Artificial Fidelity Review – Mark Isaacs’s Interrogation of Artificial Intelligence Grapples with Identity and Existence | film

MIsaac’s new arc is a weird, interesting, semi-sincere thing that I couldn’t make friends with. It’s a strange, shallow work about artificial intelligence that is itself exasperatingly artificial, a self-conscious docudrama hybrid. Isaacs licenses, or rather pretends to, live-action characters from his previous acclaimed documentaries to a fictional AI research lab called Artificial Verity at the fictional University of Southern England, so that the lab’s software can be “trained” to create on-screen AI human characters.

The research staff in the laboratory are played by actors, or at any rate people who act; Among them is the independent Lebanese director Lynn Al-Safah. Isaacs had amusing scripted conversations about this project with a non-consenting AI avatar on screen, like old Max Headroom, whose face was digitally modeled after Romanian actor Ilinca Manolache, from Radu Jude’s Don’t Expect Much of the Apocalypse. However, the film does not show the process by which Manolaci was approached and her face transformed into an AI character.

The supposed goal of all this is to create an AI version of an exiled Uyghur man called Ablikim Rahman, who already exists and runs a restaurant in London, on the ostensible basis that the resulting AI character will be able to say therapeutic things that a real person cannot. (Er… really? Why couldn’t he? It seems condescending to such a generous, intelligent man. But maybe that’s another fictional conceit.) Then we see an image of Rahman’s face on the screen, as he speaks openly about his emotional challenges. So this is ostensibly an image of an AI, although it certainly looks more realistic than Manolaci’s face. She then gets into trouble with her fake employer at the university for speaking to a Uyghur person when the university relies heavily on Chinese money, as well as for her anti-Israel views.

Isaac’s work is much admired but I admit I found this unsatisfying and insubstantial.