

Followup to this bit of news: āNatasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI āhybridā movieā
Link to interview: (variety) (archive)
relevant section from interview:
As the second season of āPoker Faceā trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled āUncanny Valley,ā the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an āethicalā model trained only on copyright-cleared data.
āItās all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,ā says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a āgenerative AI movieā but uses tools for things like set extensions.
When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.
āItās comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,ā says Lyonne. āSuddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. Thatās crazy talk, but God bless!ā
āIāve never been inside of one of those before,ā Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. āItās scary in there, if anyoneās wondering. Itās not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.ā
She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of āStar Warsā fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive āLast Jedi.ā His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before theyāre even made, āany great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,ā he says. āAnything great is created in a bubble. If it werenāt, it would never make it past the gestation period.ā
Agree 1000%. I donāt want to read into Johnsonās comments (not enough context from the article). That being said, he is only about two degrees separated from TESCREAL: the wife of his frequent collaborator JGL is Tasha McCauley, a former board member of OpenAI. JGL himself has spoken at EA events, and is reportedly directing an āAI thrillerā for Johnsonās production company. My guess is that he isnāt surrounded by AI-critical people, which sucks, and would explain the lack of acknowledgement of the slop vortex on his part.