Cannes debates AI in films
These days, it would seem that almost no international gathering of note would be free from a passionate debate around AI. And Cannes is no exception. While film-makers Darren Aronofsky and Steven Soderberg batted for the very specific uses of AI in making movies, others like Guillermo del Toro have castigated its use, even as Seth Rogen mocked screenwriters for using AI to write scripts. Someone like Aronofsky has skin in the game. His new studio, Primordial Soup, is open to projects using generative AI, and has working with Google DeepMind to produce a short film by the director Dustin Yellin called Goodnight Yamby. The film premiered at Cannes. Peter Jackson, who was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or, said he supported limited use of AI, much like earlier technologies like stop motion animation or special effects.
OpenAI wants a ‘tasteful’ safety researcher
According to a report in Business Insider, Sam Altman’s OpenAI is willing to spend big to hire an AI safety researcher that can help crack the puzzle of how to create an AI system that can make itself smarter. For this role, the company is willing to pay up to $445,000, pay that is up there with that of a cutting edge machine learning engineer. The job posting apparently says that the person hired would have to be ‘tasteful and strategic’. It is the dream of firms like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to create an AI model that can research, design and train ever better models of itself. Anthropic officials have recently said that there is a 60% chance of AI doing autonomous R&D by 2028.
AI hype speakers get booed
But what about the humans whose livelihoods are threatened by AI? There was equal parts mirth and consternation when a string of industry heads giving commencement speeches to graduating US students were roundly booed for championing AI. These included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who was loudly castigated by students at the University of Arizona, when he suggested that using AI is like securing a “seat on a rocket ship”. Students, who are constantly being told that there won’t be any white collar jobs left after the AI takeover, were understandably not best pleased.
