For decades, in cinema, AI had an unsettling face: that of a machine. HAL 9000, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who calmly refuses to open the door. The Terminator, come from the future.
This autumn, the face has changed. They are no longer machines. They are bosses.
Sam Altman on screen
On Sunday, at the London Film Festival, the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, known for Call Me by Your Name, presented Artificial. Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI.
The film recounts the disagreements that tore the company apart over AI safety, notably between Sam Altman and one of his co-founders, Ilya Sutskever. Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton, one of the fathers of modern AI, whose student Sutskever was.
Andrew Garfield explained to Reuters that curiosity and fear had fed his performance. Sam Altman, for his part, told Vanity Fair that he did not expect a faithful portrait. OpenAI declined to comment. The film will be released in cinemas this winter.
The same weekend, Zuckerberg and Musk
Artificial does not arrive alone. The same weekend saw the release in the United States of The Social Reckoning, by Aaron Sorkin, with Jeremy Strong in the role of Mark Zuckerberg, devoted to the revelations about Facebook's practices. And a documentary by the director Alex Gibney devoted to Elon Musk, nearly four hours long, was screened in a handful of cinemas.
Three films, three tech bosses, in a matter of weeks. Hollywood has found its new characters.
Aaron Sorkin is no newcomer to Zuckerberg. In 2010, he wrote The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, which told the story of the creation of Facebook. The film won three Oscars, including Best Adapted Screenplay, and it shaped the public image of Mark Zuckerberg for an entire generation, far more than any press article. That is the whole power, and the whole risk, of fiction: it often decides how real people will be remembered.
Why now
First, because AI has entered everyone's life. A billion people use ChatGPT every week: its boss has become a public figure, like a head of state.
Then, because the real story is already a screenplay. In November 2023, OpenAI's board abruptly dismissed Sam Altman, before reinstating him a few days later under pressure from employees. Twists, betrayals, planetary stakes: a screenwriter would not have dared invent it.
Finally, because public anxiety is shifting. People fear a machine that rebels less than the choices of the few people who build it. We saw this again this week, with AI giants called to testify under oath in New York.
What to keep in mind
A film is not an investigation. It simplifies, it picks heroes and villains, it condenses years into two hours. Sam Altman knows this: he has already warned that he did not expect an accurate portrait.
But these films matter. They will shape the way millions of viewers imagine AI and those who build it, far more than corporate press releases.
What we take away
We wrote in September that a technology always ends up dropping out of the conversation once it becomes ordinary. Hollywood proves that we are not there yet.
AI is still a story. And in that story, the main character is no longer the robot. It is the human who decides what the robot becomes.