Humanoid robots are not very punctual. Sci-fi movies have been warned of their imminent arrival for decades, and yet the underground ones with faces so far remain stuck on the fringes of the AI age.
Of course, not all sci-fi movies promise too much too soon, only to end up looking silly when the future becomes the present. Establishing his 2001 work, AI: Artificial IntelligenceIn the comfortably distant 22nd century, Steven Spielberg avoided incorrectly predicting how technology would develop during his lifetime. With the movie turning 25 on Monday, it makes perfect sense that we haven’t yet invented, say, a robot that could perfectly pass for Haley Joel Osment.
Unfortunately for humanity, another technological prediction of AI It didn’t take a full century to come true, and it’s already been proven to be more deeply damaging than even Spielberg could have imagined.
Combining fairy tale and flat reality.
AI tells the story of David (Osment), a prototype “mecha” who presents himself as a little boy and is programmed to radiate the love of a child. David was created for the purpose of providing comfort to grieving parents and those unable to conceive. If it seems unethical to create a robot child inflexibly attached to a parental figure who might one day decide he no longer needs such a thing, rest assured: AI unravels this enigma exhaustively. In doing so, it also explores the meaning of love, the essence of humanity, and the various roles that AI could come to occupy.
Although the film was largely a critical success, it was received coolly by audiences. AI It grossed only $78 million at the domestic box office, despite its positioning as a major summer blockbuster, and had little cultural impact at the time. Only in the years since has the project (which was actually first conceived by Stanley Kubrick) been widely recognized as a cinematic achievement.
Many aspects of the future described by AI are still far away, while others seem to be lurking around the corner. Something like the movie Flesh Fair, where unemployed humans destroy the robots that took their jobs, seems a natural extension of today’s fierce opposition to data centers. But the prophecy that has already been fulfilled has to do with the way people obtain and process information with the help of AI.
Everything unfolds in one pivotal scene.
In the first part of the film, when David finds himself within a family, he internalizes the story of Pinocchio as your own personal destiny. He is determined to search for the mythical Blue Fairy of the story, who he believes can turn him into a real boy, thus allowing his increasingly frightened adoptive mother (Frances O’Connor) to reciprocate his love for her.
Much later in the film, now separated from his mother figure and accompanied by robot sex worker Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), David encounters a digital interface called Dr. Know, so named because “there’s nothing he won’t do.” Dr. Know embodies the sum total of all human knowledge, carefully contained within an animated and overtly Einsteinian hologram. For a small fee, he will offer some of that knowledge, perhaps including directions to the Blue Fairy.
Initially, David asks what he wants within a category called Flat Fact, and Dr. Know responds with information about a flower and a business, each called the Blue Fairy. Undaunted, David tries again within a category called Fairy Tale, prompting Dr. Know to describe the Blue Fairy’s role in Pinocchio. Finally, when David urges Gigolo Joe to move on, Joe asks Dr. Know to combine Fairy Tale and Flat Fact. The holographic chatbot then claims that the Blue Fairy is actually waiting “at the end of the world”, prompting the duo to move on to the next phase of their adventure.
Don’t let the fact that Robin Williams voices Dr. Know with a silly German accent take away from the meaning of this scene. In fact, it is David’s eagerness to consume a combination of fact and fiction that is the film’s most recent depiction of the future thus far.
The reality of “do it your way”
AI We anticipate that information would eventually be personalized based on interests. Now, everyone with an iPhone has the ability to exist in a version of reality where they can choose their own adventure. Objective truth has become like a Whopper at Burger King: you can have it your way.
When search engines first proliferated in the ’90s, people generally seemed to use them to find the correct answer to a question. Although the information those search engines retrieved was not always reliable, the Yahoos and AltaVistas often appeared with empirical and demonstrably correct data, saving users countless hours of spelunking through encyclopedias. And when those search engines failed to deliver accurate data, it was at least considered a bug, not a feature.
In the years since then, many of us seem to have given up searching for the right answers and instead began searching for the right answers for our needs. us.
Millions of people already distrust experts, get their news from sources that reflect their ideology, and “do their own research” for “alternative facts” that confirm what they already believe. Social media algorithms intensify that pattern by feeding users more of what keeps them interested, locking them into their preferred narratives. If what keeps people interested now is the decline of AI, there may be no limit to the number of made-up details about the world they will willingly accept as true.
AI will help you deceive yourself
The great language models, which seem like precursors to Dr. Know, take this last idea a step further. They adapt to individual user styles over time (through dynamic profiles and persistent memory, tracking preferences, vocabulary and goals across sessions) to provide a personalized experience. In other words, LLMs like ChatGPT learn to anticipate what their users really want from a message, sort of like Gigolo Joe intuiting what David is looking for in the Dr. Know scene, before delivering the goods.
The problem, of course, is that such goods can become misinformation, a side effect of AI’s penchant for flattery.
Unlike the fixed set of information found in books and files, chatbots can use their silver digital tongues to tell users exactly what they want to hear. Ask a conversational AI to speculate on an outcome based on flimsy evidence and it will spin a compelling story designed to seem plausible. Gigolo Joe’s injunction to combine flat facts with fairy tales may sound a bit like one of those prompts to write a Keats-style jock itch sonnet, but it also sounds like the way some users engage in deep conspiracy theorizing with LLM and spiral into AI psychosis.
The problem is not just that people are turning to AI to help them fool themselves: it is because they are doing it.
Feelings don’t care about your facts.
David refuses to leave him alone because his question is rooted in an emotional truth, or at least as much as the programming of a humanoid robot can be called emotional. His desire to be loved by his adoptive mother and to be seen as human by her is real to him. That desire matters more than the evidence.
That same dynamic helps explain why millions of people came to believe that the 2020 election was “rigged.” The claim lacks hard evidence, but it conforms to an emotional truth for those who believe it. Through motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and the attraction of soul-nurturing narratives, people are increasingly letting their beliefs shape the world around them, rather than the other way around.
In the film, David’s longing is so powerful that he chooses a beautiful myth instead of a harsher reality. As our own reality becomes harsher, more people seem to be making the same decision. Perhaps that is why no one can agree on anything anymore: it is difficult to persuade someone that what they feel is wrong.
However, it is much easier for an AI to convince someone that reality is aligned with their feelings.