In the middle of Hollywood strikes about over AI, Gareth Edwards’ new film The Creator explores a bleak future with humanity and the technology at war.
Set on a bleak, war-torn future earth, it is the story of a war between humanity and a civilisation of artificial intelligence that has sprung up in its midst.We sit down to talk about the film with director Gareth Edwards in the middle of a long and brutal strike by Hollywood’s writers and actors over that very issue – the impact AI will have on filmmaking. Not likely.But we can establish that understanding AI is not as simple as good guys and bad guys, even if that has been Hollywood’s preferred shorthand for storytelling ever since the perpetually doomed star of The Hazards of Helen was first tied to the train tracks by a moustache-twirling villain.And Edwards does offer one illuminating anecdote from the film’s development: he has tinkered with the AI engine ChatGPT and at one point typed in the first scene of the movie and asked it to predict what would happen next.“It gave me four things it thought would happen and one of them was totally correct,” Edwards says.
