MOUNTAIN VIEW — For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast artificial intelligence as a villain that can turn into a killing machine.
Even Steven Spielberg’s relatively hopeful “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future.
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.”
To do so, the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant is funding short films about AI that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light.
The Google initiative, called “AI on Screen,” is a partnership with Santa Monica-based Range Media Partners, a talent management and production company that represents a wide variety of entertainment clients, including actors and writers. Range is producing the films.
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.
“They were looking for stories that were not doomsday tales about AI, which I was fine with, because I think we’ve seen so many of those,” Douglas told The Times. “It’s nice to see the more — not overly positive — but sort of middle-ground stories.”
The effort comes at a time when many Americans have mixed feelings about AI. A 2024 survey from Bentley University and Gallup showed that 56% of Americans see AI as doing “equal amounts of harm and good,” while 31% believe AI does “more harm than good.” Shifting the way AI is depicted in popular culture could help shift those perceptions, or at least that’s what some techies and AI enthusiasts hope.
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.
“Narratives about technology in films are overwhelmingly characterized by a dystopian perspective,” Lane said. “When we think about AI, there’s so much nuance to consider, which is what this program is about. How might we tell more deeply human stories? What does it look like to coexist? What are some of those dilemmas that are going to come up?”
Google did not disclose how much they are investing in the films. 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.
Creators who work with Google are given access to tech experts at the company who can share more information about the technology. Does the technology in the script already exist, for example? How would it work in real life?
“We’re living with this technology and AI — the questions arise include: How does it affect us and how can we emotionally connect via this type of technology?” said Rachel Douglas, a partner at Range, who is married to Sean Douglas.
AI has been a controversial topic in Hollywood, playing a major part in the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes.
Actors fear their likenesses and voices being replicated and manipulated without permission or payment. Writers worry their work is being used without their permission to create AI-generated scripts and story outlines. Animation and special effects jobs could be gutted. Publishers and record labels have sued to protect their intellectual property.
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.”
AI companies, including OpenAI, Google and Meta, have demoed or shared their tools with movie and TV studios and directors. Meta has partnered with horror studio Blumhouse and Cameron’s venture Lightstorm Vision on AI-related initiatives.
On Tuesday, Google announced a partnership with “The Whale” director Darren Aronofsky’s venture Primordial Soup, which will work with three filmmakers on short films and give them access to Google’s AI video generator Veo.
Proponents say the tech can make filmmaking cheaper and give artists more flexibility at a time when the movie business is struggling.
“If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see … we got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half,” Cameron said on a podcast last month with Meta’s chief technology officer. Cameron sits on the board of startup Stability AI.
AI companies are finding other creative ways to make the technology more approachable. In one example, major artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is sponsoring an upcoming exhibit at the Exploratorium, a science and art museum in San Francisco. Eric Dimond, senior director of exhibits, said he hopes the exhibit, called “Adventures in AI,” will cause more people to explore the costs and benefits of AI.
Anthropic was not involved in the conceptualization of the exhibit, Dimond said, though visitors can interact with its AI model Claude, as well as AI tools from OpenAI and ElevenLabs.
As Google and others try to put a softer focus around technology, moviegoers are still getting plenty of stories about the dangers of robots run amok.
Recent tales of AI gone wrong include Blumhouse’s 2023 horror film “M3GAN,” about a robot who becomes so protective of a young girl that she starts wreaking havoc. Last year, another Blumhouse horror film, “Afraid,” followed a family terrorized by an AI-powered assistant.
This summer, “M3GAN” is getting a sequel, released in theaters by Universal Pictures. It’s expected to be a box office hit.
