Artificial intelligence serves as both a creative choice and a cautionary tale in Alex Gibney‘s definitive nonfiction Elon Musk portrait, “Musk,” which is currently playing well in theaters — especially for a four-hour documentary about an uber-wealthy tech bro audiences are likely trying not to think about these days.
The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) joined IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast this week for a wide-ranging chat with co-hosts Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio. He talks about how his sole contact with the billionaire entrepreneur was over the X platform that Musk also runs. The brief exchange happened when Gibney first announced the project, and it also solidified how Gibney and his Jigsaw production team could absolutely never have secured a sit-down interview with the SpaceX and Tesla founder.
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So the filmmakers had to get creative, using AI to construct an intentionally uncanny-valley avatar of Musk and to compile all his public remarks into a simulated “interview” with Gibney’s subject.
“We collected a massive database of stuff that Elon had actually said, and those recordings are the recordings that we actually use in the film,” Gibney said. “We’re putting an avatar in the movie, but then playing these recordings. In addition to the archival clips of Musk, I wanted audio clips from podcasts and so on, but I also wanted to create the impression of an interview, which I thought would be interesting and important and fun. To visualize it … we took on board the idea of Musk’s own obsession with this idea that we’re living in a simulation, a kind of existential video game. So within that context, I thought, ‘OK, how about a simulated interview?’ This would then cinematically reflect on the larger themes of the film surrounding AI, our relationship with LLMs, and also his obsession with gaming and and simulations. And then we went to our wonderful design firm I’ve used on a number of films, including the Elizabeth Holmes film.”
Working with the integrated studio MakeMake, “we designed a set. We decided what clothes he would wear. We decided to put him in a gamer chair … [for his face] it’s a very flattering, if you ask me, portrait of Musk in terms of his sort of slender jaw and so forth and so on. Then, we used some AI tools to sync that figure to the audio, which is real audio.”
At the same time, “Musk” takes a cautionary position toward artificial intelligence’s capacities. As the documentary lays out, the Gen Z staff Musk appointed to his since-shuttered, ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) accessed and archived a trove of U.S. citizen data while scaling back or jettisoning government agencies and programs. And that data could theoretically be used to manipulate the upcoming presidential election a la Facebook in 2020.
“They have all our data that the federal government has. Now, was that transferred to SpaceX? We don’t know. We think it’s likely, and I think Geoffrey Hinton, who’s the godfather of AI, says, you know, if that happened, it would’ve been as easy as transferring a computer file into a folder,” Gibney said. “Then, you could train an AI with that data that would be enormously powerful in terms of doing stuff in the midterms, not just for the kind of Cambridge Analytica stuff that Zuckerberg did, or that was done via Facebook, but also through all sorts of plots and plans, like where do you devote your money? Let’s focus on questioning the citizenship of people with Latino names. All sorts of things are possible, but I think it was the idea of being able to train an AI on that private data on Americans that was troubling to Hinton, and that was Musk’s purpose, right?”
Listen to the episode below or on your preferred podcast platform.