley companies have entered into agreements with the Pentagon, rather than the use of AI and autonomous decision-making systems within bureaucracy. Alex Karp, in his book The Technological Republic, reads the history of technological development as parallel to the evolution of military technologies in the early 20th century. According to him, after World War II, this development gradually shifted toward market dynamics and economic imperatives, ultimately transforming Silicon Valley firms from national corporate entities into independent international technology corporations.

What we observe today in the Pentagon’s strategy can be interpreted as the re-strengthening of a previously weakened state-technology relationship. Yet there are also arguments supporting the claim that this relationship was never truly severed. Just as the state depends on technology companies, these companies rely on their ties to the state to gain maneuvering space against regulation. This mutual dependency underpins the relationship.

While recent media coverage of major defense contracts may give the impression of a newly reconstructed relationship, it is in fact merely a contemporary reflection of an existing bond. From legacy technology firms like IBM to today’s Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, these companies have frequently supported public projects.

The state’s role in funding R&D further confirms the continuity of this relationship. Many foundational technological advances have been supported through public funding via institutions such as DARPA, NSF, and NIH, with the private sector building products and services upon this infrastructure. Moreover, strategic interests, not merely financial support, have sustained this relationship. For instance, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed NSA programs for data sharing with major technology firms, demonstrating that these companies are not merely commercial entities but also integral components of national security infrastructure.