Artificial Intelligence (AI) is called a lot of things by a lot of people. Tech and finance bros will try to convince you it’s the next frontier in technology, comparable only to the invention of the wheel in its impact. Oscar-winning filmmaker Christopher Nolan says it’s “a Trojan horse that everyone knows the Greeks are inside”.
The director, whose adaptation of The Odyssey has scored one of the biggest opening weekends of the year, was on a podcast with French journalist Hugo Travers on July 14 when he said AI was a very transparent and visible danger.
When Travers asked Nolan his thoughts on AI and how some people compared it to the fabled trick the Greeks used to capture the city of Troy, the filmmaker called it “a transparent horse. It’s made of glass. Everybody can see what’s going on inside there”.
Nolan said he had never seen a technology that was advancing so rapidly and being embraced so enthusiastically by the worlds of business and finance, be rejected so completely by the public.
“Everybody’s suspicion of it is so instinctive, particularly young people. The reactions to AI videos online and people my children’s age immediately calling it ‘AI slop’, coining that term and just putting it in a box, which I think is a very healthy scepticism because technology is always going to give us great gifts, as you say, but it has to be viewed with scepticism.”
The filmmaker said the motives of the people pushing AI into the world must also be questioned and people should not resort to “just blind faith that everything’s going to be great”.
Later, when the host asked him if he’d ever make a horror movie — something fans think he would be great at — Nolan said there were times when he felt like he was already making one with The Odyssey.
“When you look at that material, there are elements of horror in it. And as with so much of Homer, there’s so many genres and so many stories that come from it. And so we decided, and we warned the studio we were going to do this, we wanted to make the most intense version of it.”
The filmmaker said he loved horror movies and considered them “the most visceral form of filmmaking, where you’re really trying to get a very direct, almost physical reaction from the audience”.
On Wednesday, billionaire CEO Elon Musk reached the climax of his crusade against Nolan and his film, saying he’ll have his AI agent Grok make a “historically accurate” film from the ancient Greek text by year’s end.
Musk’s announcement was received with some scepticism and head scratching as people tried to figure what historical accuracy meant for a work of fiction from 3,000 years ago.
