Synthetic Honesty Analysis – Marc Isaacs’s inquiry into AI struggles with identity and existence | Video

MIsaacs’ new arc is a passionate, engaging, honest film that I couldn’t make friends with. It’s an odd, shallow work about artificial intelligence that’s itself annoyingly artificial, a self-aware docudrama hybrid. Isaacs, or pretends to be, is giving permission to previously mentioned characters, well-known to a fictional AI laboratory called Synthetic Sincerity at a fictional university in Southern England, so that the lab’s programs can be “trained” in creating human AI figures on the screen.

The lab researchers are played by actors, or in any case acting people; these include Lebanese independent filmmaker Lynn El Safah. Isaacs has a funny conversation about the project with an avatar of the opposition AI on the screen, like the old Max Headroom, whose face is created by the Romanian actress Ilinca Manolache, from Radu Jude. Don’t Expect Much From The End Of The World. The video, however, does not show the way Manolache approached and his face was changed to an AI image.

The idea behind all of this is to create an AI version of an exiled Uyghur man named Ablikim Rahman, who actually exists and runs a restaurant in London, for the apparent reason that the AI ​​results will be able to say therapeutic things that a real person could not. (Erm…really? Why didn’t he? It seems to like this polite and intelligent man. But maybe that’s another piece of fiction.) Then we see a picture of Rahman’s face on TV, talking candidly about his mental problems. So this is an AI image, although it looks more real than Manolache’s face. El Safah then gets into trouble with his self-styled university boss for talking to a Uyghur man when the university is heavily dependent on Chinese funding, and for his anti-Israel sentiments.

Isaacs’ work is much appreciated but I admit that this was unsatisfying and unnecessary.