Corporate needs you to tell the difference between these two pictures.
Photo-Illustration: Photos: Getty, Illustration: Vulture
Maggie Gyllenhaal is outlining the limits of AI on the Lido. At the Venice International Film Festival, the jury president explained how she had tried to use AI to turn Dakota Johnson into Marilyn Monroe for her short film Flesh Impact. The film pulls an Old Custer and presupposes that maybe Monroe didn’t die at the age of 36, juxtaposing a 100-year-old Marilyn with one in her 30s played by Johnson. “The people who commissioned this project from me asked me to use AI,” Gyllenhaal said. “And I went for it. I was like, ‘All right, I’m curious. I don’t know, let’s see.’”
Gyllenhaal stressed that the AI she used wasn’t OpenAI but one that trained exclusively on Monroe pictures licensed for that purpose. Yet it was all for naught. “The idea was that we trained it on her; we then put her face on Dakota’s face. We worked hard at it, and in the end, I threw it away because what was coming through Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe was so much more moving, human, alive,” the director said.
Gyllenhaal added that the environmental impacts of AI aren’t worth the mid product anyway. “In America,” she said, “there’s a big conversation in South Memphis about the data centers. That’s a problem, so we should acknowledge that.” Just this week, a data center in Oklahoma lost 3 million gallons of water in a leak while the rest of the state faces a drought. If you want to evoke Marilyn Monroe, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: claim her ghost visited your set.
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