Actors Andrew Garfield (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman) and Yura Borisov (OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever) share a toast in the new Luca Guadagnino movie, Artificial.Courtesy of FLC Press
Big Tech is back on the big screen—but its bosses might not be thrilled.
This fall, Hollywood will release four movies on tech executives: Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, on CEO Sam Altman’s tumultuous time as the head of OpenAI; Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, on the investigation into Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissing its platforms’ negative impacts on young users and inciting violence and hate speech; the all-encompassing Musk, by documentarian Alex Gibney, on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s family life, corporate controversies, and engagement in right-wing politics; and You Can See Everything, an unsettling documentary in which directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Elizabeth Holmes, who invited them to film her in the weeks before she began serving her federal prison sentence for defrauding investors at the now-defunct health tech company Theranos.
If the 2010s brought the first major wave of examining Silicon Valley leaders, such as relatively human depictions of Zuckerberg with The Social Network and multiple movies on longtime Apple CEO Steve Jobs—they largely paint pictures of difficult, ambitious individuals who may have burned a few bridges to achieve the remarkable—this recent group represents an opportunity, as I wrote in September, to rethink that perspective.
Since the 2010s, public opinion about Big Tech companies has tanked. My colleagues and I have extensively covered the increasingly apparent harms that tech CEOs have overseen, including using AI in wars overseas and the continuing development of a mass surveillance state at home.
In a July poll reported by Axios, about seven in ten Americans said they believe tech companies and their CEOs hold too much power.
On Politico’s Decoded podcast this week, Altman asserted that “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this [AI] technology” as people will do “tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff” with it.
Early reports around Artificial, directed by Challengers’ Luca Guadagnino, starring Andrew Garfield as Altman, and covering his firing and reinstatement as OpenAI CEO in under a week in 2023, suggest that the film will have a more critical view on the executive—the Altman of Artificial says “yes” to everyone, Vulture wrote in a piece interviewing Guadagnino on Friday.
“The narcissist has the ability to understand the terrain and adapt to it, shape-shift,” Guadagnino told Vulture—which he sees as having larger ramifications: “People that have a lot of power should be very much aware that you must be responsible for the community.”
“I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate,” Garfield told Esquire in August.
Amazon MGM Studios dropped the movie in June, shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment into OpenAI. Big Tech and the wealthy elite are now more closely tied to culture, art, and media. In a Vanity Fair cover story released Monday, Altman said that he did not speak to anyone at Amazon about Artificial and that, based on the movie trailer, he didn’t feel the filmmakers were “going for accuracy.”
“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Garfield says in that trailer. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”
Artificial, which independent film company Neon acquired later that month, premieres Monday at the New York Film Festival.
