The Artificial film about OpenAI is premiering at the London Film Festival this week
AI movie Artificial premiered at the London Film Festival this week, chronicling the origin story of OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
Last month Altman, the man behind ChatGPT and one of the world’s leading figures in AI, said it looked like “an awful movie” after watching the trailer.
Speaking to City AM, Artificial writer Simon Rich responded to Altman’s criticism, saying his film is “extremely accurate”.
“Even the tweets you see on the screen are verbatim and time stamped,” he said. “And for legal reasons we had to go above and beyond the normal Hollywood accuracy bar. A lot of movies are ‘quote unquote’ based on a true story but this is a legitimately true story.
Artificial writer: film is painstakingly accurate
“There’s a world where we could have done this movie with a lot of composite characters. That’s often what you do to save time and money. If there’s four scientists who roughly believe the same thing, we’ll just make it all one guy. That way we only have to find one actor. We didn’t do that. The people are vividly and accurately portrayed, if someone wasn’t physically in a scene and we know they weren’t physically there, they’re not there in the film.
“It is painstakingly accurate,” Rich added of Artificial. “You will not find a truer account of how this technology came into existence than this film. Is it 100 per cent true? Obviously there’s certain scenes we weren’t privy to, that we don’t have witnesses for, that we had to dramatise. And of course everyone has their own personal version of the truth, and the truth can be subjective and relative. But yeah it is not exaggerated, not sensationalised, it is a very, very legally vetted, terrifyingly accurate portrayal of how we got to where we are.”
A glut of movies grappling with AI have been released this year or will be in theatres in early 2027, including the four-hour Elon Musk documentary Musk and The Social Reckoning, made by the creative team behind The Social Network.
Story of how Altman met Sutskever
Artificial follows the story of how Sam Altman met scientist Ilya Sutskever, showing how the duo worked on the technology that would form ChatGPT, the first major AI chatbot, which was released in 2022.
Critics say the release of ChatGPT instigated an AI arms race, forcing competitors, including Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, to release their rival AI chatbots such as Claude and Gemini in order to compete. The race to put out products meant ethical questions about the dangers of AI were glossed over, say critics.
In City AM’s review, our critic called Artificial “the closest look we’ve had at the charismatic, terrifying men at the heart of the AI revolution.” Andrew Garfield plays Altman, while Yura Borisov plays Ilya.
Artificial is in UK cinemas at the end of January.