by In 2024, AI is making headlines daily. We may be familiar with the science, but how do we imagine AI and our relationship with it now and in the future? Fortunately, a film may give us some insight.
The most famous AI in film is probably HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). HAL is an artificially intelligent computer housed aboard a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel. The film was released less than a year before humans landed on the moon. And yet, even with this hope for a new era of space travel, HAL’s presentation focused on artificial intelligence. His motivations are ambiguous, and he shows that he can turn against his human crew.
The 1960s classic captures a fear common throughout the history of AI movies – that AI can’t be trusted, that they will rebel against their human creations, and seek to usurp or overthrow us.
These concerns are contextualized in different ways during different historical eras – in the 1950s they are associated with the cold war and in the later 1960s and 1970s the space race. Then in the 1980s it was video gaming, and in the 1990s the internet. Despite these various tasks, fear of AI is remarkably consistent.
My latest research, which forms the backbone of my new book AI in the Movies, explores how “strong” or “human-level” AI is portrayed in film. I examined more than 50 films to see how they shed light on human attitudes towards AI – how we interpret and understand it through characters and stories, and how attitudes have changed since the dawn of AI.
Types of AIs
The idea of AI was born in 1956 at an American summer research project workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where a group of academics gathered to brainstorm “thinking machines”.
A mathematician named John McCarthy coined the name “artificial intelligence” and just as soon as the new scientific field had a name, filmmakers were already imagining human-like AI and what kind of relationship we could have with it. In the same year an AI, Robby the Robot, appeared in the film Forbidden Planet, and returned the following year in 1957 in the film The Invisible Boy to defeat another type of AI, this time an evil supercomputer.
The AI as an evil computer appeared again in 1965 as Alpha 60, in the cooling dystopia of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, and then in 1968 with HAL in the memory of Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
These early AI films set the template for what was to follow. There were AIs with robot bodies and later robot bodies that looked human – the first of these appeared in 1973’s Westworld, where a robot malfunction at a futuristic amusement park for adults creates chaos and terror. Then there were digital AIs like the evil Joshua in the 1977 horror Demon Seed, where a woman is impregnated by a supercomputer.
In the 1980s, digital AIs began to connect with network computing – when computers soon “talked” to each other about what would be done on the internet – like the one encountered by high school student Matthew Broderick in War Games (1983). ), which almost accidentally starts a nuclear conflict.
Since the 1990s, AI could move between digital and material realms. In the Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell (1995), the Puppet Master exists in a beach and in the flow of the internet, but he can live in “shell” bodies. Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions (2003) takes control of a human body and succeeds in the real world. In Her (2013), the operating system AI Samantha eventually moves beyond the material, beyond the “stuff” of human existence, becoming a post-material person.
Mirrors, doubles and hybrids
In the first few years of AI movies, AI characters portrayed the human characters. In Collosus: The Forbin Project (1970), the supercomputer AI reflects and amplifies the inventor’s own arrogant ambition. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Sarah Connor has become like the Terminators AI Skynet herself: her strength is her armor and she looks for kills.
By the 2000s, human-AI duplicates began to overlap and merge with each other. In Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the AI ”son” David looks like a real boy, but the real son Martin comes home from the hospital attached to tubes and wires that make him look like a cyborg.
In Ex Machina (2014), the human Caleb tests the robot AI Ava, but questions his own humanity, examining his eye for digital traces and cutting his skin to make sure it bleeds.
Over the past 25 years of AI film, the boundaries between human and AI, digital and material have become porous, emphasizing the fluid and hybrid nature of AI creativity. And in the films In The Machine (2013), Transcendence (2014) and Chappie (2015), the boundary between human and AI is eroded almost to the point of non-existence. These films present cases of transhumanism – where humans can evolve beyond their current physical and mental limitations by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to upload the human mind.
Although these stories are imaginary and their characters fictional, they vividly reflect our interests and fears. We are afraid of artificial intelligence and that fear does not go away in the film, although it has been questioned more in recent years, and it is possible to see a more positive representation, such as the small garbage collection robot in WALL-E. But mostly we are afraid that they will become too powerful, and that they will try to be our masters. Or we fear that they will hide among us, and we will not recognize them.
But sometimes, too, we feel sympathy for them: AI characters in movies can be pitiable figures who wish to be accepted but never are. We envy them too – for their intellectual prowess, their physical strength and their immortality.
This fear and envy of AIs has been a fascination throughout film history – we see ourselves in the creation of AIs and express our feelings to them. Sometimes human enemies, sometimes boxing mirrors, and sometimes even human-AI hybrids, the last 70 years of films about AI show a very intertwined human-AI relationship.
This article from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Paula Murphy does not work for, consult with, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and does not she disclosed any relevant connections beyond their academic appointment.
