AI anxiety comes to Telluride, with Bill Gates sounding the alarm

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Set us as preferred TELLURIDE, Colo. — For four days every Labor Day weekend, the Telluride Film Festival turns this tiny mountain town into something of a refuge from the outside world.Tucked into a box canyon and far from the usual machinery of Hollywood, moviegoers spend their days seeing films they may have known little about before arriving and talking about them almost nonstop.Artificial intelligence, apparently, did not get the memo.This year, even Telluride’s usually self-contained movie bubble couldn’t keep out the existential anxieties surrounding AI.

On Saturday, the festival devoted two events to the subject, beginning with “The Humanity Dilemma,” an hourlong multimedia presentation mixing dire warnings with live music and imagery, and continuing with a panel bluntly titled “AI AI AI,” featuring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.Introducing “The Humanity Dilemma” at the nearly packed Sheridan Opera House, festival executive director Julie Huntsinger acknowledged that Telluride normally steers clear of taking political sides.“We just let the program speak for us,” Huntsinger said.But on AI, she made an exception.“We are a very humanist festival — that’s how we identify,” Huntsinger said.

“AI is a threat.” While acknowledging potentially beneficial applications, she urged the audience to become more engaged in the debate over its development.“We all need to be very alert and vigilant and loving and kind and stop this s—,” she said, earning loud whoops of approval from some in the crowd.Entertainment & Arts The AI revolution is reshaping the creative foundations of Hollywood — from storytelling and performance to production, labor and power.

In Hollywood Tomorrow, we explore its impact from all angles.AI already occupies an uneasy place in Hollywood, where filmmakers and...