Twenty years is a long time in any industry but from what we can see on The Devil Wears Prada 2, in magazine publishing and journalism, it has been something closer to a slow-motion collapse.
As the film made it’s debut audiences got to see a sequel that takes the gilded world of Runway magazine and drops it squarely into the middle of journalism’s ongoing crisis. And yes, AI has a big role to play here.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens with a gut punch that any journalist who lived through the last few years will recognise immediately. Andy Sachs, now an award-winning investigative reporter at a fictional paper called the New York Vanguard, finds out she has been laid off via text message at the exact moment she is accepting an industry award for her work. Her speech defending real journalism goes viral, which is what pulls her back into the orbit of Runway and Miranda Priestly.
We see the character Benji Barnes, played by Justin Theroux, is all set to purchase Runway as a gift for his partner Emily, and in passing he mentions to Miranda that AI is on its way into publishing and journalism.
Talking about how the film references AI and how ogligarchs are attempting to infiltrate every part of humanity, screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna tells Variety,
There’s a certain nihilism that Justin’s character represents. He just sees this giant wave coming in AI and thinks that we should submit to it. Miranda’s counterpoint is not a desire for her own ego, she really wants to lift up what she thinks is the best in beauty and accomplishment. He feels like, “If they go, they go.”There’s a difference between ones who own it because they want to make money from it, and the ones who own it because they want to burnish their reputation or have some cachet or go to parties with movie stars. For those people. these publications can be deleted at any time. They buy august institutions with no intention of maintaining them.
More details about The Devil Wears Prada 2
The Devil Wears Prada 2 was directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the same pair behind the 2006 original, with both films drawing on Lauren Weisberger’s source material. Meryl Streep returns as Miranda Priestly, Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, Stanley Tucci as Nigel, and Emily Blunt as Emily, now working at Dior after leaving the magazine world.
One of the most discussed visual elements in the film is a series of images that appear to have been AI-generated and are used satirically against Miranda, but which were actually made entirely by human artists. The choice is deliberate and in a film that is fundamentally about the threat automation poses to creative professionals, the decision to hire human artists to make work that mimics AI output is its own kind of statement.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is now in theatres.
Edited by Nibir Konwar