AI is ‘just as powerful and just as dangerous’ as scientists claim, says writer of Sam Altman film Artificial
The writer behind the chilling movie Artificial insists AI is ‘just as powerful and just as dangerous’ as sceptics of the technology have warned.
Director Luca Guadagnino’s comedic drama, which takes on one of the most terrifying scenarios of recent times sees actor Andrew Garfield playing OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman – who was dramatically fired and then rehired in 2023 by the firm he co-founded.
Screenwriter Simon Rich spoke ahead of the film’s screening at the BFI London Film Festival to emphasise how his creation should be interpreted as a warning to anyone not yet taking the threat seriously.
“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.
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Rich described how it was a debate with an old friend that prompted him to put aside his own doubts about how threatening AI could be and really think about its impact on humanity.
“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 widely reported that $40 million Artificial was dropped by Amazon MGM Studios after a tie-up was signed with OpenAI – to the tune of $50 billion.
Fortunately for Rich and Guadagnino the project was taken up instead by Neon, the studio previously responsible for the screwball thriller Anora and the black comedy Parasite.
“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,” Rich said.
The film depicts several prominent real-life OpenAI figures, including Ike Barinholtz as co-founder Elon Musk, Cooper Hoffman as chairman Greg Brockman, Monica Barbaro as former chief technology officer Mira Murati, and Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
British actor Sir Mark Rylance plays ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton – known across the world as the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist whose work underpins the technology.
Hinton, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024, resigned from Google in 2023 over the risks posed by AI.
When asked if he felt any pressure when playing a real-life person such as Hinton, Sir Mark said: “Playing a real person who is still alive is definitely a challenge.
“But what’s nice about it is usually they are interested to meet me, so I get to meet them and talk to them. I don’t record them or film them, but I get a sense of them, and obviously I observe like a portrait artist would observe,” he said.
He added, “I’m nervous that I won’t let Geoffrey down because I really like him and he’s become a friend. Most of the people I play become friends.”
A synopsis for the film teases: “Artificial chronicles the incredibly consequential days leading up to the sudden firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI, as the fate of who gets to control the technology at the centre of an AI arms race hangs in the balance.”
Artifical will be released in UK cinemas on January 22 2027.
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Cinema, Entertainment
Michael D. Carroll