Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Correspondence
  • Published:

Beware of fictional AI narratives

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 2, page 654 (2020)Cite this article

Subjects

Nevertheless, if science-fictional AI is not realistic, what exactly is it? It is an artistic and narrative means: Over the years, AI has become a common trope in SF, establishing intertextual and cinematographic references to other representations of AI in the genre, showing the latest visual effects and allowing for dramatic turns in the story. Let’s take a look at some modern SF films after 2000: The famous female robot Ava in the 2014 film Ex Machina, for example, was supposed to look artificial, but intentionally not metallic like Maschinenmaria from Metropolis, nor white-plastic like Björk in the music video ‘All is full of Love’2. Rather, Ava needed to look human and attractive enough that ‘she’ could credibly become the love interest of one of the film’s characters and manipulate him. And again, Ava was played by a real human — just like the hologram Joi in the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 or the robot boy David in A.I. from 2001, who all experience human dramas of love or family relationships. In this vein, the humanoid robot Sonny in I, Robot from 2003 was the state of the art in computer animation — not in robotics. All these anthropomorphized artificial beings are a projection canvas for human issues, not robot issues3.

So, first and foremost, SF films should be analysed metaphorically, as a critical commentary on socio-political aspects beyond technology4. In this sense, Ex Machina is about suppression and deception in a “male-dominated libertarian world where women are still seen as window dressing for sales booths”5 and intelligent women like Ava — not robots — are perceived as a threat. Similarly, the sexy hologram Joi in Blade Runner 2049, both as gigantic living billboard and as personal virtual girlfriend, is part of a city “entirely geared towards pornified male sexual desire”6 and thus a normalization of sexism that exists today. Apart from this, Bladerunner’s bioengineered replicants — although not AI in the strict sense — and also the robot labour force in I, Robot are treated de facto as slaves, which demonstrates not only the human primeval fear of enslavement and oppression in a profit-oriented economic system, but also colonial/postcolonial perspectives and the problematic of racial discrimination and Whiteness7.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

References

  1. Cave, S. & Dihal, K. Nat. Mach. Intell. 1, 74 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Murphy, M. ‘Ex Machina’ features a new robot for the screen. The New York Times (2 April 2015).

  3. Telotte, J. P. Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film (Routledge, 2018).

  4. Hermann, I. Text Matters 8, 212–228 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Robbins, M. Artificial intelligence: gods, egos and ex machina. The Guardian (25 February 2016).

  6. Rose, S. ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe’: what Blade Runner 2049’s dystopia tells us about 2017. The Guardian (6 October 2017).

  7. Cave, S. & Dihal, K. The whiteness of AI. Philos. Technol. https://doi.org/ghc8r3 (2020).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin, Germany

    Isabella Hermann

Authors
  1. Isabella Hermann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Isabella Hermann.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Hermann, I. Beware of fictional AI narratives. Nat Mach Intell 2, 654 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-00256-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-00256-0

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing