Just because the cool kids are doing it, doesn’t mean you need to as well.
Huh? Ya know that social media trend that’s going around where people are posting photos of themselves from 2016?
Everything Everywhere All at Once Oscar winning filmmaker and the producer of this year’s Sundance Focus Feature documentary The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist exclaimed “Don’t do that!”
“They’re (tech companies) are using that to train their machines on you to show people age. Stop it!” exclaimed Kwan at a Hollywood Reporter A.I. panel yesterday moderating by Chris Gardner.
We caught up with Kwan at Deadline’s Studio today to ask him more about it. He warned that “tech companies are running out of data on us.” Hence, if you see these meme-like, social posting trends, don’t partake. It’s all means for tech companies to collect information on us who then sell that data. Per reports in October, the immigration law enforcement agency bought access to an all-in-one surveillance tool that provides updated location data from hundreds of millions of cell phones. Penlink is reportedly behind products known as Tangles and WebLoc. Both were created by an Israeli company called Cobwebs, which merged into Penlink in 2023. ICE has reportedly spent upwards of $5 million for access to the software per Forbes.
Kwan emphasized to Deadline “the need for alternative forms of communication,” meaning independent data services which can operate outside the government. Elon Musk’s Starlink recently was able to smash through Iran’s web blackout.
Kwan’s convo with Gardner largely focused on A.I. and how can responsibly harness it.
“First thing you need to know about an AI docu is that no one wants to do an AI doc, no one on my team wanted to do it. It was one of those things that falls in your lap; the longer you look at it, someone has to help bring clarity to the conversation. Right after Everything Everywhere came out, I was looking at new technologies that were coming out; this was before Google Chat GPT.”
“We’re coming up in a geopolitical corporate arms race of who is getting the biggest market share so that they can try to get AI dominance over the globe so that it helps their economy, their military, all these things,” Kwan told Gardner. What goes wrong here is that these tech corps “are deploying this technology on a society that isn’t ready for it.”
“We need global coordination,” said Kwan in regards to AI.
“My fear is that if the film industry, not just Hollywood, but YouTubers, influencers, if we’re not careful, if we don’t come together to set the terms of our industry, the tech industry is going to set the terms for us. They’re slowly going to siphon up everything until they hold the keys for our industry,” declared Kwan at the confab at Park City’s Pendry Hotel.
“If we don’t build up our collective leverage against the tech industry then basically what’s going to happen is that they will divide and conquer,” Kwan continued.
“We need to become a coordinating hub between all the agencies, all the unions, all the studios, anyone who is concerned about this technology,” he said, “even if we have different opinions, we need to find the areas of overlap which will give us more power.”
What got Kwan going on 2016 was when Gardner asked him to regale about his Sundance breakout film then, Swiss Army Man, with co-director, Daniel Scheinert. The pic won the Daniels the Dramatic Directing Award at the fest, and was acquired by A24.
Quipped Kwan, “I’m realy mad that we’re not in the marketing this year — you don’t want a farting corpse movie?”
