Matthew Modine Signs On To Exec Produce AI Doc ‘I Hope This Helps!’

Getty/Daniel Freed Productions

EXCLUSIVE: Actor-producer Matthew Modine and Adam Rackoff’s Cinco Dedos Peliculas manufacturing firm have signed on as government producers of I Hope This Helps!, a documentary that explores the promise and peril of synthetic intelligence.

Author-director Daniel Freed enlisted Google’s AI chatbot Bard to assist create the documentary, described as a “humorous, genre-bending hybrid movie” that invitations viewers to ponder “the evolving relationship between humanity and know-how.”

Responding to prompts from the filmmaker, Google’s Bard usual a furry blue creature with massive eyes to (one imagines) reduce the menacing specter of AI.

“Synthetic intelligence is a very powerful, life-altering technological development in fashionable human historical past. Full cease,” Modine mentioned in a press release. As a SAG-AFTRA board member, Modine was deeply engaged within the contentious contract talks final 12 months between the actors’ union and the Alliance of Movement Image and Tv Producers, a dispute that was solely resolved after a virtually four-month-long strike. AI turned one of many principal sticking factors in these negotiations, with actors insisting on protections for the way the know-how could be utilized in movie and tv manufacturing.

“Science fiction literature, tv exhibits, and films have repeatedly introduced tales that depict the multitude of potential risks of synthetic intelligence for all of us. As usually occurs, science fiction turns into science truth. And right here we’re. The A.I. tail wagging the A.I. canine,” Modine continued in his assertion. “The gatekeepers of A.I. possess the facility to change and management human habits in ways in which had been unimaginable only a half century in the past. Daniel Freed’s new documentary movie makes use of satire and whimsy to query whether or not or not the advantages of A.I. would possibly outweigh the numerous dangers. Adam Rackoff and I and Cinco Dedos Peliculas are thrilled to affix the I Hope This Helps! group. This is a movie that must be seen.”

I Hope This Helps! premiered in Could on the prestigious DocLands Documentary Movie Pageant in San Rafael, California. It’ll proceed a competition run earlier than wider distribution plans are introduced.

“This venture started as an effort to convey extra individuals into the dialog about how A.I. is altering the world we dwell in,” Freed famous. “We’re past thrilled to have Matthew and Adam associate with us,” mentioned Daniel Freed. “Not solely have they got a wealth of expertise on the planet of impartial movie, Matthew has thought deeply about synthetic intelligence in his roles as an actor and as an advocate for different actors. Having contemplated the theme of know-how’s unintended penalties on humanity in Oppenheimer, he additionally eloquently shared his ideas about A.I. whereas engaged on the latest SAG-AFTRA negotiations.”

I Hope This Helps! is written and directed by Daniel Freed and options the work of cinematographer Brendan Hubbard, editor Joshua Bowen, and composer John E. Low — all of whom beforehand labored collectively on CNBC’s white-collar crime documentary sequence American Greed.

Cinco Dedos Peliculas (CDP) is a movie and new media manufacturing firm co-founded by Modine with producer and former Apple advertising and marketing government Adam Rackoff. Modine and Rackoff have government produced a number of award-winning movies, environmental documentaries, and animated options, together with In opposition to the Present (2021) and My Love Affair with Marriage (2023). Their latest documentary, Downwind, chronicles the fallout from many years of nuclear bomb testing on American soil. Downwind is narrated by Martin Sheen and options Michael Douglas, Lewis Black, and John Wayne’s son, Patrick.

Freed labored for 12 years as senior producer and author for CNBC’s American Greed. He’s the co-author of Name Me Commander: A Former Intelligence Officer and the Journalists Who Uncovered His Scheme to Fleece America, a non-fiction guide detailing an audacious charity fraud orchestrated by a person whereas he was needed by the FBI for questioning in an espionage investigation. His work for tv and print has been aired or revealed by PBS, Present TV, The New York Instances, and the Los Angeles Instances.