‘Ordinary people are being erased’: one director’s audacious fightback against AI – featuring Frinton
TL;DR
Marc Isaacs uses Synthetic Sincerity as a fake documentary about an AI lab that supposedly licensed his 25-year body of work to extract authentic human emotions from films. The setup is deliberately fictional: the University of Southern England does not exist, and Isaacs says he was not actually approached to train AI on his archive. The film blends non-actors, scripted reality and AI-avatar scenes, including restaurateur Ablikim Rahman and actor Ilinca Manolache.
Nauti's Take
The interesting part is not basic AI panic, but the jab at a culture industry that had already pushed ordinary people out of frame before model training arrived. Synthetic Sincerity sounds like a small cinematic disruption: part deception, part diagnosis.
Its strongest point is uncomfortable: if documentaries mostly deliver celebrity access, polish or audience mirroring, AI does not need to arrive for reality to become flatter.
Briefingshow
The film hits a deeper nerve: AI is not only a copyright or jobs issue, but also a question of whose daily life still gets treated as worth showing. Isaacs uses fake-documentary form not as a stunt, but as a stress test for how much authenticity has already been staged, filtered and monetized before AI even enters the frame.
Video
Sources