Danny Boyle has confirmed the use of artificial intelligence in the new film ink About launch The sun newspaper.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Boyle said he used about 30 seconds of artificial intelligence in making his new film, which opened the Venice Film Festival this week before playing Telluride.
“There’s about 30 seconds of it in our movie where we’re animating some old images,” the Oscar winner said in a video interview from the Colorado festival. “Oh, and there are some mice,” he added. “It’s very good for the animals, and we had some mice running around The sun newsroom.”
Some viewers of the film took to social media this week to ponder whether artificial intelligence was used to revive old photos of the Kray brothers and former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In Telluride’s Bear Boyle video, the answer to that appears to be yes.
Vanity Fair previously asked Boyle what he thought about the use of AI in films, and he responded: “It doesn’t really matter what I think about AI. What matters is what 20-year-olds think. It’s the honest truth. My opinion of it is that it’s a very useful tool in a lot of ways, provided you use it respectfully and provided you pay the actors if you’re going to replace them with some kind of embodiment of AI.”
Earlier this week, he spoke at a press conference in Venice inkBoyle has expressed concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on certain sectors, including journalism.
“The risk that the tech giants and their AI face is that they will be able to replace journalism. They will be able to get an AI journalist that is more efficient, cheaper, etcetera, etcetera, so will the AI journalist tell the truth to the power that created him?”
inkStarring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, the film chronicles the rise of the infamous British newspaper The Sun in the 1970s under editor Larry Lamb, after it was poached from the Daily Mirror in 1969 by emerging media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The Studiocanal and Netflix film, which will be released in theaters in December and on Netflix in January, has received largely positive notices from Venice and currently holds an 85% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
