Artificial, a new comedy-drama about OpenAI and the AI arms race, premiered at the New York Film Festival. The film depicts OpenAI's leaders, including Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, as vain, reckless, and insufferably boring. The film's portrayal of OpenAI's executives is unflattering, contrasting with the more heroic depiction of Silicon Valley figures in The Social Network.
The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, is described as a black comedy that verges on the surreal.
It features Andrew Garfield as Altman and Yuri Borisov as Sutskever, with the latter portrayed as both the prime mover of the current AI wave and its nagging moral conscience.
The film's tone is diametrically opposed to David Fincher's Facebook drama, The Social Network, which was a steely, polished, wordy drama.
Guadagnino's approach to the material emphasizes a different strain of desire, as he described it as 'the desire to prevail.' The film stages tensions around the rapid development of AI as a high moral drama, with concerns about OpenAI's capacity for serious harm framed as beneficial to its bottom line.
The harmful capacity itself is seen as proof of the technology's advancement.
"A slo-mo sequence of a room of gawky programmers dousing each other in bottles of Jarritos, celebrating their AI’s latest self-learning benchmark, is stickily unsexy," said Guadagnino. The film's imagery is plain and even a little ugly, with a style that begs to break out of its more rococo tendencies.
The film raises questions about the ethical implications of AI development, with every character depicted as self-serving, if not sociopathic. It also highlights the global competition for control over AI, with China being portrayed as a potential threat. The film's alarmist warnings may resonate with AI doomers, while riling its boosters.
Source: wired
