Despicable Me 4 Super Bowl Spot Reveals The True 'Intelligence' Behind AI

Artificial intelligence is doing incredible things these days. It's providing lucrative work for some lawyers, and getting other lawyers into big trouble. AI can generate an image of just about anything you can imagine ... though the results are sometimes disturbing on account of the AI not knowing how many teeth people should have in their mouth, or how many fingers they should have on their hand, or how humans eat food. 

That's the subject of the Super Bowl spot for "Despicable Me 4," which reveals that all of these AI images are secretly the work of the Minions, Gru's army of little yellow henchmen, who are prized for their loyalty if not necessarily for their intelligence. The pull-out reveal of countless Minions sitting at banks of computers responding to the requests of bored and/or stoned people around the world brings to mind the infinite monkey theorem: that a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters would eventually, given an infinite amount of time, produce the entire works of Shakespeare. (And presumably also an overwhelming amount of monkey poop.)

It's an appropriate reference, given that the infinite monkey theorem is frequently brought up in debates over just how intelligent the current generation of AI actually is. For those not familiar with "Despicable Me" lore, the Minions are not artificial intelligence, but rather evolved organically in much the same way that humans did. In fact, the Minions actually evolved millions of years before humans, and initially had to be henchmen to the dinosaurs.