Ashley St. Clair and Alex Gibney on AI and the dangers of Elon Musk

VENICE, Italy (AP) — A new documentary about Elon Musk uses a CGI avatar and artificial intelligence voice syncing to simulate an interview with the SpaceX and Tesla CEO using things he’s really said in interviews.

The choice, filmmaker Alex Gibney said Tuesday in Venice before the film’s world premiere, was intentionally ironic. It both references Musk’s proposition that we’re all living in a simulation and pokes at his somewhat paradoxical and shifting views of the technology. Gibney said it is to convey the “reality of what he’s done and unreality of his narrative.”

The filmmakers consulted lawyers before going too far down the road and got the sign-off to use the Musk avatar.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker was joined at the Venice Film Festival by Ashley St. Clair, once a conservative influencer, who shares a child with Musk and who appears in the film. She talks about their relationship, his character and the nondisclosure agreement she was asked, and refused, to sign to guarantee paternity support.

“I was offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million,” she said.

St. Clair earlier this year also sued Musk’s AI company, saying its Grok chatbot allowed users to generate sexually exploitive deepfake images of her that have caused her humiliation and emotional distress.

The film goes into Musk’s takeover of X and what Gibney says is the manipulation of the algorithm.

“One thing that I didn’t properly understand when I started the film was how Musk tweaked algorithms at Twitter to, in fact, prioritize vitriol and hate over, you know, the town square,” Gibney said.

“Wired” reporter Zoë Schiffer, who also appears in the film, added that “he has tweaked the algorithm, both to suppress mainstream journalism and then to augment some of the more inflammatory comments and voices on that platform.”

St. Clair said she believes he’s stoking fires and “causing deliberate division that could be catastrophic if it’s not regulated or contained.”

With a runtime of nearly four hours, “Musk” delves into his traumatic childhood, including an interview with his father, Errol Musk, and traces his early days in Silicon Valley through his DOGE work with the second Donald Trump administration and involvement in right-wing politics internationally. It was, Gibney said, going to be a much shorter film before Musk wrapped himself in Trump’s campaign.

Those interviewed include Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, his first wife Justine Musk, neurologist Sam Harris, tech reporter Kara Swisher and former USAID Administrator Samantha Power.

Gibney said he thinks Musk is “extremely” dangerous to democracy. The film, which will be released in theaters in October, raises alarms about the information the “DOGE boys” gathered on U.S. citizens with their unfettered access to so many government agencies.

___

For ongoing coverage of the 2026 Venice Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/venice-film-festival

___

This story has been updated to remove a reference to the use of an AI avatar to simulate the Musk interview.