Ashley St Clair and Alex Gibney on AI, the dangers of Elon Musk

VENICE, Italy (AP):

A new documentary about Elon Musk uses an artificial intelligence (AI) avatar to simulate an interview with the SpaceX and Tesla CEO using things he’s really said in interviews. The choice, filmmaker Alex Gibney said on Tuesday in Venice before the film’s world premiere, was intentionally ironic.

It both references Musk’s proposition that we’re all living in a simulation and pokes at his somewhat paradoxical and shifting views of the technology. Gibney said it is to convey the “reality of what he’s done and unreality of his narrative”.

The filmmakers consulted lawyers before going too far down the road and got the sign-off to use the Musk avatar.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker was joined at the Venice Film Festival by Ashley St Clair, once a conservative influencer, who shares a child with Musk and who appears in the film. She talks about their relationship, his character and the non-disclosure agreement she was asked, and refused, to sign to guarantee paternity support.

“I was offered the opportunity not to speak for US$40 million,” she said.

St Clair earlier this year also sued Musk’s AI company, saying its Grok chatbot allowed users to generate sexually exploitative deepfake images of her that have caused her humiliation and emotional distress.

The film goes into Musk’s takeover of X and what Gibney says is the manipulation of the algorithm.

“One thing that I didn’t properly understand when I started the film was how Musk tweaked algorithms at Twitter to, in fact, prioritise vitriol and hate over, you know, the town square,” Gibney said.

Wired reporter Zoë Schiffer, who also appears in the film, added that “he has tweaked the algorithm, both to suppress mainstream journalism and then to augment some of the more inflammatory comments and voices on that platform”.

St Clair said she believes he’s stoking fires and “causing deliberate division that could be catastrophic if it’s not regulated or contained”.

With a runtime of nearly four hours, Musk delves into his traumatic childhood, including an interview with his father, Errol Musk, and traces his early days in Silicon Valley through to his DOGE work with the second Donald Trump administration and involvement in right-wing politics internationally. It was, Gibney said, going to be a much shorter film before Musk wrapped himself in Trump’s campaign.

Those interviewed include Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, his first wife Justine Musk, neurologist Sam Harris, tech reporter Kara Swisher and former USAID administrator Samantha Power.

Gibney said he thinks Musk is “extremely” dangerous to democracy. The film raises alarms about the information the ‘DOGE boys’ gathered on US citizens with their unfettered access to so many government agencies.