In 2024, artificial intelligence is making headlines every day. We may be aware of the science, but how do we imagine AI and our relationship with it, both now and in the future? Fortunately, the movie can provide us with some insights.
The best-known artificial intelligence in movies is probably HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). HAL is a computer with artificial intelligence on a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel. The film was released less than a year before humans set foot on the moon. And yet, despite this optimism about a new era of space travel, HAL’s portrayal was a warning about artificial intelligence. His motivations are unclear and suggest he may turn against the human crew.
This 1960s classic depicts fears common throughout AI movie history; Fears that AIs cannot be trusted, that they will rebel against their human creators and try to outwit or overthrow us.
These fears are contextualized in different ways in different historical periods; It is associated with the cold war in the 1950s and then the space race in the 1960s and 1970s. Then there were video games in the 1980s and the internet in the 1990s. Despite these different concerns, the fear of AI remains fairly consistent.
My latest research, which forms the backbone of my new book Artificial Intelligence in Movies, explores how “powerful” or “human-level” AI is portrayed in film. I reviewed more than 50 films to see how they shed light on people’s attitudes towards AI, how we interpret and understand it through characters and stories, and how attitudes have changed since the inception of AI.
Types of Artificial Intelligence
The idea of artificial intelligence was born in 1956 at an American summer research project workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where a group of academics met to brainstorm around “thinking machines.”
A mathematician named John McCarthy coined the name “artificial intelligence,” and as soon as the new scientific field had a name, filmmakers were already imagining what a human-like artificial intelligence and our relationship with it might be. That same year, an AI, Robby the Robot, appeared in the movie Forbidden Planet, and the following year, in 1957, he returned to defeat another type of AI, this time an evil supercomputer, in the movie The Invisible Boy.
Artificial intelligence as malevolent computer reappeared in 1965 as Alpha 60 in Jean-Luc Godard’s chilling dystopia called Alphaville, and then in 1968 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s unforgettable HAL.
These first AI movies set the template for what was to follow. There were AIs with robot bodies, and then there were robot bodies that looked like humans; the first of these appeared in Westworld in 1973; Here, a robot malfunction creates chaos and terror at a futuristic amusement park for adults. There were also digital AIs, like the evil Joshua in the 1977 horror movie Demon Seed, where a woman was impregnated by a supercomputer.
In the 1980s, digital artificial intelligences began to connect to network computing, where computers “talk” to each other, an early example of what would later become the internet, as Matthew Broderick’s high school student stumbled upon in War Games (1983). ), who almost accidentally started a nuclear conflict.
Since the 1990s, artificial intelligence has been able to move between digital and material domains. In the Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell (1995), the Puppet Master exists in the ebb and flow of the internet, but can inhabit “shell” bodies. Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions (2003) takes over a human body and comes to life in the real world. In Her (2013), the artificial intelligence operating system Samantha eventually transcends matter, the “stuff” of human existence, becoming a trans-matter being.
Mirrors, doubles and hybrids
In the first few decades of AI movies, AI characters mirrored human characters. In Collosus: The Forbin Project (1970), the artificial intelligence supercomputer reflects and amplifies the inventor’s own arrogant over-ambition. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Sarah Connor became like the AI Skynet’s Terminators: her strength is her armor and she hunts to kill.
By the 2000s, human-AI pairs began to overlap and merge with each other. In Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the artificial intelligence “son” David looks just like a real child, while the real son Martin comes home from the hospital hooked up with tubes and cables that make him look like a cyborg.
In Ex Machina (2014), human Caleb tests AI robot Ava, but ends up questioning his own humanity, examining her eyeball for digital traces and cutting her skin to make sure it’s bleeding.
Over the last 25 years of AI films, the boundaries between human and AI, digital and material, have become permeable, highlighting the fluid and hybrid nature of AI creations. And in the films In The Machine (2013), Transcendence (2014) and Chappie (2015), the boundary between humans and artificial intelligence is eroded to the point of almost vanishing. These films present transhumanism scenarios in which humans can transcend their current physical and mental limitations by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to upload the human mind.
Although these stories are fanciful and their characters fictional, they vividly portray our fascinations and fears. We fear artificial intelligence, and although this fear has been questioned more in recent years and more positive depictions have been observed, such as the little garbage-collecting robot in WALL-E, it never goes away in film. But mostly we are afraid that they will become too powerful and try to become our masters. Or we are afraid that they will hide among us and we will not be able to recognize them.
But sometimes we also sympathize with them: AI characters in movies can be pathetic figures who want to be accepted by humans but can never be accepted. We also envy them, their intellectual capacity, their physical toughness, and their freedom from human death.
Surrounding this fear and jealousy is the fascination with artificial intelligences that have existed throughout film history; we see ourselves in artificial intelligence creations and project our emotions onto them. Sometimes misanthropic, sometimes uncanny mirrors, sometimes even human-AI hybrids, movies about artificial intelligence over the last 70 years reveal the inextricably intertwined nature of human-AI relationships.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Paula Murphy does not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic duties.