Artificial is a wicked satire that also sticks to the facts

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According to The Verge’s senior AI reporter, Luca Guadagnino’s dark comedy hit all the familiar tech milestones.

At the New York Film Festival premiere of Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s satirical Sam Altman biopic, the director said onstage that “[when] someone wants to play God, that’s very interesting to me.” The idea of playing God, and power in general — who has it, who desperately wants it, and who will do anything to get it — is central to the film’s narrative, which sticks remarkably close to the factual events surrounding the OpenAI CEO’s rise to power with, and brief ouster from, the AI lab.

The film opens with a stunning shot of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, which will turn into a metaphor for building all-powerful AI systems over the course of the film. Again and again, Altman (played by Andrew Garfield) points to the bridge, first to convince his cofounder-to-be Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) of the importance of their vision, then as a way to control the scientist.

All of the characters are (at least somewhat) exaggerated, satirized versions of themselves. Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz) is portrayed as a — at the time — widely beloved, booked, and busy visionary who’s used to people laughing at his jokes, his every pore positively oozing with millennial cringe. (He wears sunglasses more than any other character, uses the word “epic,” and starts drumrolls on tables.) OpenAI president Greg Brockman (Cooper Hoffman) comes across as an ultra-loyal bro and unquestioning right-hand man to Altman, interested mostly in money and power (at one point, he’s wearing what looks like a diamond necklace that says “ChatGPT”).

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro) is depicted as a brilliant but easily swayed outsider. Sutskever is portrayed as the idealistic, naive hero — the ingenious mind behind the lab’s entire existence who can’t stomach lying and is reluctant to accumulate any power. And professor Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), who is known as the “godfather of AI,” is a wise sage who can foresee many of the power struggles and pitfalls ahead.

Garfield is disturbingly riveting as Altman, with his hypnotizing performance painting the most damning picture of the OpenAI CEO yet in any form of media. He depicts Altman as a manipulative, power-hungry psychopath who lies as easily as he breathes and will use anyone, anytime, anywhere to get what he wants.

At one point, Hinton references a 2008 quote by Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, about Sam Altman: “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.”

Garfield and Guadagnino portray Altman as astonishingly controlling, represented by the character’s penchant for physical touch.