Playing Sam Altman pushed Andrew Garfield to quit ChatGPT and rethink AI
After playing Sam Altman in Artificial, Andrew Garfield ditched ChatGPT and started questioning AI’s future — and he’s laying out why.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Andrew Garfield said he ditched ChatGPT as soon as he finished playing Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s new drama Artificial — a move he compared to quitting Facebook after portraying Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network.
“I got off my ChatGPT immediately. I don't really know even how to explain why but just the more you know and the more you realize we're careening into some very unknown territory,” Garfield said.
Garfield also joked about the job jitters around AI, suggesting companies don’t exactly know who’s getting replaced or how the economy will shake out — they’re just charging ahead and promising everything will be “awesome.”
Inside Artificial
Directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by Simon Rich, Artificial revisits the whiplash week in November 2023 when Sam Altman was abruptly ousted as OpenAI ’s CEO and then reinstated days later. The film uses that boardroom meltdown as its spine while tracking two decades of machine-learning breakthroughs into today’s AI crossroads. The New York Film Festival describes it as “thrilling, funny, and very human.”
Garfield said he never met Altman and built his take from interviews, reporting and Rich’s script. He joined the project in 2025 , returning to tech-world drama for the first time since Fincher’s 2010 Facebook saga.
- Andrew Garfield — Sam Altman
- Monica Barbaro — former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati
- Yura Borisov — OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever
Artificial is set to screen at the New York Film Festival in October ahead of a theatrical release.