Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
The screenwriter of the film Artificial says AI is “just as powerful and dangerous” as critics of the technology claim.
Luca Guadagnino’s biographical comedy drama stars Andrew Garfield as OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who was fired and then rehired by the company he co-founded in 2023.
Speaking to the Press Association at the BFI London Film Festival, screenwriter Simon Rich said he wanted the film to act as a warning.
“I just want people to accept that AI is real. It’s not, unfortunately, a fad like NFTs or Beanie Babies. It is an actual historical reality that this technology now exists, and it’s just as powerful and just as dangerous as the scientists claim that it is,” he said.
Speaking about the inspiration for the script, Emmy-winning Rich said it was an old friend who had urged him to consider the implications of the rapidly developing technology.
“I came to this subject in a very unusual way, which is that my oldest friend in the world, who I met in kindergarten, is an OpenAI scientist. He has been warning me about this technology for decades,” he said.
“I didn’t start to take him seriously until he joined this small non-profit called OpenAI. About a year before ChatGPT came out, he showed me what they were working on, and I was sufficiently terrified that I felt the urge to warn people.
“So I started writing articles about it, and I wrote a book about it, but nobody really paid it any attention, and so in a kind of like desperate last-ditch effort to warn mankind, I wrote this film.”
Earlier this year it was reported Artificial was dropped by Amazon MGM Studios due to conflicts of interest after it signed a partnership worth $US50 billion with OpenAI.
It was later announced Neon, the production studio behind Oscar-winning films Anora and Parasite, would release the movie.
Speaking about the film initially being dropped, Rich said he was glad it could still be rolled out.
“I’m just really relieved and excited that the film exists at all. It’s challenging to make films about subjects like that and I think it’s really cool that Neon has supported the film and I can’t wait for people to see it,” he said.
Artificial portrays a number of real-life figures – including OpenAI’s co-founders Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, chief technology officer Mira Murati, board chairman Greg Brockman and co-founder Elon Musk.
Mark Rylance also stars as Geoffrey Hinton – a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks.
Hinton left Google in 2023 after citing concerns about the risks of AI and in 2024, after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, called for urgent research into AI safety.
Artificial will be released in Australian cinemas on January 21.
