Christopher Nolan got honest about artificial intelligence in a new interview with Wired magazine. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker says the writing has been on the wall about AI dangers for quite some time, but now the media is more focused on the technology because it poses a threat to their jobs.
“The growth of AI in terms of weapons systems and the problems that it is going to create have been very apparent for a lot of years,” Nolan said. “Few journalists bothered to write about it. Now that there’s a chatbot that can write an article for a local newspaper, suddenly it’s a crisis.”
Nolan said the main issue with AI is “a very simple one” and relates to the technology being used by companies to “evade responsibility for their actions.”
“If we endorse the view that AI is all-powerful, we are endorsing the view that it can alleviate people of responsibility for their actions—militarily, socioeconomically, whatever,” Nolan continued. “The biggest danger of AI is that we attribute these godlike characteristics to it and therefore let ourselves off the hook. I don’t know what the mythological underpinnings of this are, but throughout history there’s this tendency of human beings to create false idols, to mold something in our own image and then say we’ve got godlike powers because we did that.”
Nolan added that he feels there is “a real danger” with AI, saying, “I identify the danger as the abdication of responsibility.”
“I feel that AI can still be a very powerful tool for us. I’m optimistic about that. I really am,” he said. “But we have to view it as a tool. The person who wields it still has to maintain responsibility for wielding that tool. If we accord AI the status of a human being, the way at some point legally we did with corporations, then yes, we’re going to have huge problems.”
AI has already made its way to Hollywood. Just last week, Paul McCartney revealed that AI was used to purify an old recording of the late John Lennon in order to create an upcoming new song from The Beatles that McCartney is billing as the band’s last original release. The upcoming Disney tentpole “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” also used AI and deepfake technology to de-age Harrison Ford. The AI technology had access to Lucasfilm’s archives of Ford and could use pre-existing images to accurately de-age the actor.
“The whole machine learning as applied to deepfake technology, that’s an extraordinary step forward in visual effects and in what you could do with audio,” Nolan told Wired. “There will be wonderful things that will come out, longer term, in terms of environments, in terms of building a doorway or a window, in terms of pooling the massive data of what things look like, and how light reacts to materials. Those things are going to be enormously powerful tools.”
Will Nolan be using AI technology on his films? “I’m, you know, very much the old analog fusty filmmaker,” he said. “I shoot on film. And I try to give the actors a complete reality around it. My position on technology as far as it relates to my work is that I want to use technology for what it’s best for. Like if we do a stunt, a hazardous stunt. You could do it with much more visible wires, and then you just paint out the wires. Things like that.”
Nolan’s latest directorial effort, “Oppenheimer,” opens July 21 from Universal Pictures. Head over to Wired’s website to read their full discussion with the filmmaker.
