Google Tries Funding Short Films Showing 'Less Nightmarish' Visions of AI

'For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast AI as a villain that can turn into a killing machine,' writes the Los Angeles Times. 'Even Steven Spielberg's relatively hopeful A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future.'

But now 'Google — a leading developer in AI technology — wants to move the cultural conversations away from the technology as seen in The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina.'. So they're funding short films 'that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light,' produced by Range Media Partners (which represents many writers and actors)
So far, two short films have been greenlit through the project: One, titled 'Sweetwater,' tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. It is the first project they are working on together. The other, 'Lucid,' examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream....

Google has much riding on convincing consumers that AI can be a force for good, or at least not evil. The hot space is increasingly crowded with startups and established players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The Google-funded shorts, which are 15 to 20 minutes long, aren't commercials for AI, per se. Rather, Google is looking to fund films that explore the intersection of humanity and technology, said Mira Lane, vice president of technology and society at Google. Google is not pushing their products in the movies, and the films are not made with AI, she added... The company said it wants to fund many more movies, but it does not have a target number. Some of the shorts could eventually become full-length features, Google said....

Negative public perceptions about AI could put tech companies at a disadvantage when such cases go before juries of laypeople. That's one reason why firms are motivated to makeover AI's reputation. 'There's an incredible amount of skepticism in the public world about what AI is and what AI will do in the future,' said Sean Pak, an intellectual property lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, on a conference panel. 'We, as an industry, have to do a better job of communicating the public benefits and explaining in simple, clear language what it is that we're doing and what it is that we're not doing.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.