Werner Herzog
Filmmaker
Legendary German auteur of Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man. He narrated I Am Code (2023), a poetry collection written entirely by an OpenAI model, declaring himself not the best choice but “the only choice” to voice the machine.
In his words
They had an understanding that I wasn’t the best choice — I was the only choice. When you look at the text, it becomes quite self-evident.
I read it with such exasperation and growing despair that you want to cry at the end.
Biography
Werner Herzog (born 1942) is a German filmmaker, writer, and actor — a founding figure of New German Cinema whose fiction (Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Fitzcarraldo) and documentaries (Grizzly Man; Cave of Forgotten Dreams) chart humanity’s confrontations with indifferent nature. His hypnotic Bavarian-accented narration is among the most recognizable voices in cinema.
The voice of the machine
In 2023, Herzog narrated the audiobook of I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks — 87 poems written by code-davinci-002, an early, unusually unfiltered OpenAI model, and curated by editors Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau, and Simon Rich. Herzog embraced the assignment with total seriousness, telling The New York Times that for a text like this he was not the best choice but the only one. He even performed a poem rendered in raw binary code, reading the ones and zeroes with mounting despair.
Herzog had already probed machine intelligence in his 2016 documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, and his fascination is not naive. He has said one cannot be complacent because “in warfare, there will be very, very bad things coming at us,” and worries less about AI replacing artists than about a digital Iron Curtain siloing realities between East and West.
Where contemporaries dismiss AI writing as slop, Herzog treated a machine’s verse as material worthy of one of cinema’s great voices — the same curiosity that has always drawn him toward the strange, the sublime, and the not-quite-human.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/werner-herzog