An OpenAI Engineer and His Friends Debate the Future

In April of 2022, a group of groomsmen gathered for their friend’s wedding on a farm in upstate New York. They’ve known one another since high school. One of them, the OpenAI computer scientist Dan Selsam, looked back on the cohort’s creative years. “We made all sorts of music together,” he says, in the documentary short “Josh’s Wedding.” “The one thing that really mattered to me was being with my friends and making art with them.” Among the men was the comedy writer Simon Rich, whom Selsam has known since they were three years old. On the day of the big event, while some turned their thoughts to bow ties, Selsam was hyperfocussed on something else, and insisted on showing the group a new creation on his laptop. It was code-davinci-002, an early chatbot and a precursor to ChatGPT. The friends asked it to write a poem, and were shocked by what it produced. “Josh’s Wedding,” directed by Brent Katz, another one of the groomsmen, re-creates that pivotal day, and follows the friends as they reckon with the promise and peril of the emerging technology. Together, they use A.I. to make art, debate its impact on society and work, and contemplate the possibility of a “post-human” world—one that Dan enthusiastically works toward but that the others view with dread. As time ticks by, A.I. becomes increasingly part of their lives, eventually changing the way the friends relate to one another, and what they believe it will mean for the future.

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of code-davinci-002.