You are not a gadget — but you might be immersed in an artificial intelligence-generated film.
In one of the more unusual creative collaborations to come along in a while, The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Jaron Lanier — the longtime technology innovator and sometime-skeptic — is teaming with Natasha Lyonne and Brit Marling for a new feature film that will be set in the world of immersive videogames and make abundant use of AI.
Uncanny Valley, as the project is called, is backed by Asteria, the new AI-based studio founded by Lyonne and Los Angeles-based filmmaker and entrepreneur Bryn Mooser. Lyonne will direct from a script she wrote with Marling; both will star.
Centered on a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present, the movie will blend traditional live action and game elements. The latter will be created by Lanier as well as Lyonne and Marling. And the entire enterprise will draw on AI from Asteria partner Moonvalley via a model called “Marey,” which unlike systems from companies like Runway and OpenAI is built only on data that has been copyright-cleared.
A representative for Asteria says the film “will blend traditional storytelling techniques with cutting-edge AI technologies to create a radical new cinematic experience.”
Whether the film is being geared toward theatrical, streaming or a more cutting-edge platform remains to be seen.
While AI has recently been floated as a way to fill in postproduction gaps and speed up workflow, it has seldom been integrated into the narrative of the film itself, and certainly not with the kind of top-tier names involved here.
Since co-founding Asteria, Lyonne and has been tinkering with large language models as she seeks to become one of the veteran actors at the fore of new forms of storytelling. The movie marks her feature directorial debut; she also directed upcoming episodes of her Columbo-esque Peacock hit Poker Face, which returns for its second season next week.
With the project, Lyonne also pushes further into narrative experimentations that began with the time-looping Russian Doll, while Marling continues the shapeshifting themes that The OA exhibited. (Her partner on that Netflix cult hit, Zal Batmanglij, is also a producer here.) She called this and other sci-fi projects “a tool of resistance.”
More than just another indie project, Uncanny Valley could offer a key early test of whether Generative AI will automate and dilute content, as some critics have contended, or whether it could expand creative possibilities.
Mooser, who has a slate of projects at Asteria that rely on its licensed-based model, said he believes this project will work because it comes from storytellers instead of programmers. “When artists lead the tech instead of the other way round, trailblazing and unexpected advancements are possible,” says Mooser, who is producing along with Justin Lacob, an executive at his documentary company.
Lyonne noted in a statement that she and Marling’s work on the project — ChatGPT couldn’t come up with this — is like 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.” She also called Lanier “a bona fide polymath, a philosophically expansive personal hero and a singular, sage-like character for the ages.”
After leaving Atari to found a crucial VR startup in the 1980s, Lanier has become one of Silicon Valley’s leading thinkers through turns at Microsoft Research and general parts of the public sphere, even as he has also often expressed skepticism for what Big Tech was wreaking.
“I’m disappointed with the way the Internet has gone in the past ten years,” he told The New Yorker in 2011. “I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.” (Lanier advised Steven Spielberg on Minority Report, if any of those themes sound familiar.)
His 2010 manifesto You Are Not a Gadget argued for reclaiming personal data — never mind humanity — in the face of then-growing social-media power. And while he has said that tech can be a powerful tool for artistry, he has also recently noted that AI, unlike VR, can limit consciousness.
Lanier and Lyonne previously appeared together at a Tribeca Film Festival panel at which he made that distinction and said that “In virtual reality you could make very very strange experiences, you could turn into different animals… you could split up your body into pieces and feel a diffuseness… you could change your sense of time… you could flow your bodies with others.”
But he believes this project can center both technology and humanity even with the use of AI. In a statement to THR, Lanier said that “There is a story here about technology, but it is really about people, and the unpredictable thread of connection that joins us across generations, technologies, and divergent weirdness.”
