LOS ANGELES, June 27: Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino has broken his silence on artificial intelligence while stopping short of commenting on the fate of his shelved film “Artificial”, saying he is “right in the middle of this situation”.
According to Variety, Amazon MGM dropped the film, which features “The Social Network” star Andrew Garfield as OpenAI chief Sam Altman, several months after striking a significant partnership with the artificial intelligence company.
The deal included a USD 50 billion investment from Amazon to expand OpenAI’s use of Amazon Web Services and develop custom AI models. MUBI is among the distributors still in consideration to pick up the project, which has also been passed by Netflix, A24 and Focus Features.
Appearing on Italian talk show “Otto e Mezzo” on La7 Attualita on Friday, Guadagnino was asked by why the film was perceived as dangerous.
“Unfortunately, I can’t say much because we are right in the middle of this situation,” he said.
Guadagnino drew a historical parallel, recalling how CBS cancelled a major drama series about the Reagans in 2003 following pressure from Republicans, though the show eventually aired on a smaller channel.
“It’s far from the first time this type of commercial and political pressure has happened,” he noted.
Turning to the broader AI debate, the director said his concern was less with the technology itself and more with its social consequences.
“The issue isn’t artificial intelligence itself – the tool used to generate products of knowledge or creative works. From one perspective, it’s a technological gadget – and not a particularly sophisticated one – full of flaws, though it will likely improve over time,” he said.
“The scientists who developed artificial general intelligence believe that – even though right now it’s mostly a matter of processing data scraped from everywhere, consuming vast amounts of energy and water – perhaps one day it will become independently sentient,” Guadagnino added.
For the director, the deeper question is what AI is doing to the character of American society and the world at large. He pointed to San Francisco, where part of the film was shot, as a symbol of that tension.
“It’s a wonderful city – one of the great, distinguished US cities, Alfred Hitchcock’s city – a place of great beauty but also great despair, with so many homeless people, so many people living under the influence of fentanyl, while these wonderful, silent, self-driving cars glided past them,” he said.
“That, to me, is the perfect image to illustrate the theme. It is a disturbing image – more than just disturbing.”
“Artificial,” which also features Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, is reported to carry a budget of around USD 40 million. (PTI)
