A documentary about training AI on real people raises questions it refuses to answer

Key points

• Marc Isaacs, a British documentary maker, released a new film in 2025 called Synthetic Sincerity that mixes real documentary footage with scripted fiction.
• The film depicts a fake AI research lab using real people from Isaacs' previous films to train artificial intelligence software.
• Romanian actor Ilinca Manolache's face was digitally transformed into an AI avatar character without the film showing how or whether she consented to that process.
• The Guardian reviewed the film as shallow and self-aware in a way that undermines its own subject matter.
• The core question the film raises, namely who owns a person's face when AI trains on it, goes largely unanswered.

Marc Isaacs built his reputation making intimate, quietly powerful documentaries about real people. So when he turned his camera on artificial intelligence, the expectation was that he would do what he does best: get close, ask the uncomfortable question, and sit with the answer.

Synthetic Sincerity does not quite do that.

The film imagines Isaacs licensing his own past documentary subjects, the real individuals from his earlier acclaimed films, to a fictional lab called Synthetic Sincerity at the equally fictional University of Southern England. The lab's stated goal is training AI software to generate convincing human figures for a screen. That is a real and genuinely urgent concern in 2025. AI systems learn to imitate voices, faces, and personalities by studying vast libraries of real human material, often without those people knowing.

The lab's researchers are played by actors. Lebanese independent film-maker Lynn El Safah appears among them. Isaacs himself has scripted, often funny conversations with an AI avatar on screen, a glowing digital face that recalls Max Headroom, the sardonic computer-generated TV personality from the 1980s. That avatar's face is modelled on Romanian actor Ilinca Manolache, known from director Radu Jude's film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

Here is where the film stumbles.

It never shows the audience how Manolache was approached, what she agreed to, or how her real face became the AI character's digital mask. For a documentary that positions itself as an interrogation of AI and identity, that silence is telling. The very process the film claims to examine, how real human likenesses get absorbed into AI systems, happens off camera.

The result, as The Guardian noted in its review, is a project that is "itself exasperatingly artificial." A film about AI sincerity that withholds its own behind-the-scenes truth.

Does any of this matter to ordinary people?

Yes, directly. Across the entertainment industry and beyond, real people's faces, voices, and personal histories are being used to train AI systems, sometimes without clear consent and rarely with payment. Synthetic Sincerity gestures at that problem. It just does not push hard enough to show you what it actually looks like or what you can do about it.

For now, the film works better as a curiosity than a warning. Worth watching if you are already interested in how AI and identity collide. Less useful if you want answers.