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Title: Google Tries Funding Short Films Showing 'Less Nightmarish' Visions of
AI

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/26/0625...

"For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron
and Alex Garland have cast AI as a villain that can turn into a killing
machine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Even Steven Spielberg's relatively
hopeful A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had a pessimistic edge to its vision of
the future." But now "Google - a leading developer in AI technology - wants
to move the cultural conversations away from the technology as seen in The
Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina.". So they're funding short
films "that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light," produced by
Range Media Partners (which represents many writers and actors) So far, two
short films have been greenlit through the project: One, titled "Sweetwater,"
tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a
hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear
in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. It is the first
project they are working on together. The other, "Lucid," examines a couple
who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device
that allows them to share the same dream.... Google has much riding on
convincing consumers that AI can be a force for good, or at least not evil.
The hot space is increasingly crowded with startups and established players
such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The Google-
funded shorts, which are 15 to 20 minutes long, aren't commercials for AI,
per se. Rather, Google is looking to fund films that explore the intersection
of humanity and technology, said Mira Lane, vice president of technology and
society at Google. Google is not pushing their products in the movies, and
the films are not made with AI, she added... The company said it wants to
fund many more movies, but it does not have a target number. Some of the
shorts could eventually become full-length features, Google said.... Negative
public perceptions about AI could put tech companies at a disadvantage when
such cases go before juries of laypeople. That's one reason why firms are
motivated to makeover AI's reputation. "There's an incredible amount of
skepticism in the public world about what AI is and what AI will do in the
future," said Sean Pak, an intellectual property lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, on
a conference panel. "We, as an industry, have to do a better job of
communicating the public benefits and explaining in simple, clear language
what it is that we're doing and what it is that we're not doing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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