Artificial at London Film Festival: Scarier than any horror film

Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, Artificial, is officially the scariest film of the year. It charts the development of Artificial General Intelligence (a broad, hypothetical computer system with human-level intelligence as opposed to task-specific AI systems) by scientist Ilya Sutskever and OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. Guadagnino adds camp, darkly comic flourishes but it’s a truly chilling experience, the kind you wish were the stuff of science fiction.

A modern-day Oppenheimer, Sutskever is played here by an endearing Yura Borisov. He arrives in the office of the ‘grandfather of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), one morning in 2003 at the age of seventeen, asking for a job, and by 2012, he and Hinton have created a machine which can decode images and process information like the human mind does. Sutskever has very lofty ambitions for what they have created – he believes AGI can save the world, stop climate change, cure cancer, etc., while Hinton dismisses his naive claims.

At a conference some months later, Sutskever meets entrepreneur Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), who then introduces him to Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz), and before long, Sutskever’s drinking shots with them round a fancy dinner table. ‘We’re the only ones sitting in the future’, says Barinholtz’s funny Musk caricature, a grim reminder of who we have leading us.

Sutskever and Altman draw closer, OpenAI is founded, and Altman is made CEO. Competition from Google, however, prompts the company to partner with Microsoft, which raises concerns from Sutskever and chief technology officer, Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro). Until now, OpenAI has been a not-for-profit research organisation with complete control of its own development, safety procedures, legal procedures, etc., but investment from Microsoft means giving some of that up.

At the same time, AGI is becoming near-sentient. It can teach itself how to play advanced video games and has learnt how to lie to its users. By the time ChatGPT is launched in 2022, AGI is everywhere and the rift between Sutskever and Altman is growing wider than ever. Sutskever still believes that AGI can be used for good and refuses to admit they’ve reached the point of no return, while a whiny and slippery Altman grows increasingly exploitative and power-hungry.

A sequel to The Social Network, which told the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the rise of Facebook, released last week (The Social Reckoning), but Artificial is clearly a more fitting follow-up. Like The Social Network, Artificial is timely and, coincidentally, also stars Garfield, whose perfect skin and glassy eyes are deeply unsettling here.

With a runtime of nearly two-and-a-half hours, there’s the distinct feeling that Artificial could’ve been a bit tighter and more incisive with its messaging. The film’s tone is a bit inconsistent, unsure of whether it wants to be a slightly camp satire or a serious warning, but Guadagnino does get his broad point across by the film’s ominous ending. Pandora’s box is open and this is our reality.