What 70 Years of AI on Film Can Tell Us In regards to the Human Relationship With Artificial Intelligence

In 2024, AI is making headlines day by day. We may pay attention to the science, but how will we imagine AI and our relationship to it each now and in the longer term? Fortunately, film may provide us with some insights.

Probably the best-known AI in film is HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). HAL is an artificially intelligent computer housed on board a spacecraft able to interstellar travel. The film was released lower than a yr before humans landed on the moon. And yet, even on this optimism a couple of recent era of space travel, HAL’s portrayal sounded a note of caution about artificial intelligence. His motivations are ambiguous, and he shows himself able to turning against his human crew.

This Sixties classic demonstrates fears which might be common throughout AI film history—that AIs can’t be trusted, that they’ll rebel against their human creators, and seek to overpower or overthrow us.

These fears are contextualized in alternative ways during different historical eras—within the Nineteen Fifties they’re related to the Cold War followed by the space race within the Sixties and Seventies. Then within the Nineteen Eighties it was video games, and within the Nineties the web. Despite these differing preoccupations, fear of AI stays remarkably consistent.

My latest research, which forms the backbone of my recent book AI within the Movies, explores how “strong” or “human-level” AI is depicted in film. I examined greater than 50 movies to see how they make clear human attitudes to AI—how we interpret it and understand it through characters and stories, and the way attitudes have modified since AI’s beginnings.

Varieties of AIs

The thought of AI was born in 1956 at an American summer research project workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, Recent Hampshire, where a bunch of academics gathered to brainstorm ideas around “considering machines.”

A mathematician called John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” and just as soon as the brand new scientific field had a reputation, filmmakers were already imagining a human-like AI and what our relationship with it could be. In the identical yr an AI, Robby the Robot, appeared within the film Forbidden Planet and returned the next yr, 1957, within the film The Invisible Boy to defeat one other sort of AI, this time an evil supercomputer.

The AI-as-malevolent-computer appeared again in 1965 as Alpha 60, within the chilling dystopia of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, after which in 1968 with Kubrick’s memorable HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These early AI movies set the template for what was to follow. There have been AIs that had robot bodies and later robot bodies that looked human—the primary of those appearing in Westworld in 1973, where a robot malfunction at a futuristic amusement park for adults creates chaos and terror. Then there have been AIs that were digital just like the evil Joshua within the 1977 horror film Demon Seed, where a lady is impregnated by a supercomputer.

Within the Nineteen Eighties, digital AIs began to turn out to be connected to network computing—where computers “talked” to 1 one other in an early incarnation of what would turn out to be the web—just like the one stumbled upon by Matthew Broderick’s high-school student in War Games (1983), who almost unintentionally starts a nuclear conflict.

From the Nineties, an AI could move between digital and material realms. In Japanese animation Ghost within the Shell (1995), the Puppet Master exists within the ebb and flow of the web, but can inhabit “shell” bodies. Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions (2003), takes over a human body and materializes in the true world. In Her (2013), the AI operating system Samantha eventually moves beyond matter, beyond the “stuff” of human existence, becoming a post-material being.

Mirrors, Doubles, and Hybrids

In the primary few a long time of AI film, AI characters mirrored the human characters. In Collosus: The Forbin Project (1970), the AI supercomputer reflects and amplifies the inventor’s own conceited overreaching ambition. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Sarah Connor has turn out to be just like the AI Skynet’s Terminators herself: Her strength is her armor, and she or he hunts to kill.

By the 2000s, human-AI doubles began to overlap and merge into one another. In Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the AI “son” David looks identical to an actual boy, whereas the true son Martin comes home from hospital connected to tubes and wires that make him appear like a cyborg.

In Ex Machina (2014), the human Caleb tests the AI robot Ava, but finally ends up questioning his own humanness, examining his eyeball for digital traces and cutting his skin to make sure that he bleeds.

Prior to now 25 years of AI film, the borders between human and AI, digital and material have turn out to be porous, emphasizing the fluid and hybrid nature of AI creations. And within the movies In The Machine (2013), Transcendence (2014), and Chappie (2015), the boundary between human and AI is eroded almost to the purpose of non-existence. These movies present scenarios of transhumanism—during which humans can evolve beyond their current physical and mental constraints by harnessing the ability of artificial intelligence to upload the human mind.

Although these stories are imaginary and their characters fictional, they vividly depict our fascinations and fears. We’re afraid of artificial intelligence and that fear never goes away in film, even though it has been questioned more in recent a long time, and more positive portrayals could be observed, comparable to the little trash-collecting robot in WALL-E. But mostly we’re afraid that they’ll turn out to be too powerful and can seek to turn out to be our masters. Or we fear they might hiding amongst us, and that we may not recognize them.

But at times, too, we feel sympathy towards them: AI characters in movies could be pitiful figures who want to be accepted by humans but never will probably be. We’re also jealous of them—of their mental capability, their physical robustness, and the indisputable fact that they don’t experience human death.

Surrounding this fear and envy is a fascination with AIs that’s present throughout film history—we see ourselves in AI creations and project our emotions onto them. At times enemies of humans, at times uncanny mirrors, and sometimes even human-AI hybrids, the past 70 years of movies about AI show the inextricably intertwined nature of human-AI relationships.