Vengenance most fowl: An AI warning
‘Vengeance Most Fowl’ is Wallace & Gromit’s cautionary tale about AI risks, reinforcing the importance of human imagination and ingenuity.
First published in The Mandarin
As we transitioned from 2024 to 2025, Feathers McGraw, an unsettling villain and master of disguise, returned.
In Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, he proves that his desire for revenge for the events of The Wrong Trousers is strong. Feathers’ tool for this mission is Norbot, an AI-powered garden gnome created by Wallace to free Gromit from the supposed tedium of gardening.
Wallace’s obsession with inventions that automate everyday tasks ensures that technology is central to Wallace and Gromit’s adventures.
In A Grand Day Out, the moon machine protects its territory and resents Wallace and Gromit's presence, attempting to force them to comply. In A Close Shave, Preston (another silent villain) steals Wallace’s designs to automate his operations, has Gromit arrested for sheep theft, and nearly turns Wallace’s romantic interest into dog food as he eliminates anyone in his way. In Wrong Trousers, Feathers seizes control of Wallace’s automated walking trousers by detaching the control buttons and using a remote to make Wallace steal the Blue Diamond for him.
Vengeance Most Fowl continues the theme by highlighting the risks of inadvertently allowing AI to assume a more significant role in our lives. As always, Wallace and Gromit's humour and entertainment also offer a pathway for serious reflection.
What do we value?
In one scene, Gromit opens a gate, revealing his stunning garden as a source of pride and joy. Wallace enters, observing that his gardening AI, Norbot, has been trained on every episode of Garden DIY and is programmed to create the ‘ideal’ garden. Norbot demonstrates an impressive level of technological precision and overreach. It prunes ‘overgrown’ bushes and removes anything that does not meet the criteria of ‘neat’.
Gromit’s charming garden transforms into a collection of ornamental shrubs arranged in flawless geometric topiary. Driven by its programming for neatness in design, Gromit’s garden becomes a sterile and overly engineered space—technically ‘neat’ yet seems devoid of colour and vibrancy.
In 1933, Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote In Praise of Shadows, sharing his thoughts on aesthetics, tradition, and how humans relate to their surroundings. He celebrates the subtle beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics, emphasising the value of craftsmanship and the attention to detail in handmade objects.
Tanizaki emphasises the harmony between human-made objects and their surroundings, particularly in traditional Japanese spaces where shadows and natural materials enhance the atmosphere.
Similarly, meaningful work often arises from harmony with our physical, cultural, or social environment. Philosopher Roger Scruton summarised this as the idea of fittingness: 'We want things to fit together, in ways that fit with us’.
Gromit’s garden fits with him. It was more than a garden; it expressed what he valued and the effort he had put into creating it. However, transforming the garden to meet the criteria of neatness removed the essential ‘Gromitness’ from it.
Using technologies such as AI can sometimes distance us from engaging with the essential work of doing and thinking. It can undermine expertise by reducing the value of mastery and practical wisdom we gain through direct engagement with tasks.
This is a conscious decision we make. However, the question isn’t solely about what we gain from using AI; it’s also about what we lose.
Effort is valuable
We all actively find ways to avoid effort.
Who isn’t attracted to an AI robot that manages the garden or, to use a more concrete example, an AI language model capable of answering inquiries, offering explanations, and generating content?
However, despite our tendency to minimise effort, research shows that putting in the effort also enhances our value of the outcome. We choose to do things precisely because they require effort, and the effort of exertion (mental or physical) can be rewarding in itself.
So, while we regularly find ways to avoid effort, our effort enhances the value of what we achieve. As Adam Smith observed nearly two hundred and fifty years ago:
The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What is bought with money, or with goods, is purchased by labour as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. That money or those goods indeed save us this toil. They contain the value of a certain quantity of labour which we exchange for what is supposed at the time to contain the value of an equal quantity.
The value of our achievements is not limited to their monetary cost; instead, it is deeply tied to the human effort we invest in creating them. Our accomplishments gain greater significance when they reflect the effort and dedication we commit to them, as this effort serves as a measure of their worth.
The relationship between work and value influences how we perceive and justify our achievements, often leading us to assign greater importance to the results of our hard work.
Technology alters this relationship, using tools to transfer labour from our hands to machines. As is often assumed with AI, this enables us to focus on more creative and imaginative tasks deemed to hold more significant personal or organisational value.
The question shifts from what AI can do to what it means for humans to thrive at work in an AI-enabled world.
Gromit’s garden was valued because of his effort to create it. His reward was the garden and the intrinsic satisfaction he gained from making it. The garden’s value came from how the parts fit together and reflected its creator’s creative and physical efforts.
The effort we put into achieving an outcome is important, and it adds value to the outcome.
What is the value of people?
Vengeance Most Fowl also reinforces the importance of human imagination and ingenuity (in the form of a dog and a penguin disguised as a chicken).
The complexity of Feathers McGraw’s vengeance intertwines with his cunning plan to steal the Blue Diamond. He creatively hacks Norbot’s programming to serve his evil ends, framing Norbot for the garden thefts and directing police suspicion onto Wallace, thereby getting his vengeance.
As Norbot’s actions escalate under Feather’s manipulation, Gromit intervenes to investigate the robot’s behaviour. His observations lead him to uncover Feathers McGraw’s interference, prompting Gromit to use his ingenuity to outsmart the hacked Norbot while revealing and thwarting Feather’s overall plan.
The human versus machine agency theme in Vengeance Most Fowl is central to the story and unfolds through the interactions between Wallace, Norbot, Gromit, and Feathers McGraw.
Gromit and Feathers McGraw represent the best and worst of human agency, creativity, and ingenuity, differing only in the social acceptability of their ends. While technology can enhance efficiency and productivity, it cannot (yet) replace the emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning, and adaptability humans bring to decision-making.
Beware technologies in repose
The relationship between people and technology has a long history in film.
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, made in 1936, shows the unwary worker getting sucked into the cogs of the machine, while Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1989) show AI taking over the world and either using or exterminating inefficient humans.
Vengeance Most Fowl is also a cautionary tale about technology. Importantly, it doesn’t reject technology but urges viewers to be wary of technological overreliance. It subtly asks hard questions about what is valued and lost in how we adopt and use technology.
We need to think more deeply about human agency in our workplaces. AI will impact the ‘invisible technologies’ of our organisations—language, relationships, systems of classification, and our frameworks for organising and understanding the world.
The questions that need to be asked are less about what AI can do and more about what effect AI will have. There is danger in sleepwalking into dependence on AI.
