Artificial screenwriter Simon Rich shared that he’d been obsessing over the dangers of AI for years, ever since his childhood friend Danny Selsam took a job with OpenAI. “About a year before ChatGPT was released, he showed us stuff on his computer that was so terrifying that I felt the urge to warn people. When I told journalists what I had seen, they thought it was a hoax. They thought I was trying to prank them,” Rich said during the Q&A. “So in my last-ditch effort to warn mankind I wrote this movie…and I hope to God that it helps people pay attention.”
They certainly should. Artificial is gobsmacking in its prescience and how directly it speaks to current anxieties regarding the acceleration of AI and the potential threat that it poses to humanity. Lim shared that since the last time he watched the film, Guadagnino had added a card at the end addressing concerns brought up by Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee who resigned in 2026, saying that he believes that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic can develop AI responsibly and that the AI they are developing poses a serious threat to humanity.
“When we were on set there were news stories coming out every day while we were shooting,” Garfield said. “One of us would bring in a news story like, ‘Yo, how are we going to include this now?’” The film felt like “a living document” that was only confined by what they could legally include, Garfield said. “Now there’s obviously a shit-ton more on public record. I wish we could add some scenes or recut some or change some dialogue, and give even more teeth, in a way.”
Don’t worry, Artificial has plenty of bite. Altman isn’t the only big name who gets chewed up and spit out by Guadagnino’s dark satire. Many of AI’s biggest names appear in the film, including principled Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei (Will Angus), former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro), and the Nobel Prize–winning godfather of AI, professor Geoff Hinton, played with measured sincerity by Oscar winner Mark Rylance. The biggest name in tech, Elon Musk, gets the most outlandish performance from Ike Barinholtz, who plays the richest man in the world as a cartoonish buffoon who is arguably the only person in Silicon Valley more impatient than Altman. “When you’re playing someone as universally beloved as Elon, and who everyone admires and who is a good person and walks normally,” quipped Barinholtz, getting a big laugh from the audience. “This is not him at the RNC with the chainsaw. This is him in 2014 when a lot of people were like, ‘This guy’s going to save us. He’s amazing.’”
