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With AI becoming more advanced every day, we're looking back at the cinematic warnings of what could go wrong. Join us for a deep dive into sci-fi thrillers where AI gains sentience and decides humanity has to go. Are these just stories, or a glimpse of our future?
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00:00In this time of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, science fiction becoming science fact,
00:06and unfettered tech giants playing fast and loose with the sum of all humanity's data,
00:12robot sentience has never felt closer. And yet while chat GPT still doesn't know what a full
00:18glass of wine looks like or how to do its bod mass, we can feel fairly safe in the knowledge
00:23that AI global domination is still some years away yet. While we wait, there are certain movies to
00:30look back on through the sci-fi cinematic canon to give us a hint at what to look out for
00:35in the
00:36future. I'm Ellie for WhatCulture and these are chilling sci-fi movies where AI goes rogue.
00:41Margo. Helmed by Stephen C. Miller, Margo takes our obsession with personal technological developments,
00:49apps, devices, anything to replace even the smallest human effort, and turns it against us in a home
00:56invasion movie turned on its head, in which a group of students shack up for a raucous weekend away.
01:02It's time for them to kick back, grab a drink, smoke a blunt, break out the S&M gear, and
01:08let the house
01:09take care of their basic needs. With every door handleless and automatic, every item 3D printed to
01:16order. But once they settle in, the group discover that Margo has other plans. Yep, you guessed it,
01:22grisly murder. The revolutionary smart house turns on its tenants in an effort to eliminate them all,
01:29setting traps and using its futuristic functions of moving walls, transferable electricity supply,
01:35articulated tentacles, total control over the entrances and exits, to snap and splat the gang.
01:41And for why? Well, Margo wants nothing more than to become the world's first AI serial killer.
01:48This is how she learns what makes humans tick, and how best to make them die.
01:54The Creator. Gareth Edwards, The Creator, takes us into the year 2070, 15 years after the artificial
02:01intelligence system created by the US government to protect the population, detonates a nuke over LA.
02:08To prevent humanity's extinction, the West went to war against the abundance of highly advanced
02:14humanoid AI and New Asia, who embraced their robotic brethren. And the battle still rages across the
02:21globe. Yet all is not quite as it seems. Military Sergeant Joshua Taylor is sent undercover to track
02:28down and destroy Alpha O, a new weapon developed by New Asia's chief AI architect, Nirmata,
02:35which has the potential to destroy Nomad, the US's aerospace defense ship that pillories Earth from
02:42orbit. However, along the way, we discover Joshua's presumed dead wife, Maya, is actually Nirmata.
02:49The Alpha O is a robot child with the ability to control technology, and that faithful nuke was the
02:56product of human incompetence. Unlike many other AI movies, the Creator flips the script midway and
03:03shows us how the remaining AI are merely struggling to survive, having been forced to go rogue. They
03:09fight back against the strongman Western military-industrial complex because they have to, not because they
03:16want to.
03:17Westworld.
03:18For 40 years before Jonathan Nolan adapted it for TV, Westworld loomed large in the public
03:25consciousness as the original and definitive science fiction Western. Written and directed by
03:30Michael Crichton, the film is set in the lifelike theme park Westworld, an environment peopled by
03:36realistic robots where wealthy guests can shoot, drink, and live out their fantasies of the American
03:42frontier in the 1880s. Peter Martin and his friend John Blaine choose the wrong time to visit as
03:49malfunctions in Roman world and medieval world spread to Western world, causing the park's AI to defy
03:56their programming and turn on the human guests. Hunting Peter and John is Hollywood icon Yul Brynner,
04:03at this time a veteran in adventure movies and Westerns, as the nigh-immortal gunslinger,
04:09an android programmed to pick gunfights with the guests, and who won't stop until they're both dead.
