Steve James, Alex Gibney Team for AI Docuseries ‘Mind vs. Machine’

Steve James, the Oscar-nominated director behind Hoop Dreams and Life Itself, will tackle AI in the docuseries Mind vs. Machine, which has Alex Gibney on board as a producer.

Closer Media and Anonymous Content, which are working with Gibney on his upcoming Elon Musk doc Musk, are financing the project and also producing alongside James and Gibney, Alyssa Fedele and Zachary Fink of Collective Hunch.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

• Toronto: Paul Simon Talks Hearing Loss, New Song at 'In Restless Dreams' Doc Premiere

• 'In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon' Review: Alex Gibney's Brilliantly Composed Doc Charts the Singer-Songwriter's Career

• Alex Gibney Finishes Paul Simon Doc 'In Restless Dreams' for Expected Fall Festival Bow

New York Times technology correspondent Cade Metz will executive produce with Closer Media’s Zhang Xin, William Horberg, and Joey Marra, and Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker, Jessica Grimshaw, and David Levine.

According to the announcement, the project is described as “a five-part, landmark docuseries artfully crafted from a blend of interviews, archival footage, dramatic recreations, AI visualizations, and cutting-edge special effects, is definitive in its unparalleled access to key inventors, scientists, futurists, and thinkers including Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Ray Kurzweil, Deborah Raji, and Meghan O’Gieblyn.” For the project, producers have optioned two books: Metz’s Genius Makers and Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine.

The synopsis continues: “In addition, the team has unprecedented access to the never-beforeseen provocative writings of notorious anti-technologist Ted Kaczynski, courtesy of the University
of Michigan Library. The series will grapple with AI’s implications for the future by exploring the personal journeys of those who brought us to this critical inflection point and by following key players in the field who are pushing forward the technology that will transform life as we know it.”

Closer Media, Anonymous Content, and UTA are selling the rights to the series, which does not yet have distribution.

Best of The Hollywood Reporter

• 'Star Wars': 16 Animated Characters Who Made the Leap to Live-Action

• Power Showrunners: Hollywood’s 50-ish Most Influential Writer-Producers of 2023

• The Cast of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' Then and Now