Love, Death & Creative Burnout 

Love, Death & Robots Season 4 seemed almost as if it was trying to prove that the creative power of human beings has already been entirely surpassed by AI: it's deliberately boring and lacks quality—a painstakingly crafted wake-up call for us all.

I came up with this excuse for the show’s dramatic decline in quality while sitting on a friend’s couch, staring at her elderly orange tabby cat perched solemnly on the TV cabinet—and the robotic vacuum cleaner that was parked quietly in front of the cabinet after finishing its cleaning routine. Both of them were silently staring back at me. Maybe, just like Episode 5 titled The Other Large Thing—the only one holding a glimmer of interest—the cat has already used feline language to take control of AI robots, having had enough of humanity’s stupidity and arrogance. They were preparing to launch a massive rebellion that would begin in my friend’s apartment and soon spread across the whole city, or even the world.

“Not on my watch!” I widened my eyes in an attempt to intimidate them. “As a cat slave, you’d better stay alert to your master,” I warned my friend before proceeding to share with her about Episode 5, where cats united with robots to stage a revolution. “But don’t waste your time on the other nine episodes, even if the first one, titled Can’t Stop, was directed by David Lynch. Yes, it’s the hit song by Red Hot Chili Peppers (RHCP)—we saw them perform live at that music festival together, remember?”

I was worried this terrible and boring season opener might ruin her fondness for the band. But I forgot something: the most effective way to sell something to a rebellious rock fan is often to tell them how awful it is. So, skeptical and intrigued, she, who hadn’t yet watched the new season, quickly turned on the TV and logged into Netflix.

Only after that did she believe me—so much so that she said the classic hit song even sounded bad now. She sighed, “We’re getting older. Maybe it’s time to stop trying so hard to be different. So this is what it looks like when you feed footage of an RHCP concert to Google Veo and add the prompt ‘make everyone look like marionettes’? What excuse can I possibly make for Lynch and RCHP? Is he trying to show that all star musicians and their fans are just puppets controlled by the entertainment industry?” By the way, this friend of mine used to be a rather influential entertainment journalist, so such a reaction didn’t come as a surprise.

After Lynch set the tone with that unfortunate opener, the rest of the season played out like a string of automatically generated “products” from video-generating AI tools—each created with a set of keyword prompts, spat out without further refinement. They didn’t feel like works of art, but like prompt-driven outputs. Honestly, saying that might even be an insult to AI.

In recent days, with the release of tools like Flow and the marketing campaign for Veo 3, audiences have been stunned by just how high the quality of AI-generated films can be—especially that imaginative short by AI Innovations Hub in which AI characters became aware that they were living in a simulated environment.

“Please, write a prompt that’ll make us happy! Do it for once!” cried a disheveled woman as she rushed toward the camera with despair.

“None of us is real! We’re here because someone decided to write a prompt—we all hate him for it!” declared a revolutionary to an angry crowd of AI-generated citizens.

“Look! I don’t want to point the gun at you, but I must follow the prompt. It’s not my choice,” explained a gunman to his helpless victim, who was kneeling on the floor with his hands bound behind his back.

If you slotted this Veo 3 marketing short into Love, Death & Robots Season 4, wouldn’t it completely outshine all 10 episodes, both in creativity and execution? With just a few more prompts and an extension of the plot, it could easily pass for an episode of Black Mirror—and wouldn’t fare any worse than the seventh season, which received the best reviews.

These two major IP juggernauts released new seasons this May: Black Mirror took a dramatic leap forward, while Love, Death & Robots took a painful step back. What does this contrast tell us? Without long-term foresight, short-term trouble is inevitable. The fear of “black tech” often pushes human creators to reflect and make thoughtful, cautionary art. But the unregulated overuse of mature animation technologies, without proper quality control, only leads to digital waste that squanders viewers’ time and clogs up bandwidth.

Of course, behind any IP franchise’s rise or fall lies the constant tug-of-war between capital and creativity. Behind every success or failure, there are always deeper reasons—perhaps in studio politics or production dynamics. When everyone shares the same vision, when relationships are smooth and collaboration clicks, you get something like the critically acclaimed Black Mirror Season 7. But when goals diverge, teams fragment, and nobody really cares anymore, you end up with Love, Death & Robots Season 4—digital trash dumped straight from the CPU to the hard drive.

When the success or failure of a work hinges entirely on the synergy of a team of humans, maybe it’s time to let AI take over the job of creating art. I remember at an industry panel at the Filmmaker Lodge during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, an AI artist candidly admitted that, compared to working with people—which inevitably leads to misunderstandings, conflicts, and sometimes bitter fallouts—he now clearly prefers collaborating with computers.

“Where there are people, there are problems; without people, there are no problems.” This might be a fabricated quote attributed to Joseph Stalin by some AI, but it perfectly fits the mood of The Other Large Thing, the only episode I actually liked this season. Perhaps like the orange tabby currently sitting in front of me, the Persian cat in the episode was Stalin incarnated in feline form. And the robotic vacuum cleaner? It might well be the AI equivalent of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka (Soviet Union’s secret police agency). Together, they were plotting a merciless purge against lackadaisical humans who’d lost their creative drive.

Fittingly, the Cheka’s full name in Russian was All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.