Waititi: I'd 'replace' one of my kids with a robot — SkimNews
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- Taika Waititi directed the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Klara and the Sun,' which premiered at the London Film Festival starring Jenna Ortega as the solar-powered AI companion and Mia Tharia as sick 14-year-old Josie.
- Kazuo Ishiguro told the Guardian his novel is 'not really about' AI ethics and that those seeking ethical guidance for frontier AI should 'go' elsewhere, despite Google DeepMind VP of global affairs Tom Lue citing the book as a potential 'ethical touchstone' — a recommendation Ishiguro said was the first he had heard of.
- Waititi, a father of two, said he would 'definitely consider replacing one of my children' with a robot bereavement doll because 'the human brain is easily adaptable' and the premise is 'a sound business model,' joking the replacement version 'doesn't have to be dead' and 'just doesn't ask for money.'
- Waititi described his instinct to push everything toward comedy as a defense mechanism rooted in his New Zealand upbringing and a 'cheese-o-meter' calibrated against American sentimentality, while acknowledging loneliness and death run beneath the humor.
- The film portrays robots as both 'artificial friends' and 'bereavement dolls' filling in for lost spouses, siblings and children, with Waititi noting 'there's another version of this story where Klara would turn into a murder-bot.'
- Young influencers at the festival named 'Klara and the Sun' their favorite, even as the interviewer notes older critics 'vehemently, violently disagree' — a contrast Ishiguro attributes to the complexity of emotions 'we give very simple labels to,' like love.
Why it matters: Google DeepMind's Tom Lue publicly recommended Ishiguro's novel as a 'human-centred' ethical touchstone for frontier AI, but the author himself rejected that framing in a London Film Festival interview — a direct contradiction between how a major AI lab is deploying literature and what the writer says his book is actually about.
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