Artificial review – Luca Guadagnino takes on OpenAI in muddled tech satire

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New York film festival: The origin story of Sam Altman’s company is reimagined as a campy comedy starring Andrew Garfield

On the day that Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman and OpenAI premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover story on Altman. Alongside glossy portraits from Annie Leibovitz, the world’s pre-eminent portrait photographer, the story describes him as the Oppenheimer of his day, evoking the image of a man leading humanity towards its own inevitable demise at the hands of sentient robots.

Altman doesn’t seem to be grappling with much existential angst about the whole thing though: in an interview also released this week, he said that we should be prepared to accept “bad things” in return for the benefits of AI.

How much worse can things get? AI agents have already gone rogue, hacking into government systems and “bruteforcing” UN databases. Last year, a young woman used ChatGPT as a therapist before she killed herself (the software helped her write her suicide note). Studies show that using AI is likely leading us all towards something called cognitive surrender, which does not seem like the best use of your one wild and precious life.

Artificial is a stylish and blunt satire that is unambiguous in its perspective: that Sam Altman is an amoral manipulator who might be dead inside. That goes some way towards explaining why Amazon MGM Studios pulled out of distributing the film in June (Jeff Bezos’s company has a $50bn investment in OpenAI). I found it to be more of an op-ed than a movie, with little insight into what makes Altman and the tech elite tick.

Neither does it have much to say about the world – glossy magazines included – that has welcomed them with open arms.