Ari Aster is afraid that people talk about AI "as a god"

In what could be the seed of a new film, the Eddington director said it's "obviously already too late" to rein in the technology.

Ari Aster is afraid that people talk about AI
Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

Beau is afraid of pretty much everything, but Ari Aster—the horror director behind the Joaquin Phoenix movie as well as Hereditary, Midsommar, and the upcoming Eddington—has “a lot of fear” too. Aster’s fear is specifically around the encroachment of AI, which he told Letterboxd in a recent interview was “obviously already too late” to curtail. “We’re in a race now. It’s how the history of technological innovation has worked,” he continued, before launching into a mad scientist spiel he could plop directly into a future, AI-focused thriller. “If we can, we will. I have larger questions, you know? What did Marshall McLuhan say: ‘Man is the sex organ of the machine world,’ right? Is this technology an extension of us, are we extensions of this technology, or are we here to usher it into being?” Someone get Willem Dafoe on the phone now.

Of course, Aster—and the rest of us—have good reason to be afraid. “If you talk to these engineers and the people ushering this AI in, they don’t talk about AI as this great new medium; they don’t even talk about it as technology. They talk about it as a god,” he said. “They talk like disciples. They’re very worshipful of this thing. Whatever space there was between our lived reality and this imaginal reality—that’s disappearing, and we’re merging, and that’s very frightening.”

As chilling as that all is, the “most uncanny thing about it,” at least to Aster, “is that it’s less uncanny than I want it to be.”

“I see AI-generated videos, and they look like life; they just look real,” he continued. “It goes back to that human capacity for adaptation. The weirder things get, and the longer we live in them, the more normal they become. But something huge is happening right now, and we have no say in it. So, here we go. I can’t believe we’re actually going to live through this and see what happens. Holy cow.”

The same can be said for the COVID-19 pandemic, which Aster captures in his latest and already-divisive film, Eddington. While the movie isn’t explicitly about AI, it’s still very much about screens; so much so that Aster apparently called it “Screens: The Movie” while he was filming. “All these characters are cyborgs, the same way we’re all cyborgs,” he said of the once and future Zoom era. “I wanted to underscore the strangeness of the situation: These people, despite being a community of people, are not a community. Despite being in the same rooms as each other, they are living on totally different planes. If anything, hopefully, the effect is that all these screens become queasy-making. I wanted them to be as pervasive as they are in real life.”

Eddington will play on yet another screen, but hopefully this one will be a worthwhile plane to live on for a few hours. You can join the community in theaters on July 18.

 
Join the discussion...