"Artificial" Film Roasts OpenAI and Warns of AI Dangers

A Controversial Premiere

Artificial, a new comedy-drama about OpenAI and the artificial intelligence arms race, premiered at the New York Film Festival this week. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film was originally set to be released by AmazonMGM, which dropped it this summer after Amazon struck a $50 billion deal with OpenAI. Indie distributor Neon picked up the film, and NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim referenced "the circumstances" around it in his onstage introduction.

An Unflattering Portrait

The film is almost completely unflattering toward OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other major drivers of the AI boom, depicting them as vain, reckless, and insufferably boring. Andrew Garfield plays Altman with a boyish bounce, Yuri Borisov portrays cofounder Ilya Sutskever as a geeky Frankensteinian figure, and Ike Barinholtz takes on Elon Musk with a loping swagger. Mark Rylance appears as Nobel laureate computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. Unlike The Social Network, which made Silicon Valley savants look like titans of industry, Artificial works to opposing ends, pitching its tech leaders as self-regarding dweebs in a black comedy that verges on the surreal. The story functions more as a biopic of Sutskever, shown as both the prime mover of the current AI wave and its nagging moral conscience.

Safety as a Selling Point

The film stages the industry's tensions as high moral drama. Borisov's well-meaning researcher pleads for safeguards, slowdowns, and AI alignment with humanity's broader interests, while the case for exponential growth is argued by basically everyone else. In one scene, concerns about OpenAI's capacity for serious harm are framed as beneficial only to the company's bottom line, with alarm bells signaling transparency and harmful capacity seen as proof of advancement. The movie also echoes real-world warnings: former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon alleged that colleagues described the coming years as a potential "endgame" for humanity, and another Anthropic researcher claimed AI could "kill all humans" within a decade, with odds set below 10 percent. Coxon directly compared his former company to the Manhattan Project. An early scene shows Sutskever and Hinton rebuffing a Chinese investor eager to use their neural network technology for drones and face-recognition systems.

Sources: Wired