One of the greatest living filmmakers now lives in an assisted living facility in midtown Manhattan. He squints at me from across our table in the building’s 13th-floor restaurant and asks, “Do you use AI?” When I say no, Paul Schrader begins urgently swiping through his phone. “Do you want to see what happens when I plug in the words ‘bald,’ ‘sick,’ ‘Richard Gere’?”
“Sure,” I tell him. He stabs at the phone with a single finger, waits a moment, and hands it to me. A sickly, AI-generated image of Richard Gere, sans his signature salt-and-pepper locks, stares back at me, and after a moment we both burst out laughing.
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