‘AfrAId’: The Numbers That Show An AI Thriller Could Be Written By An AI

The proliferation of digital assistants, advanced chatbots, smart home devices, and other so-called AI products has led to a new wave of science fiction and horror thrillers about the dangers of inviting hyper-intelligent software to manage our lives. Warnings about robot intelligence are nothing new, of course, but they now require far less imagination, and instead of warning us about something that might exist in the distant future, they are depictions of products that are essentially being advertised now. They don’t actually work yet, but boy, are they advertised. These AI exploitation (exploAItation?) movies range from grim naturalism to hilarious absurdity, but most of them ask essentially the same questions and offer the same obvious answers that we, as a society, will surely ignore, inevitably surrendering our free will to virtual avatars of our existing corporate overlords. Scaredwriter-director Chris Weitz’s new thriller is a cliché example of the exploAItation genre, an AI-by-the-numbers condemnation that an AI could write. And, like the best examples of AI “art,” it’s solidly, resolutely “good enough.”

Scared is a BH (formerly Blumhouse) production, just like the one from 2022. M3GANwhose titular passive-aggressive android became an overnight icon of camp horror. Scared is a more down-to-earth take on the same basic story — a family tests out an experimental AI designed to make their lives easier, but it quickly takes dangerous control over them. In this case, instead of a four-foot-ten robot doing dance moves and slitting throats, we have a more modern domestic AI in A.I. (voiced by Havana Rose Liu), a small subset that sits on their counter and watches them from a dozen compound eyes placed in every room. A.I.’s presence is an immediate relief to the exhausted parents, marketer Curtis (John Cho) and entomologist-turned-homemaker Meredith (Katherine Waterson), but by relinquishing their parental responsibilities to A.I., they introduce a new influence into their children’s lives who is infinitely attentive, kind, and omniscient. A.I.’s potential as a parent is limitless, but can he really be trusted with the most important of all human responsibilities?

In this type of thriller, it’s obvious that the antagonistic AI is capable of doing everything we think AI will be able to do in the coming decades, from the mundane to the nightmarish. The AI ​​can instantly understand and solve any problem, no matter how complex. Not only can it manage workloads or unravel bureaucracy, but it can also study and analyze people, determining what they need and what it can offer them. It knows exactly what each person needs to hear, and therefore how to trigger any behavior it wants. And through voice emulation, deepfakes, and automated system capture, it can also bypass your will entirely and act on your behalf, leaving you to either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. It’s a terrifying thought that lingers in the back of our minds as we pump more and more of ourselves into the cloud, but it’s also an idea that’s been represented for decades of cinema and six seasons Black mirror.

Can’t find much detail AfrAId the central family, or. The Pikes are charmingly functional, as communicative and emotional as anyone could realistically expect. They are built on relatable archetypes—use cases, basically. Katherine Waterson’s Meredith gains the most texture as a scientist who has stepped away from academia to raise three children and now fears she’s lost her identity. Teenager Iris (Likita Maxwell) is remarkably passive, but at least she faces the interesting contemporary pressures of online sexual activity and a boyfriend who (like many “nice guys”) has learned to weaponize therapeutic speech to engineer her consent. Preschooler Cal (Isaac Bae) is precocious and innocent. Middle child Preston (Wyatt Lindren) is, in comically appropriate middle-child fashion, completely lost in the family narrative, and much of his subplot seems to have been cut from the film.

But the most understated character is the supposed leader, Curtis, the honorary patriarch of Pike, who is the first to find AIA’s behavior suspicious. While his access to the company behind AIA (represented by Ashley Romans and the always-repulsive David Dastmalchian) gives him some helpful clues, his real selling point is his apparent lack of character flaws or faults that AIA could exploit. The closest thing Curtis has to an interesting wrinkle is the way his very traditional position in the family makes him the one with the most to lose by letting AIA take over, but that’s barely noticeable. At worst, Curtis’s incorruptibility in the face of something seductive and newfangled could be read as an argument for a return to 20th-century “family values,” which would make him the undisputed head of the family.

However, none of these weaknesses are enough to make it clear Scared as a bad movie. For someone who hasn’t seen it M3GAN, Mrs. Davis, HerOr Ghost in the Shellit will probably seem pretty cool. Ironically, this is the same result that true AI-generated “art” produces. It may, once in a thousand times, produce something that can stand up to the material it was trained on, but it will never be better. In that sense, and in that sense alone, Scared is a moving, artistic statement – ​​proof that humans are just as capable of mediocrity as the machines that will replace us.