Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh is ready, willing, and eager to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into his filmmaking toolbox.
Sodergergh, who is widely (and rightly) credited with launching the independent film boom of the 1990s with his sleeper hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), is refusing to go along with the Hollywood talking points on this issue.
“It’s worth talking about what [AI] technology might be good at. I’ve been working with AI lately on the John Lennon and Yoko Ono documentary that we’re almost done with,” Soderbergh said in a recent interview.
“AI has been helpful in creating thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space,” he added. “And that’s been really fun because you need a Ph.D. in literature to tell it what to do. But like every other piece of technology, it desperately requires very close human supervision.”
In a later interview, Soderbergh called the criticism of those comments “mystifying,” and refused to back down:
I’m just not threatened by it. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do. It turned out to be a very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve a creative problem about how to visualize what John and Yoko are speaking about philosophically. Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it. I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, “That was a fun phase.” We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to. There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.
He added that he’s not “interested” in using AI as “a writing tool because it takes away from what I love about what I do, which is the process, [but] I’m not scared of it. I just don’t see myself using it in any kind of a significant creative way.”
Soderbergh’s opinion and use of AI does not make him different from his critics. What separates Soderbergh and his critics is hypocrisy — as in, Soderbergh is not a hypocrite, while his critics are. Why? Because everyone knows that eventually they will be using AI, and pretending you won’t doesn’t make it so.
I find the freak-out over AI equal parts mindless alarmism and self-serving.
The alarmism about a machine becoming sentient is just dumb. That’s not how it works. You cannot build consciousness out of processors and vacuum tubes. Consciousness is the human spirit, and whether you believe that comes from God or the biological miracle of the human brain, neither can be replicated in a factory or laboratory.
As far as the self-serving part, the opposition to AI is no different from the opposition of autoworkers when machines began to take their jobs.
No one wants to see anyone lose their jobs (except at CNN and Disney), but progress is progress, and I say that as someone who is supposedly in the line of AI’s fire as a professional writer and “content creator.”
Who knows, maybe someday AI will write a John Nolte piece better than John Nolte. When I say I doubt that, I’m not pimping myself out as something great or special. I just mean that a computer cannot replicate humanity or inspiration, that indefinable thing. Can a computer replicate basic copywriting? Sure. And that’s already happening. But Soderbergh is right when he says he doesn’t see himself ever using AI “in any kind of a significant creative way.”
There’s nothing creative about AI. Whatever end product you desire from AI requires human handling, input, thought, and inspiration. Like computer graphics or even the word processor, AI is nothing more or less than a tool in the artist’s toolkit.
