Fakes make me laugh. Deepfakes make me laugh louder. AI can unravel hidden layers of human humour if we only stop to think like I did. It sparks the imagination. Seriously. With every expert and his uncle claiming that AI makes our lives easier, why not tinker with some hilarity dished out by the technology to break the monotony?

It’s indeed a respite from the fakery peddled by humans in the garb of creativity. Uniformity is the new creativity in the digital world. Bots prompt us to write better, speak better, visualise better and even act better. Master the AI bots and get artsy-fartsy fantasies. Digital stardom follows close behind.

This imitation of the original curry Western Sholay, therefore, is funny – to me at least. Robert De Niro as Jai, Al Pacino as Veeru, Julia Roberts as Basanti, Jack Nicholson as Gabbar, and Kevin Spacey as Thakur aren’t real. They are just AI-generated folks, unlike you and me. One of us but not like us. They aren’t original characters either.

Sholay itself was a Sippy concoction of Sergio Leone’s (no relation to Sunny Leone) series of spaghetti Westerns starting with Once Upon a Time in the West. So enjoy the AI ride, I say. It will outlast us humans. Unchecked, the innovative tech will replace and could even subjugate us, critics claim. Meanwhile, the UN is calling on governments to regulate and control the technology, but they may be late to the party as techno-babble is the digital narrative and billionaires rule the world. It won’t be long before AI and robots take over our jobs, our homes and our way of life as we know it – hunter, gatherer, job-seeker, loser.

The machines even claimed they could run the world better at a UN conference. Yes, we have been reduced to mere spectators. Come to think of it, even Mark Zuckerberg looks eerily robotic. I suspect he’s a machine. Maybe there are millions of humanoids among us. Why so serious, Zuck? A little nip and tuck with an AI tool could do you some good. A futuristic, dystopian screenplay demands that an AI for an AI is not the solution for us mortals. So sit back and have some good-natured (artificial) fun. The joke’s on us humans. Anyone laughing with me?