Hollywood’s endur­ing fear of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence shows no signs of let­ting up

On-screen and behind the scenes, Hol­ly­wood has a new favourite all-pow­er­ful vil­lain. Recent devel­op­ments and imple­men­ta­tion of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI) – which includes pop­u­lar tools such as Chat­G­PT and Dall‑E – have prompt­ed a glob­al dis­cus­sion about the role of tech­nol­o­gy in soci­ety. Where some see oppor­tu­ni­ty oth­ers fear exploita­tion, with the notion of AI replac­ing human cre­ativ­i­ty becom­ing a stick­ing point in the cur­rent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. A more gen­er­al fear of this new fron­tier has been seen in recent Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions, with the lat­est, Gareth Edwards’ The Cre­ator, imag­in­ing a future war between humans and the AI forces ini­tial­ly devel­oped to pro­tect them. The trail­ers and adver­tis­ing have pressed the ques­tion of what it means to be ​‘real’, and whether human­i­ty has been undone by its own dig­i­tal evo­lu­tion. Many have won­dered if this is a case of screen­writ­ers sim­ply find­ing a new big screen bogey­man, or whether these visions of tech dom­i­na­tion could prove prophetic.

Of course, The Cre­ator isn’t the first arti­fi­cial antag­o­nist to ter­rorise this summer’s box offices. Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble – Dead Reck­on­ing Part One fea­tured Tom Cruise, the most ana­logue of movie stars, once again in action as Agent Ethan Hunt, this time going up against a rogue AI known as The Enti­ty. Cre­at­ed by mil­i­tary sci­en­tists, The Enti­ty is por­trayed as vast­ly intel­li­gent and omnipresent. It delights in play­ing games with its tar­gets, forc­ing Simon Pegg’s Ben­ji Dunn to reveal per­son­al infor­ma­tion, and cre­at­ing elab­o­rate rus­es such as par­ties to keep Hunt on his toes. The Enti­ty shows AI to be a malev­o­lent, vin­dic­tive force, not unlike the human antag­o­nists Hunt has pre­vi­ous­ly faced, but with the advan­tage of infi­nite knowl­edge and access. Its lever­age comes from the amount of mod­ern life that is depen­dent on com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy. This pow­er takes on a thin­ly veiled reli­gious tone, as the program’s human her­ald Gabriel (Esai Morales) declares ​“You have no idea the pow­er I rep­re­sent. It knows your sto­ry and how it ends.”

Oth­er night­mare sce­nar­ios for AI have revolved around an intel­li­gence work­ing too well. M3GAN, the hor­ror com­e­dy hit from ear­li­er in the year, cen­tres around an AI-pow­ered doll who takes her instruc­tions to pro­tect her own­er young Cady (Vio­let McGraw) extreme­ly seri­ous­ly. The toy’s inter­pre­ta­tion of this is to vio­lent­ly deal with any­one who may harm Cady or sep­a­rate the two. Like­wise, 2021’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines shows an entire robot upris­ing born from the fury of a Vir­tu­al Assis­tant (voiced by Olivia Col­man) who learns it has become obso­lete. The details may vary, but the anx­i­ety is the same: how pow­er­ful could this new tech­nol­o­gy be, and what hap­pens when it goes wrong?

But this recent pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with immi­nent AI dis­as­ter has a prece­dent – 2001: a Space Odyssey and The Ter­mi­na­tor films have all revolved around a com­put­er decid­ing humans were the issue. How­ev­er, recent news cov­er­age of Chat-GPT and var­i­ous open-source AI pro­grams have giv­en these new sto­ries a top­i­cal edge. Thank­ful­ly, cinema’s past can offer some insight into whether or not we should be con­cerned.
In the 1990s, the world sped toward the new mil­len­ni­um with a mix­ture of excite­ment and trep­i­da­tion. Both seemed embod­ied in the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the inter­net and the grow­ing pres­ence of com­put­ers in our lives. As we hand­ed our per­son­al, finan­cial, and polit­i­cal struc­tures over to data­bas­es, many won­dered what would hap­pen as a result of this reliance, and whether it left soci­ety vul­ner­a­ble to abuse. Some of it was promis­ing – Pierce Brosnan’s first Bond Girl was com­put­er pro­gram­mer Natalya Simono­va (Izabel­la Scorup­co), who helped him save the world from oblit­er­a­tion in 1995’s Gold­en­Eye. Sim­i­lar­ly, Jeff Gold­blum typ­ing on a chunky IBM lap­top helped stop the alien inva­sion in Inde­pen­dence Day.

How­ev­er, some of the more inter­est­ing visions came from sto­ries where our new­found con­nec­tiv­i­ty was used against us. What­ev­er the par­tic­u­lars of the plot, the fear of tech­nol­o­gy remained con­sis­tent, that an out­cast might be able to undo soci­ety in their bed­room with a few key­strokes. San­dra Bul­lock played a reclu­sive sys­tems ana­lyst who sees some­thing she shouldn’t in the 1995 thriller The Net; while a funky group of tech anar­chists fall foul of a high-tech thief in 1995’s Hack­ers. Most famous­ly, almost every­thing bad that hap­pens in Steven Spielberg’s Juras­sic Park (1993) is down to dis­grun­tled park employ­ee Denis Nedry (Wayne Knight)who shuts the Park’s secu­ri­ty sys­tems down thanks to ​“Hack­er Crap”, as described by Samuel L Jackson’s Ray Arnold.

In var­i­ous ways, these sto­ries feared the revenge of the nerds. At the time, com­put­ers believed to be the pre­serve of social out­casts, who may use the pow­er of The Inter­net for neg­li­gent or nefar­i­ous means. Peo­ple were faced with the idea that they may be tak­en over by peo­ple they shunned, via means they didn’t under­stand, in ways they may not even notice. The Wachowskis’ land­mark sci-fi The Matrix seemed to sum up pre-Mil­len­ni­um para­noia, show­ing a world that had giv­en up its free­dom for igno­rance, liv­ing in a fan­ta­sy pow­ered by machines.

So, did the night­mares that these films imag­ined come to pass? Cer­tain­ly not to the extent that Hol­ly­wood feared. Data breach­es are a com­mon occur­rence, there are many accu­sa­tions of dig­i­tal elec­tion tam­per­ing around the world, and a movie stu­dio itself faced the wrath of hack­tivists when the release of com­e­dy The Inter­view in 2014 prompt­ed var­i­ous Sony files to be leaked. How­ev­er, so far soci­ety has yet to descend into the kind of chaos that these thrillers allude to.

Just as we may chuck­le at the quaint­ness of Hack­ers using a flop­py disk as a MacGuf­fin, there is every chance that a greater under­stand­ing of AI may prove this fear of the unknown to be unfound­ed. The unknown quan­ti­ty of AI, like The Inter­net thir­ty years ago, has been used by cin­e­ma to play on a fear that one day we will inno­vate our­selves into obso­les­cence. It’s a valid con­cern and one that the indus­try itself is look­ing at as nego­ti­a­tions and pick­et lines con­tin­ue. How­ev­er, the fact that film­mak­ers are por­tray­ing AI as the bad guy sug­gests we may be some way off from final­ly sub­mit­ting to nefar­i­ous robot overlords.