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.
Photo: Troy Harvey/©A.M.P.A.S.
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.”