‘After the Hunt’ Writer Once Trained AI for Meta—Now She’s Speaking Out Against It

Nora Garrett has a perspective on artificial intelligence that most screenwriters don't. And it's that she's actually worked a job training it.

Before her film After the Hunt premiered at the London BFI Film Festival this month, Garrett spent time as a data analyst at Meta, teaching AI systems how to function. The experience didn't make her a believer in the technology's promise. If anything, it did the opposite.

"It taught me a lot about, you know, for lack of a better term, how the sausage gets made," she said at the film's premiere, speaking to The Independent. "I feel like AI is sold to us like it's the future, but it's a regurgitation of our collective past, remarketed as the future."

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Garrett's path to Meta came through LinkedIn, where she was recruited based on nonprofit work she'd done editing and writing scripts.

She described herself as "staunchly anti-AI" in an interview with IndieWire, acknowledging that while the technology isn't going away, it's not something she wants to use or support.

Despite Meta's reputation, she said the work wasn't glamorous or particularly well-compensated. She called it "definitely the worst ratio of pay to hours spent that I've ever had in my entire life."

She couldn't provide specifics of her day-to-day work due to a standing NDA. But she's made her position on the tool clear.

"I think that ultimately there's always going to be a human element that people want," she told The Independent at the premiere. "And I don't know that making things happen quicker, cheaper, and more optimally is really conducive to the human spirit and our human collectivism."

Garrett also previously studied as an actor and served as a Hollywood assistant, so she's been in the game for a while.

As we've covered, large language models often get things wrong and can't account for human emotion in storytelling. An AI can be a tool for planning and research, but it's no match for human creativity and shouldn't be used to replace writers (or script analysts).

After the Hunt is a psychological thriller starring Julia Roberts as Yale professor Alma, Andrew Garfield as Hank, and Ayo Edebiri as Maggie. The story centers on an accusation of sexual assault. Luca Guadagnino directs.

The film will release wide Oct. 17.