Lilli Gruber put the question plainly. Why, the host of Italy’s “Otto e Mezzo” asked on Friday, was Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman seen as dangerous? The director gave her almost nothing. “Unfortunately, I can’t say much because we are right in the middle of this situation,” he said.
The film is “Artificial,” with Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI chief. Amazon MGM walked away from it several months after Amazon struck a partnership with OpenAI that was meant to expand the company’s use of Amazon Web Services and develop custom AI models. That deal included a $50 billion investment from Amazon.
Amazon has not said the film is bad. A spokesperson told Variety the company believes “Artificial” would be better served by a different studio, and that it is working with the filmmaking team to find it a new home. Prior test screenings reportedly went well. The catch is the timing: the exit followed the OpenAI deal, and the film portrays that partner’s chief executive. Audiences reportedly found Altman and Ike Barinholtz’s Elon Musk the least sympathetic figures in the story.
It would have been Guadagnino’s third project with Amazon MGM.
Who might take it
Mubi is among the distributors still circling. Netflix, A24 and Focus Features have passed, Variety reported. The film reportedly carries a $40 million budget, and the cast also includes Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, with a screenplay by Simon Rich.
A 2003 precedent
Guadagnino did point to history. He said he had read an article the day before recalling how CBS cancelled a major drama series about the Reagans in 2003 after pressure from Republicans. “It was actually cancelled, though it later aired on a smaller channel,” he said. Commercial and political pressure of this kind, he noted, is far from new.
Then he turned to AI itself. “The issue isn’t artificial intelligence itself,” he said, meaning the tool used to produce “products of knowledge” or creative work, such as a research paper, a video or an image. “From one perspective, it’s a technological gadget, and not a particularly sophisticated one, at that, full of flaws, though it will likely improve over time.”
The scientists who built artificial general intelligence, he said, believe that perhaps one day it will become independently sentient, even though right now it is mostly a matter of processing data scraped from everywhere and consuming vast amounts of energy and water.
What holds his attention is what people do with these tools. He said they are changing the face of society, and of the identity of a place like the United States. The film was partly shot in San Francisco, which he called a city of great beauty and great despair, with homeless people and people living under the influence of fentanyl while “wonderful, silent, self-driving cars glided past them.”
“That, to me, is the perfect image to illustrate the theme,” he said. “It is a disturbing image, more than just disturbing.”
Sources
- Luca Guadagnino Says He Can’t Discuss Amazon Dropping ‘Artificial’ Because ‘We Are Right in the Middle of This Situation,’ But AI Is ‘Changing the Identity of the World’
- Amazon MGM Drops Guadagnino's OpenAI Film After $50B Deal | AI Weekly
