“A must-see for anyone interested in the fraught overlap between art and AI”

The truth is what you make it. Certainly in this age of AI and deepfakes and whatnot. Creating your own story has become de rigeur amongst those looking to shape narratives and people’s opinions, but with the help of these new technologies one can also shape trauma into a more soothing version or reality. This is precisely what Colombian director duo Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas do in their heady pseudo-documentary The End of Times, in which they use technology and a fictional narrative of a daughter and her ailing mother as a hook to explore big themes, from the aftermath of colonization and the West’s exploitation of the Third World, to depression as a result of the neoliberalist crunch. Is the utopian promise of Artificial Intelligence perhaps a way out of this capitalist misery? In The End of Times, Rojas Gómez and Cárdenas come to the conclusion that even with seemingly unlimited imaginative possibilities, capitalism is inescapable.

The story of The End of Times is that of Salomé, a fictional daughter whose voice, in several languages, turns out to be created by AI models. Rummaging through her mother’s belongings she finds a treasure trove of old VHS tapes. Do these recorded memories, glimpses of her mother’s past, perhaps contain a glimmer of information that can help Salomé understand her mother’s decades-long depression. The focus lies on a costume party held right before the turn of the millennium. The quality of the imagery is obviously low, but Salomé recognizes her mother, her father, her favorite uncle. The images inspire her to tell her family’s history. Or rather, histories. As she rewinds the tapes again and again, the stories change. Where first her father died in an airplane bombing that also killed former Colombian president César Gaviria (since Gaviria is still alive, this is a first hint that something is off here), his story later changes to that of a wife-beater or a good father, depending on the story Salomé spins. The same images are continuously reinterpreted in Salomé’s attempt to create a happier ending for her mother.

As Salomé repeatedly goes through the party images, social topics like racism and the exploitation of (predominantly black) workers in Colombia’s sugar industry are addressed, later further broadened to the West’s (and China’s) exploitation of Colombia’s natural resources, extracting raw materials and then selling processed goods at a higher price back on Colombia’s market, pricing out local producers. The people in the party are not necessarily the country’s elites, but the fact that white is the only skin color present speaks volumes; later, when casual blackface enters the imagery, these tapes become a clear indictment of Colombia’s bourgeoisie.

Since it becomes increasingly clear that (probably?) outside of the VHS material, nothing in The End of Times is real, and most of it is created by AI, the film gradually shifts to this new technology being the driving force after further exploitation by Western companies, this time in a digital manner. The film references the ‘taggers’, people in countries like Kenya and The Philippines, who do manual image recognition so AI models can be trained properly, all for people like Salomé to be able to find the source of her fictional mother. Capitalism is, as always, inescapable. When she tries to use artificial intelligence to create a happier future for her mother and herself, the only thing the models can produce is AI slop, although it does create slop for every outlandish scenario she throws at it. When she tries to let the models generate a world where capitalism is replaced by a global minimum wage, they present her with videos of men in suits, shackled and chained. It is clear that such an idea is unfathomable for AI, and the models certainly don’t perceive it as a positive.

The End of Times is a highly experimental film that shows the possibilities (and imperfections) of using AI in a creative way, but is also critical of its outcomes and the way it can be used to exploit people. It is developed within a capitalist framework after all. The film is complex in its ideas as well as its execution, which makes for a confusing initial experience until you get the hang of what Rojas Gómez and Cárdenas are doing, and everything falls into place. With The End of Times, they have created a wholly unique work of art that is too experimental to gain a large audience, but is somewhat of a must-see for anyone interested in the fraught overlap between art and AI.