VENICE: The Venice Film Festival's artistic director stressed the creative potential of artificial intelligence on Tuesday ahead of the premiere of a documentary made entirely with the technology at the Italian event.
In an AFP interview on the eve of the festival, Alberto Barbera acknowledged the danger but also the capabilities of the emerging technology that has caused panic as well as excitement across a wide swathe of industries.
"There's both danger and advantage. The fact is that up to now we've seen a great many interventions on artificial intelligence driven by fear, by concern over the negative impact AI might have on the whole of humankind, on professional aspects, on copyright, on artists' image and so on and so forth," he said.
Besides understanding how to control the powerful technology, people need to ask how it can "begin to harness the extraordinary potential of this unprecedented technology," he said.
The technology enables artists and directors "to achieve things that until now were not possible," he added.
The prestigious festival on the Venice Lido has programmed a documentary made entirely with AI -- "Be Brave" from Italian director Francesco Carrozzini, which centres on the founder of jeans brand Diesel, Renzo Rosso.
Barbera called it "a very interesting experience."
In the film's line notes, Carrozzini said that the choice to use AI for his documentary about the fashion "provocateur" made sense.
"It does so through an experimental and provocative encounter with the ultimate frontier of our time: Artificial Intelligence."
The festival, which begins on Wednesday, will also host an international symposium -- with George Clooney on the panel -- to discuss what the technology means for the industry.
Movie industry workers remain on the whole opposed to artificial intelligence, fearful of its potential to kill off jobs for animators, scriptwriters and eventually actors.
The director of the Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Fremaux, came out against AI at this year's festival in May, saying it stood with movie industry personnel whose jobs were at risk.
But the festival also programmed a documentary by Oscar-winning "Traffic" director Steven Soderbergh about John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which included some visually jarring AI-generated graphics.
"Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson, a special effects specialist, told festival goers there that he thought AI was "going to destroy the world," but when it came to film, "I don't dislike it at all".