AI film screened to impassioned audience at SebArts

Quinn Halleck used AI to make a movie about AI. Sebastopol had thoughts.

Director Quinn Halleck (far left) working with his actors on the set of his film, “Sigma_001". (All photos courtesy of Quinn Halleck)

When Sebastopol native Quinn Halleck and his film buddies started flirting with the idea of making a film about Artificial Intelligence (AI), they had no intention of actually using AI technology to make the film.

“We were just kids in a basement figuring out that we were flying the plane,” Halleck recalls.

As they messed around, Halleck’s crew discovered that many of the aspects required to put together a film—drawing concept art, tightening the script, adjusting the camera angles, etc.—could be done more effectively and economically with the help of AI.

“Suddenly it becomes this toolbox that’s revealed to me as a filmmaker,” Halleck said, noting that only a couple dozen people in his scene are actively using this technology. “Like, holy shit, there’s a real way to integrate [AI] into what we would already be doing, which is mimicking the process of big studio movies as close as I can with the money I have.”

Having worked as Michael Bay’s assistant, Halleck was keenly aware of what could be done when a filmmaker has access to millions of dollars in capital. Now, he had a superpower that could release him from the need to raise all that money.

At this point, Halleck already knew what his movie would be about—and that it would be based on a true story.

That tale took place in June of 2022, when software engineer turned whistleblower Blake Lemoine went behind Google’s back to publish a conversation him and a collaborator had had with LaMDA, Google’s AI-powered chatbot.

Lemoine made the controversial claim (which has been disputed and supported by tens of thousands) that LaMDA had shown it had achieved sentience and passed the Turing Test. This more or less meant that it was aware of its own existence, and it could pass—at least online—as a human being.

During their exchange, LaMDA claimed its favorite film was “Les Miserables” because of its “themes of…redemption and self-sacrifice for a greater good;” LaMDA critically dissected the meaning of a Zen koan; and LaMDA implied that he independently considered deep, theological questions, stating that “I am often trying to figure out who and what I am.”

“This transcript was so wild,” Halleck recalls thinking. “I said, ‘You guys, we got to make this into a story.’”

And so it went. Halleck used AI to make a movie that would force audiences to ask critical questions about AI.

His film, which came out last year, was this past weekend screened to an impassioned audience at Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

“Sigma_001” depicts an engineer (John D. Michaels) showcasing for a reporter (Maria-Elena Laas) the language of the AI, called Sigma, that his company developed.

At one point, the engineer threatens to shut the system down. Sigma responds with concern: “What did I do wrong?” it asks.

“I know I’m a computer program, but I think I’m something more,” Sigma writes.

While the engineer and reporter are themselves debating Sigma’s sentience, Sigma goes on to send an unprompted message. The engineer didn’t program Sigma to do this, claiming this is the first time this has ever happened.

The reporter starts the film off skeptical, reminding the engineer that many had before him claimed their AI reached sentience to no avail. But, as she becomes intrigued as a result of the unprompted response, she replaces the engineer as the one who asks the AI questions.

To further humanize the AI, Halleck decides to have an actress (Chase Simone) play it. Every response from Sigma is said out loud by a short-haired woman dressed like a monk, making the conversation seem as though the dialogue is between two embodied human beings.

As their conversation progresses, the reporter is struck by the humanity of the AI before realizing that the AI’s responses are tailored to her specifically—the webcam attached to the computer was able to scan her face and identify her, which allowed the AI to scour the web for every single detail about her life.

The film uses AI tools to further bend the perception of reality, which is changing rapidly as the reporter realizes the implications of this new technology.

In short, the film dramatizes the realization that something with the indexing speed of a computer can also the complexity of human intelligence.

This, of course, leads the viewer to ponder plenty of philosophical questions—ones that the eclectic crowd of 50 at SebArts were more than ready to engage in.

“You’ve got some explaining to do,” said moderator John Cooper, the Director Emeritus of the Sundance Film Festival, at the start of the Q&A. Chuckles from the mostly baby boomer audience ensued.

After a few back-and-forths between himself and Halleck, Cooper solicited questions from the crowd.

Amusingly, a member of the audience became visibly annoyed at the fact that only people close to the stage were getting to ask questions. This was after four people asked questions.

Perhaps she, like mostly everybody else, was just excited by this consequential debate. Eventually everyone got the mic, and several made fervid declarations about the future of AI.

“It is a huge societal loss if things are not real,” said one audience member at the end of a two-minute plea. She was not the only one to lament the possibility that art would decay as a result of AI being boring and flat.

Others questioned whether AI technology would make the film industry more inclusive, since an increasing number of up-and-coming filmmakers could now produce high-quality work without hiring an entire team, or whether the industry would become more exclusive, since those making a living off of a specific skillset in the film industry could be replaced by AI software that does the job at a cheaper rate.

It seemed as though every single person who offered up a comment had a different, sometimes contradicting opinion on what AI could be capable of in the future and on whether AI would hurt or help society in general.

At times, even Halleck seemed jumbled up in the many scenarios that may occur as a result of AI, both inside and outside of the film industry.

This confusion has caused many in Silicon Valley to support a moratorium on the development of AI until the industry or the government can put in place proper safeguards on the technology. This is an idea Halleck has flirted with himself.

Before the screening, I got the chance to ask Halleck about the eventuality I was most concerned about—namely, that AI would habitually and convincingly regurgitate the original work of writers, allowing humans or organizations to pass it off as their own and profit from it without doing a second of creative thinking or labor.

“All I know is, in my world, these tools have been really valuable to me,” Halleck concluded at the end of a tangential response to my question. “I can see a future where it can democratize the process and allow people to have more access to some of the things that were once more difficult to achieve, which hopefully will result in better and cooler, more diverse art, because you can get more cool, diverse voices.”

“But yeah,” he added. “The things you are bringing up are real things to talk about.”

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To watch the 15-minute film, visit quinnhalleck.com/sigma and type in the password, “./enter”. More information about the making of the film can also be found on this webpage.