Hollywood filmmaker dismisses AI ‘crisis’

Oscar-nominated director Christopher Nolan has said in an interview that the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has only received such frenzied media attention because it represents a threat to journalists’ careers.

In an interview with Wired magazine published on Tuesday, the British-American filmmaker said that the potential dangers of AI have been apparent for quite some time, particularly in militaristic contexts. But with the development of easy-to-use chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard, Nolan says that the media has leaned into alarmism because the technology poses an existential threat to their livelihoods.

“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 told the magazine. “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.”

The public release of ChatGPT last year incited a widespread public debate about the uses – and potential dangers – of ‘generative’ AI technology, which combs through vast quantities of online data and presents content to users in a ‘human-like’ fashion.

Its supporters have pointed to AI’s efficacy in performing various tasks, such as academic research, while critics point to the type of Doomsday scenarios put forth by Skynet in the movie ‘Terminator 2’; something that Nolan will no doubt be familiar with.

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But while Nolan is keen to dismiss the media glare as being somewhat self-serving, he admits that the biggest threat isn’t posed by AI itself, but rather by how humanity adapts to it. “The biggest danger of AI is that we attribute these godlike characteristics to it and therefore let ourselves off the hook,” he said. “We have to view it as a tool. The person who wields it still has to maintain responsibility for wielding that tool.”

He continued: “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.”

It is these potentially ‘huge problems’ which have been traversing the media for the past several months. In May, Geoffrey Hinton, widely-considered to be one of the ‘godfathers’ of AI technology, resigned from his post at Google and undertook a media campaign to warn of its dangers. Big Tech thought-leaders like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak were among several industry figures who co-signed a letter which, in part, called for aggressive regulation of the AI sector.

But while Artificial Intelligence could present opportunities to filmmakers to achieve effects previously limited only by the boundaries of their own imaginations, Nolan says he is happy to watch from the sidelines.

“I’m, you know, very much the old analog fusty filmmaker,” he said. “I shoot on film.”