Gareth Edwards’ Concerns About AI Wound Up Eerily Prescient

Ever since we first caught wind of The Creator, the sci-fi epic from Gareth Edwards hitting theaters this Friday, there’s been an uncanny elephant in the room regarding artificial intelligence. Indeed, not only is Edwards’ premise of human soldiers facing off against AI-controlled robots a bit too timely for comfort, but the film’s imminent release just days after the Writers Guild of America finally got the strike-ending deal they deserved—complete with AI regulations—is nothing short of bizarrely poetic.

To call Edwards‘ foresight impeccable (if you could call it that, of course) would be a hefty understatement. When the filmmaker first began penning the screenplay for The Creator, artificial intelligence wasn’t nearly the hot-button issue it is now. Nowadays, of course, every other person is chatting about and sweating over it, so The Creator picked an eerily perfect time to rear its head.

And Edwards, in his own way, couldn’t agree more. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the creative force behind Rogue One reminisced on the roadmap that The Creator has followed over the years, contrasting older attitudes towards artificial intelligence and the subsequent, puzzled reception towards his idea, with those of today that have, according to him, gone as far as making parts of his movie cheekily trite.

It was a real hurdle getting everybody over that line to see why AI might be a bad thing. Cut to today, when the film’s coming out, and it’s hilarious watching the opening few minutes of the movie because you’re so already there. It just makes the film more resonant, I think. But now it feels like we’re preaching to the choir in this first scene of the movie.

In any case, here’s hoping that The Creator goes down as a great sci-fi blockbuster instead of a too-close-to-home cautionary tale. Now, are we necessarily barreling towards guerilla warfare against our toasters and self-driving cars at the moment? No, not exactly, but one could have arguably said the same thing about barreling towards a world where we were seriously considering letting computers make all the art while we humans got stuck with all the diminishing returns-laden labor five years ago, so who’s to say what’s in store going forward?

(featured image: 20th Century Studios)