Filmmaker Bennett Miller on the Imperative of Artistic Innovation in the Age of AI

Around 2015, after finishing the acclaimed movie Foxcatcher, the filmmaker Bennett Miller began working on a documentary about AI. 

Though it was years before Chat GPT brought the technology to mainstream attention, he managed to capture a bracing, far-sighted vision of how AI could change society and culture through interviews with tech founders, venture capitalists, scientists, artists, and everyone in between, from Sam Altman to Tom Stoppard. After filming was done, Bennett received early access to DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generator. 

Fast-forward to today. The documentary, a six-part series called A Better World, has become frozen in a hazy legal purgatory and is yet to be released. But Bennett is a man transformed. Today he is a virtuosic AI artist whose spectral, sepia-toned images—surreal technological echoes of 19th-century ghost photography—have been displayed around the world by Gagosian Gallery, most recently in a Paris show that ended earlier this month.

So, what has he learned on his voyage into the strange heart of AI? And how has it shaped his thinking about how art functions today?