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Andrew Garfield was once one of ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion users. That was before he played OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial,” which centers on the company’s origin story and Altman’s dramatic 2023
outing (the board reinstated him just five days later). Working on the film led Garfield to dump the chatbot altogether.
“I got a bit scared,” he told Variety at the “Artificial” premiere at the New York Film Festival. “I felt a little mistrusting of the technology. It feels like the people who are encouraging us to use the technologies don’t exactly know its capacities themselves. That feels a little irresponsible, to me personally.”
The tech company has faced public backlash over its ambitions to rapidly advance artificial intelligence without taking ample time to address safety concerns, the primary conflict explored in “Artificial.” OpenAI has also faced a series of hurdles over the past six months, including the shutdown of its generative-AI video app Sora and heightened industry scrutiny after a former Anthropic employee warned that AI companies are “gambling with our lives.”
“Luckily, I don’t need [ChatGPT] in my life in the same way that other people in other industries might,” Garfield explained. “As an actor, I was using it as a kind of fancy Google for some research purposes. I know that it’s not what it’s meant for.”
More than half of Americans say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased presence of AI in everyday life, per Pew Research Center. Actors are concerned, too: what was once a hypothetical punchline has become a top concern among Hollywood creatives.
“I don’t think actors are going to be rendered useless,” Garfield said. “The soul of humanity is the soul of humanity. And I think actors are some of the people that have to hold the soul of humanity for all of us and stories.”
Garfield’s portrayal of Altman received rave reviews following the “Artificial” premiere at the New York Film Festival. Variety’s Clayton Davis praised Garfield’s “Norman Bates-inspired turn” and predicted he could emerge as a frontrunner for a best supporting actor nomination at this year’s Academy Awards.
“He has this vocal fry in between lines, kind of when he’s thinking, that he really nailed,” said Will Angus, who appears in “Artificial” as former OpenAI employee and Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei. “The walk, the head movements. It was spooky.”
Altman himself complimented Garfield’s replication of his walk and other mannerisms, even though he doesn’t expect the film to offer an “accurate” depiction of his ousting and reinstatement.
“That’s a very generous thing for him to say,” Garfield said. “ I imagine it must be incredibly strange and surreal to be a young man, as he is, to know that there’s a film where a version of him is being depicted. I feel quite sensitive and compassionate towards that. I’d personally feel really vulnerable and probably angry. That’s just me. He seems very chill about it. It’s a curious thing what we do, but as Luca has said, the people who are in power in our world right now, it’s our duty to interrogate that power.”
