tech
‘Ordinary people are being erased’: one director’s audacious fightback against AI
Marc Isaacs’ film Synthetic Sincerity may look like a documentary, but its fictional premise – a lab that scrapes movies to harvest human emotions – shines a hard light on just how far AI can go
TL;DR
- Marc Isaacs' new film, "Synthetic Sincerity," is based on the fabricated premise of an AI research lab licensing his entire body of work to harvest human emotions for AI character creation.
- The film, co-written with Adam Ganz, utilizes a staged or scripted reality genre, departing from traditional documentary conventions by using non-actors performing scripted dialogue.
- Isaacs and Ganz critique the current state of mainstream documentaries, feeling they have become sensationalist and erase ordinary people, making their hybrid film an antidote.
- The film addresses the AI revolution, the democratization of images, authenticity, and touches upon geopolitical issues and censorship, all handled with wit and humanity.
- The filmmakers intentionally created a fictional university for their film to avoid needing permissions, highlighting their experimental approach to documentary.