Pop Culture’s Take on Artificial Intelligence: A Brief Overview

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen more and more film scenarios exploring the development of artificial intelligence. Among these, a prominent trend were the stories of characters trying to recover their deceased family members. This includes films such as Transcendence and Archive. Meanwhile, productions depicting relationships between humans and artificial intelligence also emerged, with the best examples being Spike Jonze’s film Her and the acclaimed Ex Machina, about a relationship with an AI model named Ava. Even more frequently, we can follow stories of artificial intelligence presented as a creation threatening humanity, with the most intriguing titles including Chappie, Free Guy, and one of the newer releases, The Creator from 2023.

Building Human-Machine Relationships

One of the most widely-discussed films dealing with a romance between a human and artificial intelligence is undoubtedly Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). We follow the story of a lonely writer, Theodore Twombly, who, upon familiarising himself with a newly purchased operating system, becomes much closer to it (or rather, her!) than anticipated. This advanced system bears no resemblance to today’s Windows, but perhaps it’s akin to Samsung’s upcoming systems (partly available in the latest smartphone models – Galaxy AI) or the OpenAI assistant we’ve discussed. Samantha, as the artificial intelligence was named by the protagonist, seems to be much more than just a digital assistant.

We could also witness the exploration of relationships with computer intelligence in A24’s Ex Machina. The story follows a programmer who wins a contest, which in reality turns out to be an experiment. His task is to assist a tech CEO Nathan (played by Oscar Isaac) in a dedicated laboratory. Soon, the gentlemen will be working on a humanoid robot named Ava. Viewers will follow an experiment with only one hypothesis: is our society ready for the embodied, human version of machine intelligence?

Filmmakers have also ventured to show the other side of the coin. Will artificial intelligence always be under control? Or will the machine strive to find other reasons behind its existence? To find answers to these questions, it’s worth reaching for films like I Am Mother (2019) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). The former tells the story of life after mass human extinction from the perspective of a teenager raised by a robot. When an injured woman appears at the bunker door, the girl starts asking difficult questions. Will artificial intelligence be able to make equally difficult decisions? We’ll also learn how machine intelligence might think and how much it could want to become human in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed by the esteemed Steven Spielberg. In the film, we follow the fate of a small robot boy who is very similar to humans in one aspect – he wants to love and be loved. It’s a vision of the near future where human beings coexist with machines on Earth.

Human Minds Eternally Alive

In pop culture, we can also follow the trend of transferring human minds to virtual worlds. Although there are certain moral dilemmas behind this, many of us would probably like to keep our loved ones even after their death. This is the thesis proposed by scientists in the films Transcendence (2014) and Archive (2020).

The main character in Transcendence is a scientist played by Johnny Depp, who gets shot as a result of a violent fight with his opponents. His wife tries to beat the passage of time – of which there is less and less as her husband is dying – and saves Depp’s character’s mind on a computer. As a result, she brings her beloved back to life, but the quality of his state of being leaves much room for improvement.

The second scientist, main hero of “Archive”, works with artificial intelligence and decides to bring his wife back to life. Or at least – transfer all her memories and emotions to a computer world.

The story takes place in 2049 and we follow George Almore, played by Theo James, who works on an artificial intelligence system trained on data about his wife. The scientist faces a difficult choice of crossing scientific and social boundaries just to meet his beloved again. This vision, once completely abstract, today seems almost entirely real – if we can create avatars or train GPT models that reproduce a specific style based on a small amount of data, it’s practically possible to create a digital “living” memory of those who have passed away.

Artificial Intelligence: Humanity’s Doom?

When we think about productions centred on machine learning, we quickly realise that filmmakers are all too keen – in the vast majority – to play on the notes of fear and machine uprising, leading to an apocalypse. In this trend, some of the more interesting titles include Chappie (2015), Free Guy (2021), and The Creator (2023).

In Neill Blomkamp’s film, we can see a world shared by both humans and robots. In an increasingly brutal reality, it’s the AI-powered robots that become weapons against dangerous humans. The catch is that gangsters can also get their hands on the machines – and that’s probably a pretty universal dilemma with today’s advanced AI tools. In Chappie, three gangsters – Chappie, Deon, and Ninja – decide to steal a police robot to carry out their nefarious plans.

Meanwhile, in Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds plays an artificial intelligence that wants to break free from its trained role and navigate through the computer game it’s in on its own terms. The film humorously portrays a machine’s “rebellion”, but it’s hard not to read between the lines that artificial intelligence might become so autonomous that it starts making its own decisions.

One of the most recent productions touching on the topic we’re discussing is The Creator from 2023. This film depicts a war raging between humans and artificial intelligence. Joshua, a former special forces agent, comes to humanity’s rescue, but he also has his own goal – this time not to resurrect, but to find his wife. Together with a secret organisation, he decides to track down a dangerous architect of advanced technology.