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The completion of Cold Harbor is hyped up so much throughout this series. Jame Eagan  tells Helly AND Helena about it excitedly, Drummond describes it as “Lumon’s greatest day”, and Lumon fired three good workers in favor of three known dissidents because they knew Mark wouldn’t complete Cold Harbor without it.

So when Gemma walks into a room and disassembles a crib, many viewers were either perplexed or in disagreement. How could this be the crowning moment? How could it be so banal?

Theories on the purpose of cold harbor fall into two camps:

It’s testing compliance

ColdHarbour Gemma is different from every innie we’ve seen on the show. In mark’s first moments, he threatened to find and kill Petey. Helly assaulted mark and tried to run away. Even Gemma’s other innies show reservations, like when she’s distressed on the plane or reluctant at the dentist or hateful in the Christmas card room. 

CH Gemma is different. She’s given the same onboarding question and standard memory wipe as Mark & Helly, but instead of acting out, she complies instantly with the task she’s given. 

Kier sought to tame the four tempers to create maximum efficiency, and in CH Gemma, that’s worked perfectly: she has no objections to any prompting whatsoever. Cold Harbor could be about trying to create the perfect employee.

It’s testing severance bounds

We know Cobel was obsessed with reintegration and putting iMark & Mrs. Casey together. She loots Mark’s house for his wife’s things to prod iMark during the wellness sessions, and watches closely as iMark sculpts a tree in front of Mrs. Casey.

We know at least some of the rooms were personalized to Gemma’s anxieties and dislikes; Allentown forces her to write thank-you cards repeatedly because she hates doing that. In the same way, Cold Harbour is personalized to her greatest pain: losing the baby with Mark.

Cold Harbor could be about pushing the bounds of severance; Dr. Mauer says so himself. There is no emotion bleeding through here; CH Gemma tackles one of the lowest moments of her life completely docile and oblivious.

(As an aside, if this was the intention, mark “passed” this test when Gemma did not. iMark abandons his outie’s wife after his outie experienced the most resplendent joy in years, proving love can’t transcend severance.)

What do you think of Cold Harbor? What was it trying to achieve? Was it the best way to achieve either purpose?

People on twitter at each other’s throats for a recent trend in which you can use imageai filters to reproduce images in Studio Ghibli style.

Lots of people are throwing around the Miyazaki quote where he calls AI an “insult to life itself” - it’s worth noting that this came after he witnessed a simulation using AI animation to make a zombie body crawl across the ground. Miyazaki remarked that he has a very disabled friend he sees regularly, and that he can't find this usage cool or interesting. He goes on to remark about generative AI later in the clip, but let’s be clear, that specific statement was disconnected.

I’m curious what the Lemmy opinion is here. Is this a short-lived fad or does it speak to larger ramifications in the creative industry? Is this a silly little image filter or a harbinger of global artistic doom?

People on twitter at each other’s throats for a recent trend in which you can use imageai filters to reproduce images in Studio Ghibli style.

Lots of people are throwing around the Miyazaki quote where he calls AI an “insult to life itself” - it’s worth noting that this came after he witnessed a simulation using AI animation to make a zombie body crawl across the ground. Miyazaki remarked that he has a very disabled friend he sees regularly, and that he can't find this usage cool or interesting. He goes on to remark about generative AI later in the clip, but let’s be clear, that specific statement was disconnected.

I’m curious what the Lemmy opinion is here. Is this a short-lived fad or does it speak to larger ramifications in the creative industry? Is this a silly little image filter or a harbinger of global artistic doom?

Sorry about it being a YouTube short, I’m not sure how to upload it as a video.

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