Making it up … Synthetic SincerityView image in fullscreenMaking it up … Synthetic SincerityReviewSynthetic Sincerity review – Marc Isaacs’ AI interrogation grapples with identity and existenceA combination of fact and fiction leaves the celebrated documentarian’s puzzling project about software training wanting for depthMarc 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.‘Ordinary people are being erased’: one director’s audacious fightback against AI – featuring FrintonRead moreThe 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.The supposed point of it all is to create an AI version of an exiled Uyghur man called Ablikim Rahman, who really does exist and runs a restaurant in London, on the ostensible grounds that the resulting AI figure will be able to say therapeutic things that the real person couldn’t. (Erm … really? Why couldn’t he? It seems patronising to this dignified and intelligent man. But perhaps that is another fictional conceit.) Then we see the image of Rahman’s face on screen, speaking candidly about his emotional challenges. So this is ostensibly an AI image, though it certainly seems a lot more real than the Manolache face. El Safah then gets into made-up trouble with her made-up university employer for speaking to a Uyghur person when the university is so dependent on Chinese money, as well as for her anti-Israel views.Isaacs’ work is much admired but I confess I found this unsatisfying and insubstantial.Explore more on these topicsFilmDocumentary filmsDrama filmsAI (artificial intelligence)ComputingreviewsShareReuse this content