Earlier in April, Traffic, Magic Mike and Ocean’s 11 director Steven Soderbergh told Filmmaker Magazine that audiences can expect “a lot of AI” in upcoming projects. This includes a documentary about John Lennon’s final interview. It sparked a lot of confusion, given the ickiness of using the iffy technology on the last words of a dead man, but also that Soderbergh has had no issues releasing multiple bangers a year without sacrificing creative control. In a followup discussion with Variety, Soderbergh defends his reasoning: He’s built different.
“I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it,” says Soderbergh. “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.”
It’s true that Soderbergh is quick to use new gizmos in his process. He filmed both 2018’s Unsane and 2019’s High Flying Bird off his iPhone. But he is being a little coy as to why his peers are steamed at him. The controversy around AI in Hollywood isn’t just about talent or effort, but about ethics and legality.
The major AI firms are still sobering up from the “break stuff” phase and now begging governments around the world to void copyright laws just for them, since LLMs are routinely coagulated from plagiarized works. The push for AI, especially in entertainment, is a snake oil campaign, with “viral” AI videos often turning out to be manipulated sales pitches. Despite that it’s still not profitable! OpenAI just shuttered Sora after bleeding a million per day. And not to be a nag about the environmental impact, but you should do yourself some diligence by Googling “do I need water to live?”
Plus it looks horrendous! In January Darren Aronofsky teamed up with Google to develop a mini-series about the American revolution generated through DeepMind. It was filled with historical anachronisms (not the fun needledrop kind), the object impermanence that still beleaguers AI video and that lenticular sheen you usually see in Spirit Halloween paintings. Soderbergh is the most talented major director to be lured in by AI so far and does admit it’s probably just a fad. But it’s a fad he wants in on.
“Five years from now, we all may be going, “That was a fun phase.”” Soderberg tells Variety. “We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to.”