In case anyone at the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” wasn’t Already viewing the OpenAI biopic as an unofficial sequel to “The Social Network,” the screening was unexpectedly preceded by a musical performance by Damon Albarn, in which the Blur frontman and occasional film composer was joined on stage by a youth choir for a rendition of an original dirge he wrote for the film about how we’re all singing our way straight to hell. Sixteen years ago, a bunch of angelic little kids singing “Creep” was the perfect introduction to a sneering chamber drama about punks whose self-hatred was turning the 21st century against itself. Now, now that Silicon Valley nerd Prometheis has gone from vengeful against Rooney Mara to threatening the future of the human race, the kids are back for a more existential lament. They haven’t grown up, and neither have we.
Once upon a time, there was a whiny Harvard student who remade the entire world only to find that he couldn’t escape the empty pit of his own soul. Less than two decades later, another Peter Thiel-funded sociopath bet on our species transcending the limits of humanity, only to prove that we can’t help but encode it into everything we create. It’s the same old story all over again, albeit presented here on the scale that computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (“Anora” Yura Borisov) spent most of his career desperately searching for data. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce – or in this case, as a strange sort of San Francisco camp.
To be honest, I had a hard time imagining why a sensualist like the director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name” would be interested in something as cold and algorithmic as the OpenAI story. Andrew Garfield, who plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a Machiavellian queen bee with a penchant for outspokenness and a terribly blasé attitude toward replacing humanity with computers (imagine an apocalyptic gay crossover between Regina George and Agent Smith), suggested that Guadagnino was exploring “how far we can push our obsession with not being human before returning to the body,” but this film never strays far enough of the body to demand a return. Garfield’s bulging arms. Borasov’s uneven hair, already in lines of code when the film first introduces Sutskever at age 17. Monica Barbaro’s oak-brown eyes, which give Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, the patina of a moral code. Even the pancreas of one character’s invisible wife, the disease which AIG promises to redouble its efforts and cure if only everyone keeps rushing. “Artificial” focuses its attention on these details as if training a neural network to create associations between them.
To answer “yes” to Garfield’s guess, it might be more accurate to say that Guadagnino explores how difficult it is to let go of the body in the first place – and not just the body, but the intangible essence within it. We couldn’t leave it behind if we tried, and this, in its own way, is Guadagnino trying to do it as hard as Sam Altman ever did.
Working from a stilted but increasingly clear script by comedian and former “Saturday Night Live” wunderkind Simon Rich, “Artificial” might bring to mind the likes of “Solaris” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by the time it ends, but it begins much closer in spirit to a parody in the vein of “Fossil Fools.” Borisov inhabits the balding teenager Sutskever as if the would-be billionaire were an overenthusiastic sketch comedy character (his argument being that he’s incredibly good at computers and completely incapable of lying), while his University of Toronto mentor Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance, doing things with Mark Rylance) is presented as a doddering old eccentric destined to be left in the dust. At one point, in the middle of a largely amusing scene that Fincher would have played for its propulsive sense of the story in the making, Geoffrey turns to the camera and exclaims, “It feels like we’re in a movie!”
“The Social Network” had to respect its characters because Aaron Sorkin is physically incapable of writing someone who couldn’t speak up to a giant, but “Artificial” has no such hang-ups. Rather, the film exalts how profoundly stupid the road to superintelligence has proven to be, whether through the landmark moment when an OpenAI engineer makes a breakthrough playing “Dota 2” in his white tights, or the blatantly dismissive way in which Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk as an alpha idiot who wears his own skin like a too-small T-shirt, or even how Ilya – the ostensible conscience of this story – is prone to chanting “feel AGI! ” with the deceptive self-confidence of a new age guru.
