Luca Guadagnino can't talk about Amazon ditching Artificial, but he's happy to trash talk AI

To be fair—and fittingly, given how much time he’s spent thinking about Altman—Guadagnino’s thoughts on the matter go beyond simple accusations of water-wasting slopitude. Per Variety, Guadagnino wasn’t exactly kind to the technology, calling it “a technological gadget—and not a particularly sophisticated one, at that,” and noting that it’s “full of flaws” while “consuming vast amounts of energy and water.” But while granting that AI likely would get better, in the future, at many of the tasks acolytes like Altman are obsessively setting it to, the director said he was far more interested in the cultural shifts it’s causing in people right now.

“We shot part of the film in San Francisco—a wonderful city, one of the great, distinguished U.S. cities, Alfred Hitchcock’s city,” Guadagnino remarked. “A place of great beauty but also great despair, with so many homeless people, so many people living under the influence of fentanyl, while these wonderful, silent, self-driving cars glided past them. That, to me, is the perfect image to illustrate the theme. It is a disturbing image—more than just disturbing.”

Artificial reportedly centers on a very busy span of four days back in November 2023, when Altman was ousted, and then un-ousted, from his CEO role at OpenAI amidst a vote of no confidence. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield as the tech mogul, has been shopped around to several studios since Amazon cut bait last week; Variety reports that MUBI is still among the biggest names still expressing interest.