By Kristina Moskalenko
When was the last time you cried watching a film?
I remember crying when I was about seven, watching Terminator. It was the scene where he lowers himself into the flames, giving a thumbs-up.
I haven’t cried at many films since.
But then I saw a new film, “Artificial”.
I came home and cried.
Before going to the premiere during the London Film Festival, I expected a film about ChatGPT and its dangers. Something like “The Social Network” or “The Social Reckoning”.
I was also curious about Yura Borisov, who plays ChatGPT inventor Ilya Sutskever. Borisov seems to be the first Russian actor whose name Hollywood might actually learn. I wanted to see him in a leading role, especially because so many people in Russia question his talent and write ironic lists of actors they think are more deserving.
And then Borisov and Mikey Madison, the two stars of Anora, ended up in two of the biggest films about technology this year. I wanted to compare them.
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich said that “The Social Network” was a movie about an asshole, while “Artificial” is a movie about the Antichrist.
I agree with this on some level. That is why I think it is important for everyone who uses ChatGPT to understand what it actually is. And what it isn’t.
According to the film, this is how ChatGPT was created. The story is dramatised and simplified. But hey, sometimes the devil is in the devil and not the details.
Our current AI, this great achievement of the free world that the West considers itself to be, ironically started with a child from the USSR, played by Yura Borisov, who moved to Canada at the age of five.
His family was Soviet, and his values seem to have been largely Soviet too. His name is Ilya Sutskever.
At the University of Toronto, he studied neural networks and machine learning. He read the popular Soviet book “Solaris” and got the idea of creating a self-thinking planet from there. Being a brilliant mathematician, he helped develop the neural-network technology that would later become part of what we call AI.
His idea was to make it work with big data that the human mind cannot comprehend, identify patterns and use them for medical research, eliminating poverty and other humanitarian causes. All these things might be solved if only we could see the root causes hidden beneath a huge pile of data.
Meanwhile, like other students, he gave presentations on campus, with PowerPoint files projected behind him and four fellow students attending. These talks were serious, deep, somewhat boring and highly specialised. Not many people were interested, because the subject was obviously complicated: a self-thinking planet, Solaris… We like things quick and easy these days.
Until one day, Sam Altman showed up.
Very typically American, this real man of genius had a strategy: find brains and talent and suck them dry. By any means necessary, and preferably for as little money as possible.
With his charisma and marketing skills, he managed to get this Soviet-minded scientist and his idea under his wing.
They started a company, and Sam set off on a quest for investors, advertising the idea and telling everyone about it. Everything was going according to plan.
Anna Delvey has nothing on Sam, because in Silicon Valley, Anna Delvey is just the local climate.
There you go: all the stars come together. Investors have to invest their money somewhere and make more money somehow. Artificial intelligence sounds like the perfect next big thing.
But here’s the important detail. Ilya had an idea and some basic code, but the system still needed to be developed. The threshold at which a machine could learn from enormous amounts of data and identify patterns had not yet been crossed.
To make this work, they needed huge amounts of data about human behaviour.
So how do you get that data? Hire the cheapest labour in Silicon Valley!
And there they sat: college graduates, young men, playing computer games. By tracking them, the system learned. And learned. Until…
Bingo! We have something that works! Time to launch it into the free market and celebrate with gallons of beer! Just what young men like!
But that was never quite what Ilya had in mind. He wanted to create a system into which you could upload enormous databases, for example, all the research on cancer. He wanted to make it a charity, a nonprofit, for the benefit of all humanity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s exactly how it’s going to be, said Sam.
Once the technology began to work, Sam didn’t want to wait for more research and safeguards. Ethics? Legal issues? Who cares! He wanted to win the race and get his money! He wanted to drink champagne and party!
The technology worked, and that was enough for Sam to plug it in.
Having launched this unfinished, raw and wild product, he went on to give interviews and do photo shoots. The feeling of being king of the world has not been banned yet, has it?
