AI is revolutionary. Humans are not.

It seems that, to tell the story of the artificial intelligence revolution, there was no need for killer robots, runaway algorithms or machines bent on world domination. All it took were human beings eager to take control of the control room. This is the most interesting lesson to be drawn from Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s new film, presented at the New York Film Festival, starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever. A political comedy, even before it is a technological one, about humanity’s extraordinary ability to turn every universal mission into a personal competition. The promise of saving humanity, the temptation to control it, the ambition to build a better future and, in the meantime, the need to determine who should sit in the most important chair.

According to early reviews, the film recounts OpenAI’s rise to prominence, right up to Altman’s sensational dismissal and subsequent reinstatement in 2023. A story which, even in reality, had something irresistibly comical about it: a group of people committed to creating a machine potentially more intelligent than humans, yet unable to agree on who should be in charge of humans. The issue, of course, is a serious one. It concerns security, the relationship between capital and research, and the possibility of governing immensely powerful tools. Yet the absurdity remains remarkable.

For years, through science fiction and public debates, we have imagined that the great challenge of AI would be to understand when machines would begin to behave like human beings. Guadagnino raises a different question: what happens when human beings, even in the face of an epoch-making revolution, continue to behave exactly as they always have? With their jealousies, their obsessions, their boundless egos, and their difficulty in distinguishing the common good from their own success.

Finally, there is a delightful detail. Guadagnino explained that he did not use artificial intelligence to make his film about artificial intelligence. A legitimate choice, of course, but also a small, unintended metaphor: we depict the future whilst continuing to jealously defend our control over the present. And perhaps this is precisely the greatest paradox. Technology changes at an astonishing rate. Human nature, far less so. AI might even learn to do everything we do. But to become truly human, it would still be missing one thing: learning to argue over an armchair.