Let’s talk about what’s behind our infatuation with evil AI, and how fiction reflects and influences our feelings about real-life technology.
How AI is like fictional slasher villains
Whatever we dread frequently pops up in entertainment. Godzilla reflected the terror of nuclear annihilation. Alien invasion films were partly manifestations of Cold War-era fears.
Chris Weitz, the writer and director of AfrAId, said our misgivings about technology have spawned many AI villains already – and he predicted many more now AI is worming its way into our lives.
Depictions of malicious AI, Weitz said, “embody fears that we have about technology and what it’s going to do to us. And personifying them is one way of coming to grips with them.”
Dana Calacci, a professor of human-centered AI at Penn State University, cited the cultural critic Mark Fisher to explain why AI can inspire the kind of creepy crawlies we get from classic horror.
In the Halloween horror movies, viewers never know exactly why Michael Myers murders people. It’s not explained in The Birds why the feathered menaces go after Tippi Hedren and her friends. Calacci said that AI likewise doesn’t have a clear reason for what it does.
The absence of motivation for AI and horror movie villains feels unnerving, or what Fisher described as “eerie”.
“There is no motivation behind why a lot of these [AI] models do what they do,” Calacci said. “We find these tools eerie and bizarre and uncomfortable because when things happen, there isn’t a cause.”
Make-believe AI inspires fear – and optimism
For most of the public, decades of malicious intelligent machines in movies “fuel a great deal of alarm about the coming of our robot overlords”, said Margaret O’Mara, a historian of technology at the University of Washington.
But many people in the past and present of Silicon Valley grew up engrossed by science fiction and fantasy. “And it fuels the techno-optimism that still prevails in the industry,” O’Mara said.
In her research, for example, O’Mara said many technologists who came of age in the 1950s, 60s or early 70s were big fans of the Tom Swift books, a science fiction series about a plucky inventor.
Sometimes technology enthusiasts seem to twist fictional cautionary tales into positive inspirations, she said.
Elon Musk has said he’s inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a science fiction novel featuring survivors after Earth is destroyed to construct a space highway. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks about the 2013 movie Her, with a charming AI companion, as a model for real AI.
Neither of those works are blueprints for human happiness. The Douglas Adams novels are a satirical criticism of wealth, technology and more. In Her, the main character is estranged from other people when he’s consumed by a relationship with an AI.
Weitz said that when he was a child, he loved Star Wars movies and their overwhelmingly positive depictions of artificial beings. (He later co-wrote a Star Wars film.) And he didn’t start his latest movie intending to focus on an AI supervillain.
Weitz imagined AI as a jumping-off point to explore the downsides of technology and what it means to be human. He was inspired by “surveillance capitalism”, the concept popularised by author Shoshana Zuboff that technology companies are exploiting our data and undermining our humanity.
When AI software such as ChatGPT and Dall-E started to stun people with humanlike patterns of language and images, a malicious AI became Weitz’s focus.
He is also working on another AI-themed project based on The Murderbot Diaries, science fiction books set in a dystopian future.
“I grew up with a very warm attitude toward what a machine intelligence would be like,” Weitz said. “I think now we’re a bit more ambivalent.”
AfrAId is coming soon to NZ cinemas.
