‘Ordinary people are being erased’: one director’s audacious fightback against AI – featuring Frinton

Marc Isaacs’ film Synthetic Sincerity may look like a documentary, but its fictional premise – a lab that scrapes movies to harvest human emotions – shines a hard light on just how far AI can go In Marc Isaacs’ latest film, the subversive documentary maker reveals that an AI research laboratory recently licensed his entire body of work. That’s a quarter-century of droll, deadpan studies of ordinary life in Britain – from the poetic Lift, about the comings and goings in a London tower block, and The Curious World of Frinton-on-Sea, set in the sleepy retirement town dubbed “God’s waiting room”, to Philip and His Seven Wives, in which a secondhand furniture dealer declares himself to be a Hebrew king. Isaacs agreed to let data analysts at the University of Southern England feed these and other documentaries into their system to harvest authentic human emotions from which AI characters could then be created. His film about the experience takes its name from the university’s lab: Synthetic Sincerity. But how synthetic is the film itself? “Well, we made up the University of Southern England,” admits Isaacs, 59, over lunch at Etles, a Uyghur restaurant near his hom