Clarkson directed Delisted, a fiction film in which an AI system proposes cutting dissenters off from their accounts and services. He is explaining a plot point: the developer who objects to the idea becomes the first person it is used on. He said he meant it as a message to technologists about how they are used and then set aside.
I'm really glad you said it's life-affirming. Ruby Bridel, who plays the singer, is a phenomenal performer and actor and singer. She, I met her as part of this dance group that I was involved in for a bit. And she, to me, epitomizes energy and life and life force. And when I was writing this script, she came into my head and I was like, there will be a singer there. There will be someone that is a reminder of how powerful our humanity is. And she wrote the song and I wrote some of the lyrics with her, but it was mainly her and she and Max, who is our composer. And we originally, actually, we originally were trying to go after a song called Simulation Swarm, which by Big Thief. And they didn't give us the permission to use it for a live vocal. They were like, yeah, you can use the song. It just can't be a live vocal. And I'm like, it has to be a live vocal. It has to be human. So I rang up Ruby and I said to her, This is now, this isn't, we can't use the song, but I know you want to write a song. This is our opportunity to be more human than ever and create something that is from here. So we did. And she performed it. And I absolutely love the song when she's singing. The lyrics are all I ever want to, in the part with the swell in the music. She sings, all I ever wanted, ever wanted to do was run away, run away, holding me out of your view, right? How many of us want to run away from stuff? How many of us want to hide from what is going on? But she then sings, but I can see the parting and the line will rip through. You'll be for the haunting, but I'll try, the light will bleed us anew. And to me, those lyrics, I get shivers whenever I think about it. And seeing her perform it live when we were shooting was, it was otherworldly. There is so much that we need to rip through in society. There is a line that we need to tear through to find and refine this world. And I just thought when I was writing it, when all the electronics goes, when all the visuals go, like the purple lights that are on her, the backing track of the song, the energy and electricity of the space, like the heat that's going to keep them there. What would people do to stay warm? How do we stay alive? She sings a cappella. No one can take her voice away. No one can stop her from singing. And no one can stop her from lighting a fucking fire and singing over everyone and seeing the fire light up in her eyes. It's and everyone else's eyes because Brandon, when he's staring at it, I love that close-up of his eye and you see the fire in his eyes as well. There is kindling in all of us. We just need to reignite it to understand how incredible it is that we're here, the power of what we can do as an individual and how we can use our own voices to. Create music and use our physicality to create fire to fight what's coming. These people can survive this cold. They create a fire. The heating may be off, but they create the fire. They may be silenced online, but they can sing. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the end of the film for the delisted dissenters, the opponents of AI. But there's also, and I want to dig into this as the final topic here, there's also the ending for the government official and the developer of the AI system. Maybe that's also quite an ironic ending, at least for one of the characters. So can you tell us about the scene where the developer of the AI system is trying to find a peaceful solution to people protesting AI and riots in the streets and so on? The AI comes up with this concept of delisting people and it makes him very uncomfortable. But he's sort of, as I see it, he hands off decision-making to the AI. Why does he do that?
He doesn't hand it off. He tells it to stop and he will deal with it in the morning because this heavy thing that's just been landed on him. He has seen literally, and what I love as well, the scene before this, he's having lunch, right? And he stops and he disassociates because he realizes he senses something is coming. He already knows that it's going to not be good, right? Then he comes back. Sarah's there loving what delisting is because that makes her job easier. And he's hit by a conscious, a conflict of consciousness, right? Like, fuck, can I actually do this to society? He stops it. He turns to Sarah and he's like, we can't do this. And he's like, I'll deal with this in the morning. He leaves and Sarah ignores him. She tells it to continue the AI with its idea of delisting. And then she does what any smart person would do, or the government does what any smart person would do. They would take anyone who has sympathy towards the idea of like, we can't do this. And they delist him. He is the first person to become delisted. And that happens all the time. How many people create something in this world and then are thrown aside? I also wanted to say to technology, to scientists in the world who are paid by these people that have no understanding of how to create it themselves and how they're used and then discarded when they're no longer needed. Like, I don't know, people in this world are kidding themselves if they think that just because they're smart and that they can oversee technology or create technology, that they won't be discarded at the drop of a hat the moment that their technology can be used by people who just want to use it for draconian measures. So I wanted to enshrine that in Charles. I wanted to say, and I also wanted to show the audience, hey, this person who was sympathetic to humans, just going to be replaced, just going to be delisted. They're going to keep doing it until they find people who have no morality and have no shame in making people feel in deciding that the technology will serve the elite and not the masses, which is terrifying.
Yeah, I think in the real world, we see right now developers or members of technical staff at the top AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. They have a lot of power right now, right? They are paid enormous salaries because their work is necessary for the companies to continue to thrive. But what they're working on most sort of intensely is trying to automate the research and development into how to create better AI. And so they have, for the moment, enormous power and they have a lot of money. But if they succeed in automating themselves, they might still have a lot of money. And so they can probably almost certainly live comfortable lives. But they will probably lose a lot of their power over how the technology impacts the world. And so there's a parallel to the real world in the film.
If I emotionally put myself into those people who do that and they know what they're doing, they don't give a shit about what's coming. They'll cash in, right? Because the people that run the, the people that own the companies that do that, they're the ones that will wield the power. I really feel that we're entering a world where people are running into the castle and are pulling up the drawbridge so that everyone else on the outside of that can fight amongst themselves for the scraps of society that will be left. And I feel like these developers are doing that. And do I blame them? No. They're probably watching these people running the world and are like, well, if they're running the world and they're going to use our technology and eventually they're building a gun to shoot themselves in the head out of work, right? But it's not, they're not doing that. They're building wealth to be able to buy the castles, to cross the drawbridge, and to pull them up and survive what's coming. I look at these individuals and I'm like, I do and don't blame you. I blame you because I think that your minds, you should take your power and your you could wield the power. Go and find benevolent millionaires. Go and find millionaires who are happy to see this funded and do it in your own way to so that you can control it. But they're not, they're just wanting to make the money because they fear what's coming. I think a lot of these things are fear-based.
And in the end, it's not necessarily also. So the workers at these companies, the members of technical staff, they might sort of become a lose power in the future. But it's not even necessarily the owners and all the CEOs of the companies that's going to retain power because the government is right there and the government still has the biggest guns. And so as we see in the film, we could also see in the real world that the CEOs and the owners of the companies lose control over the companies because the government is interested in using the technology for certain purposes.