AI can’t be wished away, harness it: Shekhar Kapur

Artificial intelligence can write love poetry, but it can’t fall in love, well-known filmmaker Shekhar Kapur said on Monday.

He was delivering the Lata Mangeshkar Memorial Lecture on the penultimate day of the 54th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) here.

What distinguishes humans from AI is that we experience emotions, the director of the hit Mr India and critically acclaimed Bandit Queen said, in an hour-long conversation with filmmaker Sudhir Mishra. Together, they spoke about the challenges posed by the advent of AI.

“AI does not feel fear,” Kapur said, emphasising that human emotions such as fear and love play a major part in the creative process. “A lot of human endeavour is based on the fact that you won’t be able to make it,” he observed. AI, on the other hand, is like playing ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ but with ‘She loves me, she loves me.’ The possibility of failure makes human effort worthwhile, just as the possibility of death makes life worthwhile, he said.

Kapur also spoke about his experience with Chat GPT: he asked it to write a sequel to his debut film Masoom (1983) and was astonished that it could come up with a convincing script instantaneously. “But it wasn’t my film,” he said. He was relieved, he added, to know that he was better than AI. Kapur is planning Masoom 2. Mishra, who directed Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003) and Dharavi (1992), agreed that uncertainty added to the mystery of the creative process.

The penultimate day of the festival, with films from 78 countries, was marked by back-to-back discussions featuring women in cinema, and actors playing villains in Hindi cinema.

Director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, director of Nil Battey Sannata (2015) and Bareilly ki Barfi (2017), and Shweta Venkat Mathew, who edited Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), spoke about how they were able to carve successful careers for themselves in a male-dominated industry.

The masterclass with the most attendees was the one with screen villains Ranjeet, Raza Murad, Gulshan Grover and Kiran Kumar. They let the audience in on many private anecdotes, and displayed the same swagger as they do on screen. When a woman in the audience praised their voices and diction, Raza Murad said she should also muster the courage to walk a few steps towards the stage so that they could see her clearly.

Moderator Komal Nahata asked the panel about the use of abusive language in recent productions, to which Ranjeet, who has played villain in about 200 Hindi films, said he had been a crude villain but never a ‘vulgar’ one. “I tell the director I can give the same expression without the words,” he said, to much applause.

Kiran Kumar said the lines for the bad guys were being written now on the basis of how people spoke in real life, and it was all right to use language natural to a character.

“But it is not right to use such language only because it draws in the crowds,” he said.

Vidya Balan, the actor who won a National award for The Dirty Picture, said the film, based on the life and times of screen vamp Silk Smitha, had rid her of some prejudices and positively changed the way she looked at her own body.

Michael Douglas, the Hollywood actor who will be conferred with the Satyajit Ray Lifetime Achievement Award on Tuesday, arrived at the festival venue on Monday and said cinema was a language that was uniting the world.