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Star Wars, AI, and Aura, or why Elon Musk’s latest nonsense got to me

There is often no use in negotiating with fascists, nor is there much use in trying to tell them why and where they got things wrong. The fascist right does not care for consistency or critical thinking. In fact, the inconsistency and the absurdity of some of their claims is frequently the entire point, as it keeps us, on the other side of things, obsessed with the details. So I really shouldn’t be writing this post, if I’m honest. But sometimes someone does something so annoying that I simply can’t help myself, so here we are: Elon Musk has posted something stupid. I know, colour me shocked as well. This is not even the first time he has posted something stupid specifically about Star Wars, but I haven’t been able to let this one go. Now, I’m not on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter and haven’t been for years, but others are and they tend to share the nonsense through screenshots on platforms where I am active. This is how I woke up today to the dumbest, AI-generated image I have seen in a hot sec. It is worth stating that this is far from the worst thing Elon Musk has done recently, considering the money he’s pouring into swaying American elections, his seeming interference in the war on Ukraine by Russia, and his general … everything. I can’t necessarily comment on those since I’m no expert on American politics, the war on Ukraine, or the idiocy that is a car that floats. Some might say I’m also not qualified to make statements on Star Wars, but there I disagree. I have opinions, strong ones as anyone who has read my posts here before knows. So here I am, ignoring my own advice, and saying some words about stupid things.

I’m not going to share the screenshot I saw, because we have a solid no-AI policy here. I’m not spreading that sh*t. But for the sake of clarity, I will describe what I saw in as few sentences as possible. Imagine a sad man Tweeting “This is what they stole from us” above an image of Anakin Skywalker on a throne that looks like a budget hybrid version of Daenerys Targaryen’s throne in Dragonstone and the Iron Throne. It’s not even a good copy of Palpatine’s Throne of the Sith in The Rise of Skywalker. Behind him stands Palpatine’s Red Guard and behind those some very blurry Troopers (Storm or Clone, I can’t be bothered to try and figure it out). On Anakin’s left is Padmé Amidala, looking extremely Black Swan, and to his right are young Luke and Leia, featuring their bowl cut and buns and even military rank. I could go on to list everything that is wrong with this picture, such as the fact that Padmé, the literal embodiment of democracy, would jump into the fiery pits of Mustafar before becoming an Imperial Trad Wife or that Anakin is both missing his leg and lacking third-degree burns all over his body. I could try to have my cake and eat it too by explaining that this is not Anakin, that this is not what he would have wanted, that this is a literal nightmare. What is more important to me in this moment, however, is how Musk tagged this inanity, “This is what they stole from us”, as if this is what we wanted. As if this image of imperial control and warfare is the kind of story we craved in the ’70s and ’80 when the original trilogy came out, in the 2000s during the prequels, or even in the late 2010s for the sequels, and that it was taken from us. Dude… we never had or wanted this.

Follow me on a quick segue that will hopefully prove relevant. In 1935, philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote an essay entitled ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, or ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. I’m not a philosopher and my art knowledge is limited, but there are some things about this article which popped into my mind when I first saw the image. The first is about how our ability to reproduce works of art quickly and rapidly influences a work’s aura. With the rise of AI, this ability has expanded immensely, probably beyond what Benjamin ever considered, and I think this degradation of aura is even more noticeable. The aura of a work, to (perhaps badly) paraphrase Benjamin, lies in its singularity, in being rooted in a specific time and place, and it is something that allows the work to take you over, rather than you claiming the work. With AI, people are now producing images through which they create endless reproductions, remove an original work from its time and place, and attempt to claim the work of others and make it serviceable to them. I am also reminded here of what Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly called a “hyperreal medievalism”, in which we ‘do not simply seek to describe, reproduce, or otherwise recover the medieval, but instead employ contemporary techniques and technologies to simulate the medieval – that is, to produce a version of the medieval that is more medieval than the medieval, a version of the medieval that can be seen and touched, bought and sold, and therefore owned’ (2010, p.15). With this image, and others like it, people like Musk are not merely attempting to recreate an idea of Star Wars, they are producing a version of it that they claim is more real than the real Star Wars that we have. They want it to be something that they own, whose reception they control, and which makes us forget the timeliness and singularity of the original.

Benjamin also proposes a reason as to why people might do such a thing and that is the aestheticization of politics by fascism. It is about the spectacle, which is why Musk’s image gives us the visual of a nuclear family at the centre with a strong Führer-type at its core, a submissive wife, and obedient children, all in black and backed by resplendent white and red-coloured armed forces. This is a propaganda image, one which is intended to allow people to express their desire for dominance, or perhaps even just security, whileglorying in a Nazi colour scheme. It says much more about him and his intentions than it does about Star Wars. As Benjamin states, ‘[a]ll efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war’ (p. 19). While this may just seem like a silly image, in suggesting something was stolen from “us” it is a call to mobilisation, as all fascist propaganda is. In this image, AI and the degrading of something I’d like to think of as Star Wars‘s aura come together. It is not that Musk fundamentally misunderstands Star Wars, although he probably does, it is that he is using his little Grok-machine to craft as aesthetic, fascist image that is meant to get us all riled up, not about Star Wars but about nebulous others taking things from us. It is about the aesthetics of fascism no longer merely creeping into our everyday lives but goose-marching right to our front door. If the last few days of political news, about Serbia and Brazil but also the student protests in Europe, have shown us anything it is that true power lies in showing up consistently, protecting what we love, and perseverance. As Nemik said, ‘Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction.’ Images such as the one shared by Musk require endless instruction, both through prompting and through constant reinforcement of fascist, anti-human rhetoric. These images come to serve as instruction themselves, threatening to make us forget the singularity and power of Star Wars and its message of rebellion and resistance. It is only one image, but it is also a sign of our time in which art is perhaps more vulnerable to exploitation than ever before and we ourselves risk being unable to differentiate between a work of art and its appropriation by the machine.

I perhaps shouldn’t have written this post because I am doing the very thing I want us, as a fandom, not to do, which is give air to this kind of misappropriation and abuse of Star Wars. But I needed to get some of this off my chest and find a place to put my disconnected thoughts. In the end what matters is that we as a fandom hold on to what makes Star Wars what it is, that we stop ourselves from reproducing and slowly degrading it through AI, and that we recognise the aestheticisation of politics when it happens.

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