It's 2024 and AI is making news headlines every day. We may know the science, but how do we imagine our relationship with AI, now and in the future? Luckily, movies might give us some insight.
Perhaps the best-known AI in film is HAL 9000, an artificially intelligent computer aboard a spaceship capable of interstellar travel, in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The film was released a year before mankind landed on the moon, but despite this optimistic view of a new era of space travel, HAL's portrayal sounded a warning about artificial intelligence: His motivations are murky, and he shows the capacity to rebel against his human crew.
This 1960s classic captures a common fear throughout the history of AI films: that AI cannot be trusted, that it will rebel against its human creators and try to overpower or overthrow them.
70 years of AI depicted in film shows that the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence is both frightening and fascinating.
These fears have come from different historical periods and contexts: in the 1950s it was associated with the Cold War, in the 1960s and 1970s with the Space Race, in the 1980s with video games, and in the 1990s with the Internet. Despite these different concerns, fears about AI have been remarkably consistent.
My latest research forms the backbone of my new book, AI in Film, which explores how “strong” or “human-level” AI is portrayed in movies. I surveyed over 50 films to uncover human attitudes towards AI – how we interpret and understand it through characters and storylines – and how attitudes have changed since the birth of AI.
Types of AI
The idea of AI originated in 1956 during an American summer research project workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where a group of academics came together to brainstorm ideas about “machines that think.”
As soon as a mathematician named John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” and gave a name to this new branch of science, filmmakers were already imagining human-like AI and its relationships with humans.
That same year, the AI Robbie the Robot appeared in the film Forbidden Planet, and then again the following year in the 1957 film The Invisible Man, defeating a different type of AI, this time an evil supercomputer.
AI as a malevolent computer reappeared in 1965 as Alpha 60 in Jean-Luc Godard's chilling dystopian film Alphaville, and then in 1968 as HAL in Kubrick's memorable film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
These early AI movies set the template for future AIs: AIs with robotic bodies, and later AIs with human-like robotic bodies. The first AI appeared in the 1973 film Westworld, where robots malfunction in a futuristic adult amusement park, wreaking havoc and terror. Then came digital AIs: the 1977 horror film The Demon Seed, featuring the villain Joshua, whose woman is impregnated by a supercomputer.
In the 1980s, digital AI began to connect with networked computing, an early form of the internet where computers “talk” to each other, like the high school kid Matthew Broderick encounters in WarGames (1983) that nearly starts a nuclear war.
Since the 1990s, AI has been able to move between the digital and material realms: in the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), the Puppet Master exists within the rise and fall of the internet but is able to inhabit a “shell” body; Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions (2003) takes over a human body and manifests in the real world; and in Her (2013), Samantha, an AI operating system, ultimately transcends matter, transcending the “material” of human existence and becoming a transmaterial being.
Mirror, double, hybrid
In the first few decades of AI films, AI characters mirrored their human counterparts: In Project Colossus (1970), an AI supercomputer reflects and amplifies the inventor’s own hubris and over-the-top ambition.
In Terminator 2 (1991), Sarah Connor becomes a kind of Terminator for the AI Skynet: her strength is her armor, and she hunts to kill.
In the 2000s, human and AI doubles began to overlap and merge: in Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the AI ”son” David looks just like the real boy, while the real son, Martin, comes home from hospital hooked up to tubes and wires and looking like a cyborg.
In Ex Machina (2014), the human Caleb tests out the AI robot Ava but ultimately begins to question his own humanity, inspecting his eyeballs for digital traces and cutting his skin to draw blood.
AI films over the past 25 years have blurred the boundaries between human and AI, digital and material, emphasizing the fluidity and hybridity of AI work, while films like In the Machine (2013), Transcendence (2014) and Chappie (2015) have eroded the boundaries between human and AI to the point where they barely exist.
These films present a transhumanist scenario in which humans could evolve beyond their current physical and mental limitations by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and uploading human minds.
These stories are fictional, and the characters are fictional, but they vividly depict our interests and fears. We fear artificial intelligence, and that fear never fades in the movies. But in recent decades, that fear has become more questioned and we've seen more positive portrayals, like the little garbage-collecting robot in “Wall-E.”
But our greatest fear is that they will become too powerful and try to become our rulers, or that they will hide among us and we will not notice them.
But sometimes we sympathize with them. Movie AI characters are often pitiful figures who want to be accepted by humans but never will be. We also envy them for their intellectual capabilities, their physical strength, and the fact that they will never experience human death.
Surrounding this fear and jealousy is a preoccupation with AI that has existed throughout cinematic history: we see ourselves in AI creations and project our emotions onto them.
Films from the past 70 years featuring AI, sometimes appearing as humans’ adversary, sometimes as an eerie mirror, and sometimes as a human-AI hybrid, have shown us that the relationship between humans and AI is inextricably intertwined.
The author is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Dublin City University, UK.
Republished from The Conversation
Published in Dawn, ICON, June 23, 2024
