The call comes as I am running through nettles in a bikini, wellies and a cooking apron having just spotted deer at the bottom of the field. I know it’s an image to conjure with. I mention it just to say I wasn’t in what you might call a “sitting down” frame of mind.
“Would you like to go to the Venice Film Festival in a week’s time?” the voice asks. “George Clooney is on the panel for a chat about human creativity in the age of AI.”
Because of the apron, the deer, the nettles and the general bewilderment I am on the verge of saying no. It’s all slightly too much. The only machine learning I have done all summer is the wildlife camera I keep accidentally walking in front of whilst checking to see if the boys have positioned it properly.
I am genuinely not sure I can get up to speed with George and AI and Venice and footwear without rubber soles.
The voice says it will call back.
A week later I am on the Easyjet flight to Venice. The panel will also have a Vatican cardinal to talk about algorethics – which possibly sounds better in Italian – with Signal president Meredith Whittaker, artist Mark Quinn, sculptor Kennedy Yanko, the film director Lee Daniels, director of Cinema Paradiso Giuseppe Tornatore, and Maggie Gyllenhaal who is presiding over the Venice judging this year.
Our task is to ask whether fake intelligence, and the speed at which language models are learning, is a threat just to our work or to the whole of human existence. We have an hour.
But first we have an even trickier bit of navigation: the Venice waterways in the dead of night. The plane lands late and I’ve promised to be at the welcome dinner – Ristorante Da Ivo – before the party breaks up.
The water taxi pulls up at what looks like a cupboard onto the canal. This is Da Ivo’s back door as paparazzi have sealed off the restaurant’s front.
An overly energetic boatman propels me from his taxi through the cupboard door and into the lap of our host, Charles Finch, who without missing a beat greets me and wheels me over to meet George (yes that one) and Amal (yes that one) and a wonderful French score composer – “Emiliee do not fuck up our Bayeux Tapestry please” – Alexandre Desplat.
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And in this room, full of the most creative people in film, I do what any idiot in my position would do and start talking US politics with George.
I hear the story of Joe Biden’s exit, of Kamala’s entry, the part Obama played alongside him in getting the elderly president to retire. I hear whom he rates on the slate of up and coming Democrats (Jon Ossoff, GA) and I listen to the phenomenal work they are both doing to free journalists imprisoned across the globe. It is simultaneously mind-blowing and actually tremendously easy. And then another martini appears and I realise why.
The next morning, I wake early to the sound of vaporetti, and gentle teenage breathing from the next-door room. Perhaps this is the moment to explain I’ve actually crashed my youngest son’s Interrail adventure by offering him and his friends a bed in Venice and a slap-up lunch when my work here is done.
I throw open the windows to see the Scuola vecchia della Misericordia, where the event will take place, a mere bridge away. This majestic old building has, in that typically Venetian way, been both a synagogue and a basketball court in its colourful history. Today it will host journalists and invited guests from around the world for two panel sessions and a total of 14 speakers.
It is a lot of voices to make sense of the vast and sprawling subject. I am expecting to talk about democratisation of film-making, ownership, the sense of the organic versus the inanimate.
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But the conversation takes a curious turn. There is near consensus that this is not really about humans versus machines. It’s about five or so singularly, superlatively rich men versus the rest of humanity.
This is what is angering Venice right now. Faced with that epiphany, I start to push for more concrete solutions. Would Clooney commit not to work with tech giants like Amazon Prime if he thinks they’re central to the unravelling of humanity? What position should the Catholic Church take towards big tech and the power it wields. I turn to the Cardinal and ask if he would decree the power of Google, Facebook etc to be “evil”.
He understands English, but he will respond in Italian – everyone must wear headphones for the simultaneous translation. I grope to find them, and realise with cold sweat horror that Clooney has nabbed mine by mistake instead of the ones on his left.
I daren’t break the flow, so I furrow my brows in what I hope appears to be concentration at his fast-flowing, if lengthy, Italian.
At the end, desperate for a linguistic escape route, I turn to the rest of the panel and ask: “And would any of you here disagree with what the Cardinal has just told us?”
It will be my son’s friend Hugo, studying theology at Oxford, who will explain to me afterwards that it takes the Catholic Church about 600 years to declare something evil.
“I’m not sure he was going to break that on your stage,” he consoles.
Twenty-fours later I am at the 80s-themed birthday party of Pete Czernin – whose company Blueprint made A Very Royal Scandal with me, and whose partner has just captivated the film festival with Wild Horse Nine. I count 35 Adams Ant, two Top Guns, a Toyah, a Limahl, a former prime minister (not in costume) and a woman wearing an awful lot of tartan. I’m not sure if she’s channelling Fergie or if it’s just a normal night out for the county set. As for us? In the height of summer silliness the husband and I had wondered about going as Thatcher (him) and General Galtieri (me). But as the party rolls around this week, somehow the Falklands theme isn’t feeling quite so retro…
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