Brit Marling

Brit Marling (born 1982) left a Goldman Sachs analyst track to write herself into independent film, breaking out at Sundance 2011 with “Another Earth” and “Sound of My Voice.” With Zal Batmanglij she co-created Netflix’s cult metaphysical series “The OA” and FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” a whodunnit steeped in AI and tech-billionaire unease. Her work has always treated technology as a storytelling problem rather than a prop.

Betting on ethical AI filmmaking

In April 2025, Marling signed on to co-write and co-star in “Uncanny Valley” with Natasha Lyonne, who directs her feature debut; virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier advises the project. The film follows Mila, a teenager immersed in an augmented-reality game where physical and digital worlds blur — and it will be made partly with generative AI from Asteria, the artist-led studio Lyonne co-founded, using Moonvalley’s “Marey” video model.

The project’s explicit premise is that the tools matter as much as the story: Marey is marketed as “clean and ethical” because it was trained exclusively on licensed content, in contrast to models built on scraped, copyrighted work. The production drew backlash from AI skeptics anyway, and Lyonne publicly defended the hybrid approach; Marling framed the film itself as the argument — science fiction as “a powerful tool of resistance.”

For a writer whose series have dramatized both the promise and menace of intelligent machines, “Uncanny Valley” is a practical wager: that artists who engage AI on ethical terms — licensed data, human authorship, story first — will shape the technology’s place in cinema better than artists who boycott it.