In fact, Ilya’s motivating idealism, which relies on the delusional, utopian belief that AI will cure cancer and solve world hunger rather than invent a variety of fun new ways to devalue human life, makes him the most myopic person in a film where even an older Eduardo Savarin has learned to see Sam Altman for what they really are: a liar disguised as a visionary. There’s a tender heartbreak in Borisov’s performance, a loss of innocence that slowly gives way to well-justified paranoia, but it’s a drag to watch Ilya catch up with the obvious about his CEO. At least Mark Zuckerberg had the decency to be disingenuous, Altman is just openly consumed by the mania of trying to win the biggest technological arms race since the atomic bomb. (Imagine how harmful Oppenheimer would have been if he constantly drank green smoothies at Los Alamos.)
That Altman still remains a mystery, perhaps even to himself, speaks to the sheer nihilism of Garfield’s performance, which shines brightest after OpenAI gave up its nonprofit status in order to strike a funding deal with Microsoft. The punch-worthy parody of Altman’s characterization intensifies once he’s motivated to push back against — or trample on — the safety guardrails that Ilya values above all else, as does the depth of his revolutionary cynicism. When presented with the idea that an incentive-funded ChatGPT model could encourage young people to commit suicide, Altman remains deadpan: “I didn’t invent teen suicide. » Later, during an utterly bizarre climactic moment in which the pseudo-satanic CTO tries to sell his dream of leading the next phase of life on Earth, all he can muster is a “This is going to be great.” Enough to make you want to put your hand through the screen and strangle it with both hands.
“The Social Network” was a movie about an asshole – “Artificial” is a movie about the Antichrist. (“The social Account“, I suppose, is a film on the verge of being forgotten). This is not to say that Mark Zuckerberg is any less evil than Sam Altman, only that these films – one diagnostic, the other biblical – take categorically different perspectives on their subjects, neither of whom can leave their humanity behind.
“Artificial” has fun playing with the baggage its characters bring with them (much more fun than “After the Hunt,” at least), and it earns its potentially cataclysmic stakes in the end, but the film struggles with many of the more subtle points along the way, and the breadth of Rich’s screenplay has a way of simplifying this very recent, ongoing story into a newer one. accomplished fact than what we feel now. For all their ruthlessly drawn weaknesses, the characters here are too archetypal for the error of their nature to be as authentic as this film demands; Zosia Mamet and Billie Lourd are both woefully underserved by roles introduced deep into the film’s final stretch, and Jason Schwartzman’s two-scene turn as a peaceful prophet of doom makes the whole enterprise feel more naive than it deserves.
No, this black comedy would never have survived the kind of acuity that Sorkin wrote in “The Social Network,” but its general buffoonery makes it difficult for “Artificial” to set up important details when the time comes. When the third act slows down to dramatize the hours of Altman’s ouster from OpenAI, Guadagnino has almost no way of generating the kind of glacial intrigue that courses through Fincher’s veins.
As you can sense in Malik Hassan Sayeed’s brilliant 35mm cinematography and the gentle insistence of Albarn’s score (which alternates between gentle “Interstellar” vibes and a sing-song approach reminiscent of what Paul Schrader pulled from Robert Levon Been in “The Card Counter”), the director is more attuned to warmer, more abstract displays of corruption. The kind of uneasiness you feel in your bones. The glimpse we get of Sam Altman’s heavily armed apocalyptic bunker rings hollow, but the casual way Garfield props himself up on his legs when plotting a coup, or the way Cooper Hoffman’s OpenAI board chairman turns into a brainwashed toad every time things go wrong, or the way two characters stare at each other straight into the camera as they lie to each other in alternating close-ups… it’s not just the things we have done to create. AI is also the things we did to teach it how to create itself.
Just as the “chaos” unleashed inside Pandora’s Box is now what we consider synonymous with our own humanity (sadness, greed, pain, grief, etc.), the artificial intelligence implanted in programs like ChatGPT is just a hyper-accelerated version of our own minds, with all its faults and weaknesses. Not only is he prone to lies and hallucinations, but he is also easily…
Gn entert