There was a woman in the company too. She was from Albania. In the film, she explicitly says that she is the one who has to clean up the entire mess Sam has created between the departments and the people in the company.
Women in the audience laughed at that sentence. Like it was the voice of women throughout the ages, who have had to constantly clean up the mess men create. Thank you for noting, Luca Guadagnino!
But what about the creator, Ilya? He is terrified. He has created something that works, but not in the way he wanted it to. He hasn’t finished it yet, and it has already slipped out of his hands. He doesn’t completely understand it himself, but he cannot stop it.
It reminds me of Chernobyl.
They built these very powerful reactors and started extracting energy. But how do you stop them? Well, nobody knows how to stop them.
Meanwhile, young men are jumping around San Francisco in their underwear. Victory! The Americans have won! Cheap beer is flowing like a river.
Who cares about the rest, if Sam can finally have his champagne and start building his golden bunker?!
At this point, being a scientist rather than a strategist, Ilya tried to fire Sam Altman from the company.
Sam, however, had been preparing for this and secretly consolidating his power. Some divide and rule here, some lies and promises of big profits there, some threats about job security, and there we go: the creator of the code was legally out of the company and had no say in developing his own product.
Ilya was thrown onto the streets of San Francisco.
I sobbed here. I cried. Not only because Yura Borisov played Ilya so poignantly.
I felt so connected to Ilya because, although I moved to my USA/UK chapter in 2009, I still feel that I wasn’t taught how to make money out of thin air. I wasn’t taught how to lie in order to make money. We were taught to do our jobs well and be responsible.
God, when I first travelled beyond the post-Soviet world in 2004 and saw people putting their feet up on the seats on a train, I was horrified! I hadn’t been taught that way. I was taught to keep seats clean and respect others on the train. I believed that good work would speak for itself, that quality mattered more than quantity, and that you should not lie or use people, because of the greater good.
Perhaps that is what I recognised in this scientist: something I feel I have had to defend in myself for years. The belief that doing something well matters, that knowledge has value even when it cannot be immediately monetised, and that not everyone needs to be good at selling themselves.
There is also a more painful layer. The film describes so well what happens when someone raised with one moral and cultural framework enters a society that rewards a different set of behaviours. You can learn the new rules. You can speak the language, understand the codes, become professionally successful. But some part of you may still feel that accepting those rules means betraying something fundamental.
Ilya felt that, I believe. I felt his pain.
And then you begin to see American democracy in its current version as candy wrapped in shiny paper. We were told it was freedom. But we were given only those elements of freedom that are free.
You can walk down the street without a bra. You can write on the internet that the government is made up of idiots. You can express yourself, wear what you want and sleep with whom you want.
But you don’t have the freedom not to worry about how your children will get to university. You don’t have the freedom to get sick without worrying about how to pay for it. You don’t have the freedom to choose whether to give birth to a child that was created by using the freedom to do what you want with your body.
Ironically, I grew up in a country where there was no free press and people couldn’t walk down the street naked to express themselves. Yet I also grew up with certain expectations of public responsibility. There was a kind of freedom in the things a country invested in: the freedom to know that when you were old, you would be taken care of; the freedom to expect your doctor to be competent, or at least to believe there was a mechanism to hold them responsible.
I am not mourning the Soviet system. I am mourning the loss of a particular moral vocabulary. Responsibility. Competence. Restraint. Collective provision. The idea that freedom should mean more than the right to express yourself in ways that cost nothing, or the right to compete in a marketplace.
Watching “Artificial”, I recognised the failures and restrictions of the society in which I grew up, while still missing the values I associate with it.
Perhaps this is the hardest part of living between cultures: finding a space that can hold two, three or four views on how society operates or should operate. And the most ironic thing in all this is having to learn how to suppress your own culture and ethics in a multicultural society.
All too familiar for those who have been there, all too far for those who haven’t.
Leave a Reply