Alex Gibney on how AI helped simulate an Elon Musk interview he never got to do
The Oscar-winning documentarian joins IndieWire's "Screen Talk" podcast to talk about his "Musk," who the film should leave out, and how the production team simulated an interview with the rich tech bro.
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Artificial intelligence serves as both a creative choice and a cautionary tale in Alex Gibney's definitive nonfiction portrait of Elon Musk, "The Mask," which is playing well in theaters right now — especially for a four-hour documentary about a rich tech bro that audiences are probably trying not to think about these days.
The Oscar-winning documentarian ("Taxi to the Dark Side") joined IndieWire's "Screen Talk" podcast this week to chat with co-hosts Ann Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio. He talks about how his only contact with the billionaire entrepreneur is through Platform X, which Musk also runs. The brief exchange happened when Gibney first announced the project, and it also proved how Gibney and his Jigsaw production team would never have been able to land a sit-down interview with the SpaceX and Tesla founder. Related Stories Is Meme Casting A Viable Marketing Strategy In Hollywood? As the major fall film festivals wind down, the Oscar race becomes regional
So the filmmakers had to get creative and use artificial intelligence to create an intentionally weird avatar of Musk, condensing all of his public statements into a simulated Gibney-themed "interview."
We collected a huge database of things that Elon actually said, and those recordings are the recordings that we actually use in the film,” Gibney said. In addition to archival clips of Musk, I wanted audio clips from podcasts, etc., but I wanted to create the feel of an interview that I thought was interesting and important and entertaining. To visualize it... we took this idea of Musk's own obsession with the idea that we're living in a simulation, some kind of existential video game. So in that context, I thought, "Okay, how about a simulated interview?" This plays cinematically into the film's larger themes around artificial intelligence, our relationship with LLMs, as well as his obsession with gaming and simulation. "And then we went to our wonderful design company, which I used in a number of films, including the Elizabeth Holmes film."
Working with MakeMake's integrated studio, we designed a set. We decided what to wear. We decided to put him in a gamer chair... [for his face], if you ask me, Musk's portrait is very flattering in terms of the kind of narrow jaws and so on and so forth. Then, we used some artificial intelligence tools to synchronize that shape with the sound, which is the actual sound.
At the same time, "Mask" takes a cautious stance towards the capabilities of artificial intelligence. As the documentary shows, Musk assigned Gen. Z staff to his temporary and temporary department. The DOGE gained access to a trove of US citizens' data while cutting back or eliminating government programs and agencies. And this data could theoretically be used to manipulate the upcoming 2020 presidential election on Facebook.
"They have all of our data that the federal government has. Has it been transferred to SpaceX? We don't know. We think it's possible, and I think Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of artificial intelligence, would say, you know, if that happened, it would be as easy as moving a computer file to a folder," Gibney said. Then, you can train an AI with that data to be very powerful in terms of doing things in the middle, not just the Cambridge Analytica stuff that Zuckerberg did, or Facebook did, but all kinds of plots and maps, like where do you allocate your money? Let's focus on questioning people's citizenship. The ability to train AI on the private data of Americans that was problematic for Hinton, and that was Musk's goal, right?"
Listen below or on your favorite podcast platform.