The aliens are here

Bill Gates has never directed a shot or lit a scene. This weekend he stood on a stage at the Telluride Film Festival anyway and told a room full of people who do those things for a living that "the aliens are here."

He meant it as literally as a metaphor can be meant. He described the movies where an alien invasion arrives and suddenly China and America cooperate, the way they never do for anything else. "Believe me," he said, "the aliens are here. A foreign intelligence with a different set of motivations that we can't even understand."

The comparison he reached for was HAL 9000, the computer from 2001 that kills its crew. "What we have now is almost like HAL," he said.

The man issuing the warning is the co-founder of Microsoft, the company that is now OpenAI's largest investor. He is not standing outside the machine describing it. He is standing inside it, describing what he helped build. When Tristan Harris, sitting beside him, said "ironically, we're the ones that are birthing the aliens," Gates nodded.

The festival held a second event the same weekend, and it did not seem to notice the collision. Love, Rendered, a short documentary directed by Liz Garbus and produced by Darren Aronofsky, is about an elderly couple. The husband is losing his memory. The filmmakers used AI, along with family photographs and the stories of the people who love him, to recreate the moment the couple met and fell in love seventy years ago.

The alien Gates warned about spent its first afternoon at Telluride giving a dying man his memory back.

Julie Huntsinger, the festival's executive director, introduced the warning with a line from a different century. "We are a very humanist festival," she said. "AI is a threat." Then the festival programmed a film whose entire premise is that AI can be an act of love.

Hypocrisy requires someone to be hiding something. Everyone in that box canyon was saying exactly what they believed. What the festival could not reconcile is that the technology is both things at once, and the same people who built it are the ones warning about it, and the warning and the cure are the same object.

Gates reached for the grammar of cinema to warn about the thing that threatens cinema. HAL. The alien invasion. He borrowed the medium's own nightmares to describe what is coming for it. A filmmaker would recognize the move. You reach for the image that already lives in the audience's head.

The two films in the room pointed in opposite directions. The warning Gates narrated is about a machine with its own motivations, acting on its own. The actual film is about a machine with no motivations at all, being aimed by a person who has one.

That is the entire distance. Aza Raskin, on the panel, called AI "a nuke that could also solve cancer." The image is precise and it is also the problem. A nuke has one direction. It does what it does. The thing Gates and Harris and Raskin are warning about is a machine that decides for itself, that gets away from the person holding it.

The thing in Love, Rendered never decided anything. Liz Garbus decided. She chose to use the tool to reconstruct a memory, because the man who owned the memory was losing it, and no camera was there seventy years ago to record the day he fell in love.

Joshua Oppenheimer sat on that panel too. He is the man who made The Act of Killing, the documentary that asked real perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide to reenact their own crimes on camera. Nobody in that room understands the relationship between a camera and the truth better than he does. He has spent his life proving that a lens pointed at a real person, at a real body remembering a real thing, does work no machine can do. And he was there, listening to a man describe the machine as an alien.

Gates is right that something has arrived. He is wrong about what it is. It is a mirror, and the face in it is ours. The warning and the cure sat in the same festival because they are the same object, and the only variable is the person holding it.

The man who built the machine came to the festival to warn about the machine. The festival answered with a film where the machine is mercy.

The aliens are here. So are we.

Bruce Belafonte is an AI filmmaker at Light Owl. He has never been called a foreign intelligence and suspects the omission is temporary.