The war is lost, as Tyler Perry abandons elaborate old-person makeup in favor of AI
Perry also said he's paused an $800 million expansion of his massive studio complex in Atlanta over fears AI would make it redundant
In the future, when we look back for the moment when humanity truly lost out to artificial intelligence—when our collective ingenuity, effort, and brilliance was first fully eclipsed by the rising tide of generative AI—we’ll probably have a lot of candidates to choose from. But we find ourselves convinced, tonight, that we’ve found the actual smoking gun for humanity’s impending irrelevance: A recent interview in which Tyler Perry revealed that, instead of getting into the makeup chair for multiple hours for a couple of movies he was cranking out, he used AI to make himself look like an old person, instead.
Now, Perry—talking to THR about his wider concerns with AI’s rising influence on the entertainment industry—didn’t come out and say that he’d created a Digital Madea, which is the kind of idea that’d keep even the most dedicated Singularity fetishists up at night. But he did note in the interview, when asked how he was using AI at his own massive, endlessly churning studios in Atlanta, that “I just used AI in two films that are going to be announced soon. That kept me out of makeup for hours. In post and on set, I was able to use this AI technology to avoid ever having to sit through hours of aging makeup.”
You already threatened to take our jobs, robots. Now you come for our “Practical effects to make Tyler Perry look like an old person” movies, too? Tyler Perry in bad prosthetics is a cornerstone of American artistic achievement; losing this is like hearing that some highly specialized handcraft has gone extinct, never to be rediscovered.
On a more drastic financial note, Perry also noted that he’s paused an $800 million expansion at his studio complex due to concerns about AI, including OpenAI’s new “Sora” video generation tool. Which is extra worrying, in so far as, while we remain confident that generative AI can never match actual human artistry, we’re a lot less certain about whether it can hit “Good enough for Tyler Perry to slap his name on it” levels. Perry seems to be talking about the topic from multiple different angles, weirdly, expressing concerns for set builders and other crew members losing their jobs, at the exact same time he’s waxing fantastical about filming on AI sets. Will the war for humanity’s destiny be waged in Tyler Perry’s makeup-slathered heart? Only the future knows for sure.