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Last month, Poker Face star and Internet “it girl” Natasha Lyonne announced her directorial debut, Uncanny Valley, and found herself in the valley of an online backlash against the film’s proposed use of AI. Amid mass layoffs, environmental destruction, and a billionaire class shoehorning the technology into whatever it can, AI has become a non-starter for many, and when Lyonne announced that her movie would utilize “ethical” AI, trained only on cleared data, the anti-AI contingent of her fanbase rebelled against her. Uncanny Valley, a sci-fi comedy about a teen girl whose reality disintegrates after an AR video game consumes her, became cinema nongrata and Lyonne “some weird Darth Vader character or something.”
In a new interview with Variety, Lyonne somewhat clarified how Uncanny Valley would use the technology and to what end, whilst commiserating with fellow internet backlash victim Rian Johnson. The Poker Face star maintains that her use of AI is “all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave.” This is not a “generative AI movie,” she says. In Variety‘s telling, the film will use AI for “things like set extensions,” so there’s still quite a bit of haziness surrounding how the tech will be implemented and to what extent. We’re also unsure how generating set extensions with AI protects below-the-line artists, like set designers, animators, or production crews, but sure, go off.
Nevertheless, Lyonne didn’t like being the target of a backlash, calling it “comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension.” She has “never been inside” a backlash before, describing it as “scary” and “not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.” In the initial announcement for Uncanny Valley by Asteria Studios, an “ethical AI film and animation studio,” co-founded by Lyonne and Bryn Mooser, the film is described as a “hybrid film” that combines live action and AI. It would behoove someone in the film’s marketing to explain how the movie will use the technology. Currently, there’s a valley separating “hybrid film” and only using it for “things like set extensions.”
