David Fincher feels unthreatened by AI: “I may be eating my words in a year”
Acclaimed director David Fincher has revealed why he doesn’t currently feel worried about artificial intelligence impacting art. However, Fincher is aware he “may be eating my words in a year”.
Fincher is set to release his new film, The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender, in cinemas on October 27th before it arrives on streaming giant Netflix next month. In the movie, Fassbender plays a contracted killer, and the director has admitted to using AI to help clean a small section of dialogue in the film, which he described as “handy”.
The Fight Club director made the revelation during a new interview with GQ, where he explained why AI, in its current incarnation, is useful to artistic types and why we shouldn’t be worried about technology replacing films or music.
He commented: “I think AI’s a really powerful tool. And for my money, I have not heard an AI Beatles song that compares to ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ So until somebody plays an AI song that knocks me out… maybe that’s just where we’re at now, and I may be eating my words in a year, but I think ultimately, the thing that we respond to in poetry, and writing, and songwriting, and photography, is the personal bent. The thing that’s making it”.
Fincher also said in the interview: “I have friends who are photographic geniuses playing with AI. And you look at it, and it always looks like sort of a low-rent version of Roger Deakins. And I understand what AI is pulling from in order to make this.”
The director continued: “But I’ve also seen short films that are made by people who embrace what is ineffective and plastic about AI, and have made short films that are really moving, touching, and interesting, but it’s obviously AI. Until the point of time that somebody shows me something that I go — [he slaps his chest] — ‘Oh my god, that breaks my heart’, and then they say, ‘Oh, well, as it turns out, this was somebody talking into a microphone, and this is the film that came out,’ I’m not that worried about it.”
In a two-star review of Fincher’s new film, Far Out wrote: “The Killer is indeed an action thriller movie, and it does a commendable job of being just that – also modernising the 1998 French comic book of the same name it was based on with WeWorks, gym memberships, Amazon deliveries, cryptocurrencies and all the rest of it. But there was a genuinely fascinating character study to be undertaken here, right there waiting in the crosshairs.”
Watch the trailer for The Killer below.
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