Artificial Film Review: OpenAI Drama Roasts AI's Creators

Wired's review of Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, which premiered at the New York Film Festival this week, calls the movie a black comedy that makes the people driving the AI boom look vain, reckless and boring. That is not an accident.

According to Wired, the film is closer to a biopic of OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever than of Sam Altman. Yuri Borisov plays Sutskever as a well-meaning researcher who cannot lie, clomping around like a “geeky Frankensteinian monster.” Andrew Garfield's Altman bounces and skips. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk with a loping swagger, and joked after the premiere that his character is “a person who walks normally.”

The film arrives with baggage. Wired reports AmazonMGM dropped it this summer, after Amazon and OpenAI reached a $50 billion deal. Neon picked it up. NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim referenced “the circumstances” in his onstage introduction.

Wired compares the film to The Social Network, but says Guadagnino and writer-producer Simon Rich work against that movie's vision. The Social Network made programmers look like titans. Artificial depicts them as what Wired calls self-regarding dweebs. Guadagnino, known for Call Me by Your Name and Challengers, keeps the imagery plain and the tone mostly sexless. One slow-motion scene shows programmers spraying Jarritos at each other. A climactic street confrontation recalls The Room. Guadagnino told the audience the story is about “the desire to prevail.”

The warning underneath is dark. In a recent Wired interview, former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon alleged that people he worked with called the next few years a possible “endgame” for humanity. Another Anthropic researcher put the chance that AI could “kill all humans” within a decade below 10 percent. Coxon compared Anthropic to the Manhattan Project.

In the film, Wired says, even safety becomes a selling point. Raising alarms shows transparency, and the capacity for harm proves the technology is impressive. It is win-win and no-win.

An early scene has Sutskever and his mentor Geoffrey Hinton, played by Mark Rylance, turning away a Chinese investor who wants their neural network for drones and face recognition, Wired reports.

Wired predicts Artificial will confirm AI doomers' fears and irritate the technology's backers. It is still funny in places, full of contempt for the people shaping the future. At the premiere, Barinholtz offered a sarcastic “The future is bright! We're all gonna be fine!” The audience responded with nervous laughter.

You do not need to wait on a film to decide what to think about AI. But if you do watch, Wired says, expect a warning dressed as a comedy.

• AI safety
• Artificial
• Ilya Sutskever
• Luca Guadagnino
• OpenAI
• Sam Altman