"Synthetic Sincerity" Review: Marc Isaacs' AI Film Is Shallow and Frustrating

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A combination of fact and fiction leaves the celebrated documentarian’s puzzling project about software training wanting for depth

Marc Isaacs’ new film is a curious, intriguing, semi-sincere affair that I couldn’t make friends with. It is an odd, shallow piece of work about artificial intelligence that is itself exasperatingly artificial, a self-aware docudrama hybrid. Isaacs is, or rather pretends to be, licensing the vivid characters from his previous, acclaimed documentaries to a fictional AI research lab called Synthetic Sincerity at the fictional University of Southern England, so that the lab’s software can be “trained” in the creation of AI human figures on screen.

The lab’s research staff are played by actors, or at any rate people acting; these include Lebanese independent film-maker Lynn El Safah. Isaacs has amusing scripted conversations about this project with a disapproving AI avatar on screen, like Max Headroom of old, whose face is digitally modelled on Romanian actor Ilinca Manolache, from Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World . The film, however, does not show the process by which Manolache was approached and her face transformed into an AI figure.

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