Why AI is Hollywood’s favorite monster

For almost a century, people have been going to the movies to get freaked out by fictional depictions of artificial intelligence.

Back in 1968, there was Hal 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1980s gave us the replicants in “Blade Runner” and Skynet in “The Terminator.”  

And these days movies about rogue bots are more popular than ever. Films like “M3GAN,” a 2022 thriller about an artificially intelligent doll, and this summer’s “AfrAId,” featuring a killer Alexa-like AI smart home device, seem to be channeling our worst fears about the intelligent technology increasingly embedded in our daily lives.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Shira Ovide, a tech reporter and author of The Washington Post’s “Tech Friend” newsletter, about why AI is such a compelling horror villain.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Shira Ovide: I wish we had an army of psychologists to look at this question. And it’s something that I have been asking for a very long time, and one of the things that I’ve heard is that we have these dual feelings about artificial intelligence and other technologies, right? We’re wowed by it. We’re sort of amazed at the idea of flying cars or robots that can do our laundry, or artificial computers that can outthink humans or drive cars better than humans, but at the same time, that feels terrifying and out of our control to have something that out-humans humans or that is so powerful and emotionless and is not encumbered by our human physical or emotional frailty. So, I think that duality of these technologies, and especially these artificial intelligence technologies, it does make us feel weird.

Meghan McCarty Carino: Right, and that’s kind of the description of the concept of the uncanny valley, right? It’s things that are a little bit too humanoid, but they’re slightly off, and they just make us feel weird.

Ovide: They just make us feel weird, yes. I spoke to an AI professor at Penn State University who cited Mark Fisher, who was this influential cultural critic, and linked it back to classic horror villains. One of the scary things about a horror villain like Michael Myers or Hannibal Lecter is it’s not clear why those villains do what they do, right? Why does Hannibal Lecter kill and eat people? We don’t really know or understand. And there is some element of AI where, again, the output is not understandable. There’s not an explainable reason for what AI does, and that likewise feels unsettling and eerie to us.

McCarty Carino: You recently wrote about other scientific developments throughout history that have shaped the horror genre. Can you give some examples?

Ovide: Well, my personal favorite example is from 200 years ago, when Mary Shelley wrote the book “Frankenstein.” And at that moment, there was this movement to go against the Industrial Revolution and other scientific advances of that period, and you saw that reflected in “Frankenstein,” where you have this artificial being that a human creates, and then it goes out of control. These fictional depictions are embodiments of things that we’re afraid of in real life. During the Cold War, you have all these alien invasion movies at a time when we’re worried about Russians invading or nuclear Armageddon and things like that. Another example is the original Japanese-language “Godzilla” movies. They kind of helped encapsulate and embody fears that people in Japan felt in the aftermath to the atomic weapons being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

McCarty Carino: There seems to be kind of a feedback loop between these fictional representations of AI and our attitudes toward the technology in real life, and even in how the technology behaves in real life, right?

Ovide: Yeah, the feedback loop that I find superinteresting is that, on the one hand, you have our fears of real life, of a Soviet invasion, of atomic bombs, you have those kinds of fears influencing fictional depictions of technology and artificial intelligence. At the same time, those fictional depictions of technology and AI also influence how we feel about those technologies and AI in real life.

I was sort of fascinated that Monmouth University does consumer polls about people’s attitudes towards AI, and they’ve done this periodically for decades. And the last time they did this, they found that people are worried that AI is going to do more harm than good. And when researchers asked a similar question in the, in the mid-1980s, when AI was mostly science fiction, people felt more optimistic about it. So, somehow, people have become more doubtful about the benefits of AI in the intervening generation, when AI is now real and not just something you see in a Hollywood movie.

McCarty Carino: So why do you think we are drawn to these narratives that further our fears about AI instead of alleviating them?

Ovide: Well, I think that’s a question about all kinds of horror movies, right? There might be this kind of inoculating effect of seeing things that we’re afraid of depicted on screen. If you kind of get this dose of it by reading a book, reading a Stephen King novel, or seeing a horror movie on screen, maybe it makes those fears seem more manageable. But again, that feels like one for psychologists and not technology reporters like me.

More on this

Some lists of Hollywood’s best AI thrillers include the 2013 movie “Her,” though it’s not exactly full of jump scares.

We did a series last year looking back at how strangely prophetic that movie has proven to be. And that was before OpenAI got into hot water for releasing and then canceling a voice assistant that was a little too reminiscent of Scarlett Johansson’s performance.