Artificial Goes After Our Silicon Valley Overlords. Just Not Very Well.

Por Alex Nguyen — Mother Jones Magazine

The world premiere of Artificial, the new movie centered around the rise of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he led an unstable company down a dangerous path, was packed. The recent wave of high-profile “rogue AI” security incidents, disputes over tech industry-led safeguards and regulation, and continued multibillion-dollar investments to advance development has clearly piqued public interest.

The movie, directed by Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, contains scenes derived from real reporting on OpenAI and the industry: discussions on ensuring their products “align” with human values while racing competitors such as Google, and undertaking corporate restructuring to draw investment from the likes of Microsoft. It also hinges on wide public sentiment that major tech companies and their leaders hold too much power and developers should pause development of their most advanced models to mitigate risks to humanity. 

The people behind Artificial appear to agree. “The deeper responsibility we all felt is to try to do some interrogation of who we are giving all of our autonomy, power, and data to,” Andrew Garfield, who plays Altman, said on Monday night during the post-screening Q&A at the New York Film Festival, “that felt like the service to the greater thing.” The actor said the filmmakers were adding new scenes while shooting to create a “living document” of how the AI industry was progressing.

The moral center of the film is Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist played by Yura Borisov, who sees in AI technology potential to solve humanity’s problems, but realizes too late that his idealism doesn’t fit within the constraints of the market. A former AI researcher played by Jason Schwartzman, presented as a prophet who sees the future of the tech with clarity, tells Sutskever that it could lead, if not to total human extinction, at least to life under AI subjugation.

But the filmmakers also portray the tech leaders who don’t recognize this—or simply don’t care—as goofy megalomaniacs. While Garfield portrays Altman as constantly dodging confrontation to get people to be as forgiving toward him as possible, he also plays him with a cartoonish quality—with his frantic shifts in posture played as a joke, and the post-production team changing the actor’s brown eyes to a bright, inhuman blue. Even more so for others like Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, whose facial expressions and demeanor seem to lean far more silly than threatening. 

The intermittent comic relief scenes give the movie’s satirical side the energy of Saturday Night Live sketches—the screenwriter, Simon Rich, previously wrote for the comedy show—immediate, but largely short on depth and nuance. The filmmakers could pull their humor, and their wider sense of what’s laughable about these characters, from deeper, and darker, places. (There are vague gestures at a misogynistic Silicon Valley culture, but nothing political or deeply personal.)

With the characters operating more as caricatures, the movie doesn’t meet what Garfield called on Monday “the deeper responsibility” to interrogate the people it depicts or the culture behind them the countless expository conversations on the potential harms of generative AI—between real-life characters who unleashed said harms through global-scale business relationships—don’t feel grounded in any reality. The mentions of existential risks stop at just that: Altman says “Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse.” The only specific harm addressed is AI’s contribution to a person’s suicide.

As I wrote on Monday, it’s good that Hollywood might finally be catching up to tech companies’ negative impacts on our world. Many Silicon Valley films before Artificial did not. But only being able to giggle at our tech overlords is not enough.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

Fonte: Mother Jones Magazine