Mountainhead creator says he ‘scraped AI companies back’ to make his movie

Mountainhead writer and director Jesse Armstrong has said he’s “pretty sure that the AI companies have been scraping my material along with everyone else’s to train their large language models,” and that to find the right voices for the movie’s tech-bro characters, “I’ve been scraping them back.” 

Mountainhead, which lands on HBO this weekend, is a dark satire about a group of tech billionaires who retreat to a secluded mountain lodge during a global crisis —  a crisis that’s exacerbated by their own creations, including highly convincing AI-generated deepfakes and a social media platform that fuels misinformation and instability.

Speaking in an interview broadcast on Tuesday by the BBC’s The World Tonight, Armstrong said that his “scraping” process involved accessing large amounts of content online to help him shape the characters’ voices, “especially the tech CEOs and founders, because they all make themselves available on innumerable podcast and TED talks.” 

The Succession showrunner and co-writer added: “It was crucial for me to tune into their particular voices, partly the vocabulary, a bit the philosophy, the whole package of how they approach the world with this tremendous confidence. Getting that voice was actually the reason that I pitched the film because I couldn’t get that overweening confident voice out of my head, and it’s a funny voice because it lacks a certain amount of self-awareness.”

AI companies like ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Google, and Meta are known to use (or scrape) online content to train their large language models (LLMs), which power the AI platforms. It’s a controversial issue, with creators understandably upset at having their content used without permission, recognition, or payment. 

On the topic of how generative AI could impact his own industry, Armstrong commented that “eventually it will be able to do pretty much everything.”

When asked if it can already write as well as him, Armstrong laughed, saying, “People can judge for themselves,” adding, “At the moment, the part of it which is creative is somewhat limited. Their large language models are predictive and they give you a bit of what you want and a bit of what they think might come next so they’re pretty good at mimicry, not great at creativity. But I’m sure that part will come.”

Mountainhead premieres on HBO on Saturday, May 31.