Fresh off the incredible success of his latest blockbusterOppenheimer, the revered filmmakerChristopher Nolanhas shared his own thoughts about artificial intelligence with its relationship to movies and in general after reading a movie plot generated by AI based on his films – and he didn’t like it.
Nolan has a whole line of commercial and critical hits under his belt, like the beloved Dark Knight Trilogy, and is famous for his thought-provoking and mind-bending films likeInceptionandInterstellar, which have gained the writer and directorunique fame as untouchable, as his creativity and ingenuity has earned him the rare ability to make any kind of movie he wants without studio interference, as it’s practically guaranteed to be a hit.
So when someone like Christopher Nolan has thoughts about something as important and controversial as AI, we do better to listen. So here are Nolan’s thoughts about the future of AI movies and human creativity.
The untouchable filmmaker recentlyreacted to an AItasked to write a movie plot based on his own sci-fi films, and he wasn’t impressed. The AI took a lot of cues from Nolan’sInceptionandTenet, but it was basically the same core plot asThe Matrix.In this AI’s plan for a movie, another AI called “The Nexus” controls society through “a secret network that links all human minds” until a “rebellious hacker…must find the core of the Nexus to save humanity from the relentless grip of AI.”
Nolan quickly states that the AI plot is “complete, as we say in English, ‘cobblers.’ It’s, yeah, total nonsense." A fair assessment as it’s bland and unoriginal. He says no more about the plot and moves on to the topic of AI in general.
Speaking about modern AI researchers, Nolan explains how this time in history is “their Oppenheimer moment,” in reference to the real-life scientist that his latest film of the same name is about, the man who developed the atomic bomb and gave humanity the power to destroy itself. Though, unlike the father of the atomic bomb, AI researchers “are looking at his story to say, ‘Okay, we’re about to unleash this very powerful technology on the world. What about the unintended consequences?”
Nolan is very vocal about his opinions concerning AI as a member of the Writer’s Guild union, which is currently a part of theSAG-AFTRA Hollywood strike, which has voiced much concern for AI use in filmmaking. Nolan also gives his thoughts on that too.
Related:How Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s Simplest Film Yet (And Why That’s Good)
AI As a Very Powerful Tool
In theinterview, Nolan sayshe “feels that AI can still be a very powerful tool for us” and is very optimistic about it, “but we have to view it as a tool. The person who wields it still has to maintain responsibility for wielding that tool.”
Nolan elaborates on the dangers of AI and how people have reacted to it, saying that problems with AIs regarding weapons have been apparent for quite a few years, yet no one has reacted to that. “Now that there’s a chatbot that can write an article for a local newspaper, suddenly it’s a crisis,” in reference to the famous ChatGPT and the controversy surrounding it.
Stating that “the biggest danger of AI is that we attribute these godlike characteristics to it,” Nolan explains that by doing so, we “let ourselves off the hook… [as] 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.”
AI is very powerful, but creating this idea of an all-powerful entity would, in a sense, “relieve” us of our responsibilities, the same way that Oppenheimer thought at first that giving the bomb to the government would mean he was no longer accountable for it, but only realized later that he “had blood on his hands.”
Even allowing AI control over something that doesn’t seem too important, like movies, would mean a lot of bad, as allowing an intelligence that, no matter how intelligent, can be programmed by only one person who may have a plan makes the rest of the people feel like they have no power or even need to do anything. And that’s the thinking which put the world under constantthreat of nuclear holocaust.
Related:Oppenheimer: How Christopher Nolan Did the Impossible With His Atomic Blockbuster
There’s No Replacing Human Creativity
The genius filmmaker finds some solace, though, in that “the use of AI in the artistic realm is [that] they’re going to be powerful tools, but ultimately there’s no replacing human creativity.” Nolan defends AI and the use of rapidly developing technology in filmmaking because, as a filmmaker, he’s always embraced and pioneered new technology, including being the first to employ high-tech IMAX cameras inThe Dark Knight, the first major Hollywood film to do so, but as a human has never seen the value of putting machine over man.
Nolan finds it encouraging that AI can be very useful to filmmakers, but they will never replace them. As he saw with the example above, with the AI-made Nolan movie, it seems fair to say that whatever an artificial intelligence can come up with will never match the level and soul that only humans canput into storytelling and art.
