AI is a powerful tool. I use it to brainstorm, plan my week, and find it to be a fabulous research assistant. I do not pretend otherwise, and I do not feel the need to apologize for it. The tool is useful. It gives me back hours I would rather spend with my wife, or watching a movie or reading a book or walking the dog.
But somewhere underneath the usefulness sits a question I cannot shake. Does anyone care about our humanity anymore?
I didn’t expect a fashion sequel to ask the question better than I could. The Devil Wears Prada 2 did.
The film opens with Andy, where we imagined she would be, working as a journalist. However, her media outlet is folding, which her team learns by text while she is standing at an awards ceremony.
She stays anyway, collects her prize, and delivers a viral speech about why journalism matters. That speech makes her valuable again. At the outset of the movie, we are reminded that in today’s world, words do not count because they are true. They count because they spread.
Runway, the towering force of a fashion magazine we met twenty years ago in the first Devil Wears Prada, has also been hollowed out. With its owner having died, the magazine is in the process of being bought by a tech billionaire, Benji, played by Justin Theroux.
Benji has 21st-century instincts. Print is dying (obviously). Budgets are gone. The job is now to make everything faster, cheaper, more technological, and scrollable.
Late in the second act, at a dinner held in the room that holds Leonardo’s Last Supper, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly asks Benji to protect what the magazine has always stood for. He is not interested. He tells her that the day is near when Runway will no longer need models or designers at all. “It’ll all just be AI,” he says.
The movie’s critique of AI is one we have all heard: It is soulless. The memes are slop. The photoshoot churned out on a green screen is dead behind the eyes.
Miranda defends “beauty, artistry, the best in human achievement.” It is a good critique. But it is also an easy one.
Because soullessness is not the whole problem.
Here is what I suspect: Artificial Intelligence is only as good as the person at the keyboard.
AI does not replace what you know. It reveals whether you know anything at all. It will hand you a confident paragraph that is quietly wrong, and if you do not already understand the subject, you won’t catch it.
AI often invents sources that do not exist (hallucinations). It cites studies nobody ran. The person who knows the material can use the machine. The person who does not will be used by it and will never know the difference.
The film is reaching for something larger, though, and so am I. Underneath the fashion and the corporate knife fight, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is asking what human beings are for once work can be done without us.
For a long time, many of us in America only knew one answer. We are what we produce. We are our output.
The corporation taught us to measure ourselves the way it measures us, by what we made this quarter and whether it scaled. People as units. Labor as costs. Cut whatever you can.
The deepest scene in the movie is not the boardroom. It is in front of the mural. Miranda notices that Leonardo painted Jesus without a halo, and she reads it as a statement about us: “We are human. No one is perfect.” The Last Supper is one of the great artistic achievements precisely because it was made by a fallible man. The hours and the failures and the human hand are the point.
Many of us are being forced, for the first time, to consider what it really means to be human. Not human as a worker. Not human as a brand. Just human.
The movie ends on a small, quiet gesture, and you have to know the first film to get it. Twenty years ago, Miranda humiliated Andy over a blue sweater. “It’s not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean…”
You think you stand outside the system. You do not. It dressed you this morning.
In the final scene, as Runway seems to be returning to its humanity, Andy is wearing a cerulean sweater vest paired with Levi jeans. Not the armor of the runway. Not the costume of the machine. Herself.
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CEO of Sean Palmer Coaching, Homiletician in Residence at Bammel Church in Houston, and co-host of the “Sacred Frames” movie podcast.