Demis Hassabis and Darren Aronofsky met in 1999 when they were invited to speak at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London about the future of storytelling. At the time, Hassabis was a video game developer; today he is CEO of Google’s DeepMind AI lab and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Aronofsky had released his debut feature Pi in 1998 and would go on to direct the Oscar-winning Black Swan and The Whale. Now, his new film company, Primordial Soup, is joining forces with Hassabis and DeepMind to produce short narrative films using AI. Three are already in the works.
Demis, why is using AI in filmmaking interesting to you?
Demis Hassabis: It stems from my games background. I started by doing game design and programming. That’s how I got into AI, actually. I love this fusion of technology enabling creativity. During the golden era of games in the 1990s, we were exploring a whole new art form, one which fused the best of technology with the best of design. We didn’t just make games, we were inventing whole new genres, such as the best-selling simulation game Theme Park which I co-designed and programmed in 1994, aged 17. I see the work I’m doing now with AI and these AI tools that we’re building [being used] for creativity.
Darren, what’s the idea behind your new film company Primordial Soup?
Darren Aronofsky: “Make soup, not slop” is the working model right now. All of us have seen things [generated by AI] that we’ve never seen before, but for some reason they kind of go in your head and then they just dissipate and you don’t really quite remember them. I was wondering why that was, and I think what’s missing is storytelling — the emotion to the slop. And that’s why I started to think about how we can use this incredibly powerful technology to aid our storytelling. I know if I was 27 right now, trying to make my first film, it would be me and five friends in a room with computers trying to figure out how this all works and what type of stories we can tell.
Demis, besides your video game background, are you also a movie fan?
DH: Massively. This is why Darren and I bonded so well. Science fiction was a big inspiration for me from the beginning, including probably my favourite film Blade Runner. I loved the music and aesthetic but also its deep exploration of artificial consciousness, and what it means to be human. I have many friends who are in the film business and my whole family is on the creative side. My father is just about to stage an opera that he’s written in his retirement, my sister’s a composer and pianist — my whole family is in the arts. I’m the black sheep working in science and games.
Darren, you’ve released a trailer for the short film ‘Ancestra’, directed by Eliza McNitt. What part did AI play and where do humans come in?
DA: Human performance is still amazing and something that we wanted to capture for this piece. But Eliza’s film is “inspired by the day she was born” — there were many things in her vision that were completely unphotographable and purely imaginative. The AI models have to be pushed to imagine as well, and they’re creating stuff that’s never really existed before.
The press materials for ‘Ancestra’ mention input from members of the Screen Actors Guild. AI was a big concern during the Hollywood strikes in 2023. Have you spoken to the unions about what you’re doing?
DA: We have producers who talked to them. But the unions are all leaning into how they’re going to work with this technology. There’s an unbelievable amount of workers, different types of artisans and technicians that have come together to work on “Ancestra”. I should probably do a count, but I’m sure the crew list is huge, almost like the size of a normal feature film for a short film because the tools and the technology are brand new.
Many people in Hollywood are freaking out about AI. Should they be?
DA: For storytelling, technology replacing human involvement is in the realm of science fiction. Being on set and seeing how it takes hundreds of different types of artists and crafts people to come together to make a single moment, itself all anchored upon the performance of a real person who’s totally unique and then has to carry that story over a length of time — it’s a very complicated thing to do.
Demis, what’s in it for DeepMind and Google?
DH: The creative process is going to change a lot in a couple of years, and that’s exciting. So we want to provide the right tools for creators. We’re getting input from musicians and filmmakers like Darren [DeepMind’s other collaborations include Donald Glover and Jacob Collier] to tell us what they need and what sorts of things they want the models to be able to do.
For the average user, this will come to things like YouTube in some way. But what’s exciting from a research perspective is: if you want your AI system to understand the world around you, it needs to understand the physical world. What does the model know about intuitive physics, about lighting and gravity and material behaviour of liquids? That’s the sort of understanding you would need.
DA: It’s like the early days of hip hop and sampling when there were just so many possibilities of what music could be suddenly.
Demis, do you think in 10 or 15 years an AI will be able to develop a particular vision or a visual style the way filmmakers do?
DH: Currently, these tools are not capable of making up new starts. They’re more extrapolations of what’s already known. Can these systems actually come up with new conjectures, not just solve an existing one? The answer right now is no. So there’s clearly still something missing from these systems, out-of-the box thinking or true invention, that the great creatives, whether they’re scientists or artists like Einstein or Picasso, can do.
DA: What do you call that? Intuition?
DH: I would call it “true invention”. Humans have analogical reasoning — it’s like, oh, I’ve got all this knowledge, and then I found some underlying pattern in this other area that this could map to. Our AI systems are still not capable of that. But one day they might be.
Lots of people are researching these things: can you codify curiosity? I think that kind of out-of-the-box invention requires a few extra skills beyond just pattern matching. It requires good judgment, good taste. That’s what separates good scientists from great scientists, and I’m pretty sure good artists from great artists. If you’re lucky in science, which I know a lot about, they always say, I can smell this idea is a good one. And we don’t have that yet in these AI systems.
DA: The last time Demis and I hung out, I asked: how far are we from a masterpiece [comparable to one] by Martin Scorsese coming out of AI prompts? He wasn’t sure that would ever happen, but something’s happening with these images that’s exciting. Someone’s going to figure out how to tell stories with this in a new way.
‘Ancestra’ premieres at Tribeca Film Festival, New York, on June 13, tribecafilm.com
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