Artificial writer responds to Sam Altman’s criticism of the film

Artificial screenwriter Simon Rich said the filmmakers aimed to portray OpenAI’s history accurately. In a City AM interview, he responded to Sam Altman’s earlier negative assessment of the trailer.

Rich said the writers used real individuals instead of combining several people into composite characters and checked who had been present at depicted events. He said social media posts shown in the film reproduced the originals with precise timestamps.

The screenwriter nevertheless acknowledged that some scenes had to be dramatised because the filmmakers were not witnesses to every conversation. Rich’s assertions of accuracy are his assessment and do not establish documentary reliability for every scene.

Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial screened at the London Film Festival. Andrew Garfield plays Altman and Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever. The festival programme describes the film as an account of OpenAI’s rise and the period when Altman was removed from its leadership. Its subjects include work on the technology behind ChatGPT, released in 2022.