Editor’s note: This post includes spoilers for “007: First Light’s” second half.
I’ve heard that the family who used to oversee the James Bond license, Barbara Broccoli most notably, always starts each 007 film with the bad guy first. They react to real world events, take the temperature of the state of the world, and pick the perfect global enemy. How apropos that the go-to villain for 2026 is a billionaire who ghoulishly attempts to hawk any technology to make more money and destroy the planet, leaving humanity and the truth lying in the wake in favor of pure profits and stroking a massive ego?
So while reality and fiction are colliding in the dumbest ways imaginable, I come to find that the opening sequence of “007: First Light” was meant to be a bit of a twist. The voice in your ear was not a person, but, in fact, a super computer, a quantum machine named THEIA, who churns through massive amounts of data to become “intelligent.”
But halfway through the game, you come to find the man responsible for selling this technology to the government is not just evil and shitty, but his wunderkind and meal ticket just hallucinates total random bullshit. It’s not smart at all, can’t learn, and just lies all the time. The major theme of this game is “fuck AI,” and I, for one, commend that message wholeheartedly.
To me, it’s irrelevant if you saw this coming, didn’t see it coming, hate it, love it, or find it clever. I am genuinely blown away that the Amazon corporation, who now controls this IP, let IOI Interactive get away with writing this as the backbone of the plot. Sir Nicholas Webb said “fuck it, consequences be damned, this tech is out there now and I could not care less if it’s used for the worst things imaginable, fails, kills, pollutes all information, or anything else because it makes me RICH.”
Sound like anyone we know?
How cathartic it is to see the craven villain send his son and a bunch of goons to clean up the AI’s mess, all in order to save the narrative that it’s always right, useful, and worth the money people are spending on it? Where have I heard that before?
This makes me wonder about the upcoming Bond film that Denis Villeneuve is working on. Where else do you go? This was the origin story of a young James Bond and a new crew, and he was going up against the biggest foil we have today besides fascists overtaking the government. But Bond, a government agent, can’t really attack the government he works for, so the best alternative for a bad guy we can all root against in our modern age is a wealthy asshole who profits off of data centers stealing all of our power and water to fund a big plagiarism machine that costs a ton to operate and does nothing new.
How could a movie be based on anything else? What is Bond going to fight against next time, a corrupt media? That’s been done. Taking over the world? Been done. Revenge against the 00 program? Been done. Plain old greed and power? Check them all off the box.
Generative AI was the thing, it’s public enemy #1, and we all hate it for ruining the economy and easy access to correct information! And this game nails it. Absolutely crushes the entire concept around relying on a box of wires to comb through the fucking internet and come to better conclusions. This is why everyone searches things now with the work “Reddit” attached at the end; you can’t trust “A.I.” for any reason!
And god damn it do I hate that term. It’s not actual artificial intelligence. It’s just a large language model that predicts words, and mimics how we type. That’s it. There’s nothing more behind the curtains, and the sooner we all get rid of this annoying, pointless technology the better off we will be as a species.
If you’re interested in more of our takes on this game, be sure to watch this video in which I explain all of the things wrong with the game’s gameplay while still praising it for everything else. It’s a great game, a must play, and a strong GOTY contender. If only more studios took a stand against LLMs in their stories, we could shift the narrative and start convincing the people who think of ChatGPT as a novelty instead of what it really is: A betrayal of humanity.
Image Credit: “007: First Light”
Video Game Town 
Leave a Reply