The Artifice Girl (2022)
May. 14th, 2023 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayAnyone who has the slightest interest in science fiction stories about AIs needs to see this film. Seriously.
Trigger warnings: Discussion of child sexual abuse and emotional abuse; one short but distressing fistfight.
The setup is that a brilliant young man has created an artificial girl as a honeypot to catch pedophiles. She started out as a modified chatbot, but after he worked on her for a while, started to upgrade herself into what might be considered an AI.
The AI continues to develop across the film, and the philosophical questions of what she is, and what it means to be a human being, are pretty much the entire film. It's not easy to make 90 minutes of philosophy engaging, but this film knocks it out of the park.
I've spent a lot of time philosophizing about AI myself. And I've seen a lot of movies, books, etc. that have grappled with AI philosophy to a greater or lesser degree. I was cringing for much of the film, waiting for the seemingly-inevitable cop-out, or the Treknobabble statement that would break my suspension of disbelief. Astonishingly, it didn't happen. There were a few spaces where my credulity was strained, but which actually got explained within the story later on. I'm not saying it's 100% plausible, but they avoided the vast majority of the typical way these stories fail (for me).
And the filmmakers don't just have the challenge of the philosophy to deal with. They've deliberately restricted the settings and actors. It would be pretty trivial to make this a three act stage play. The story is clearly divided in three parts, each of which takes place in a single, simple room. They do a tiny bit with additional scenes to add visual interest, but nothing that isn't (or couldn't easily be) covered in the dialogue. Some MIT-associated acting troupe should jump on this project.
Highest Recommendation.
Trigger warnings: Discussion of child sexual abuse and emotional abuse; one short but distressing fistfight.
The setup is that a brilliant young man has created an artificial girl as a honeypot to catch pedophiles. She started out as a modified chatbot, but after he worked on her for a while, started to upgrade herself into what might be considered an AI.
The AI continues to develop across the film, and the philosophical questions of what she is, and what it means to be a human being, are pretty much the entire film. It's not easy to make 90 minutes of philosophy engaging, but this film knocks it out of the park.
I've spent a lot of time philosophizing about AI myself. And I've seen a lot of movies, books, etc. that have grappled with AI philosophy to a greater or lesser degree. I was cringing for much of the film, waiting for the seemingly-inevitable cop-out, or the Treknobabble statement that would break my suspension of disbelief. Astonishingly, it didn't happen. There were a few spaces where my credulity was strained, but which actually got explained within the story later on. I'm not saying it's 100% plausible, but they avoided the vast majority of the typical way these stories fail (for me).
And the filmmakers don't just have the challenge of the philosophy to deal with. They've deliberately restricted the settings and actors. It would be pretty trivial to make this a three act stage play. The story is clearly divided in three parts, each of which takes place in a single, simple room. They do a tiny bit with additional scenes to add visual interest, but nothing that isn't (or couldn't easily be) covered in the dialogue. Some MIT-associated acting troupe should jump on this project.
Highest Recommendation.