At first glance the videos impress. But similar to the case of the AI kimono I wrote about last year, those who know Japan will find themselves quickly sliding into the uncanny valley of gibberish street signs and snow on the ground in cherry blossom season and all of the other assorted janky weirdness that comes with generative AI. That weirdness isn’t a bug, but a sort of feature. Because this isn’t really Japan dreamed by a machine — it’s Japan dreamed by a machine that’s been trained on foreign fantasies of Japan. (The baked-in Orientalism of American AI is one of many reasons domestic Japanese startups are scrambling to conjure up their own.)
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