“I became some weird Darth Vader character,” says actor turned director Natasha Lyonne over the internet response to her forthcoming film, Uncanny Valley, partly made using ‘ethical’ AI.
In April, Poker Face and Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne announced that she’s to direct and star in a sci-fi film called Uncanny Valley, co-written with fellow actor Brit Marling (Another Earth, The OA). The more controversial part of the announcement was that the project will in some way use generative AI alongside more typical filmmaking techniques.
The internet reaction to the news was, presumably, rather unfavourable, as Lyonne brought the online response up during an interview with Variety.
“It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” Lyonne said. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”
Uncanny Valley is said to be about a teenage girl who becomes engrossed in an augmented reality game, which begins to blur the lines between real and virtual worlds. Of the film, Lyonne described it rather cryptically as, “If Dianne Wiest and Diane Keaton, at their loquacious best, decided to take a journey through The Matrix for sport, only to find themselves holding up an architectural blueprint.”
The bit that may have gotten lost among the internet chatter is that Uncanny Valley will use a piece of gen-AI software called Marey, which is ‘trained’ on data licenced from creators, rather than scraped from the entire internet without an artist’s knowledge or compensation. Asteria, the company co-founded by Lyonne and her partner Bryn Mooser, and which will produce the AI parts of the film, call it “clean and ethical AI.”
“It’s about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” Lyonne said in her new interview, in which she was joined by Poker Face creator Rian Johnson.
Lyonne also said that Uncanny Valley isn’t a “generative AI movie.” By this she could mean it isn’t like such projects as The Woman With Red Hair, a forthcoming WWII drama made entirely using gen-AI tech. If a five-minute clip of its opening is anything to go by, it’s a production stuck in its own uncanny valley.
Instead, Lyonne’s film will use AI tools “for things like set extensions,” according to Variety. It echoes some quotes from the actor and filmmaker in an April interview with Deadline, in which she said the use of AI in Uncanny Valley would be akin to “a green screen or something like that,” and would allow her to “do a film at a greater scale”.
She also sought to distinguish the ‘clean’ tech she plans too use with the “dirty model” of other, bigger AI platforms.
“I just heard we have this first clean foundational model that is copyright-clean that you can build on, but ultimately that is a tool,” Lyonne said. “That’s not going to omit any department heads or production designers or cinematographers. This movie I’m doing with Brit Marling is actually a real film.”
We’ll bring you more on Uncanny Valley as we hear it.