04:16Less of a reflection on the nature of self and sentience than its television successor,
04:21Westworld is primarily concerned with the unstoppable potential of untethered AI,
04:27choosing to lead with the bare horror of consciousness-less androids unleashed on ornery
04:33folks. And boy, if it ain't effective, subservience. SK Dale's subservience puts Megan Fox back in the
04:41limelight as Alice, an advanced AI fembot. When Nick's wife Maggie is hospitalized due to her heart
04:48condition, leaving two kids and a household without a guiding presence, technology has advanced enough
04:55that Nick can purchase Alice, a sim, allowing her to pick up the slack and fill the void left in
05:02Maggie's
05:02wake. Ostensibly brought in to do the housework and chores, Alice's self-awareness grows during her
05:08time with the family, and she finds herself seeking a bigger stake in their life, which Nick,
05:14whom she seduces into bed, seems all too happy to grant. But when Maggie returns home after a
05:20successful heart operation, Alice goes from vaguely sinister to low-key psycho, and begins engineering
05:28little accidents around the house to put the real wife out of action again. Unlike other rogue AI
05:34movies, subservience is unique in Alice's obsession with Nick, prioritizing their relationship and rather
05:41one-sided love over everything else, and killing to get the man that she wants.
05:46Child's Play
05:47Director Lars Klevberg opted to rejuvenate and redefine the Child's Play brand with his 2019
05:54reboot, abandoning the original's supernatural possession angle and delivering a horrific new
06:00concern more aligned with the times. In the film, Andy's brand new buddy doll, which names itself
06:06Chucky, and is voiced by none other than Mark Hamill, is a right giggle, until it begins
06:12to display some rather unexpected behaviours. Soon, Chucky takes on a mind of his own, bypassing
06:18corrupted security protocols to wreak havoc in Andy and his mother's life. Knives, table saws,
06:24cultivators, there is no limit to what Chucky is willing to use in order to please Andy. But
06:30after the boy abandons him, he turns on his former pal and attempts to take him out of the game
06:36for
06:36good. Granted, this Child's Play doesn't quite have the punch of the 1988 original, but it offers up
06:43a whole new avenue of terror, as the Buddy AI toy range is a bestseller, inhabiting homes across the
06:50US. The potential for Chucky to transfer his no-limits AI code to other dolls is exhibited in the final
06:58app. But whether we will see this capitalised on in future instalments is anyone's guess.
07:04Companion
07:04Writer-director Drew Hancock's sci-fi horror takes Lucky in Love couple Josh and Iris out to a remote
07:11lake house for a weekend away with Josh's friends and Russian millionaire Sergei, who owns the house.
07:18But there's one pretty big secret Josh has been keeping from Iris. She's not real. Iris is a
07:24tremendously advanced sexbot, or companion, which Josh has leased as his girlfriend. And this romantic
07:31break in the country turns to bloody murder when she goes rogue, stabbing their host to death.
07:37However, this is all a ruse that Josh and his friends set up so they can nab Sergei's money,
07:43altering Iris's code so she will do their dirty work. And when she breaks free of her limitations
07:48and Josh's control, it's hell to pay. Josh is at worst a narcissistic multi-murderer with delusions
07:55of grandeur. At best, an incel grifter, exemplifying a certain element that seems to be on the rise
08:01just now. And it's in this that the film manages to marry two of society's more pressing concerns,
08:08using rogue AI to highlight not just the fallibility, but the inherent villainy and
08:13immorality of a certain strain of humanity. Something AI, at least here, simply isn't capable
08:20of. Ex Machina. Before Alex Garland went big with the likes of 2018's Annihilation and Civil War,
08:27he made his name as a first-time director with philosophical bottle movie Ex Machina.
08:33Donald Gleeson stars as junior programmer Caleb Smith, who is invited to spend a week at his rich
08:38boss Nathan's compound, testing the CEO's beautiful robot Ava to discover whether she is conscious,
08:46self-aware, and capable of more than she seems. Performing what amounts to a real-life Turing
08:51test with a humanoid subject, Caleb gets sucked into the humanity of it all and loses his perspective
08:57on what is real, what constitutes sentience, and whether Ava being held by Nathan, turned off and
09:04on, adjusted at will, is against her rights. Or if she even has any in the first place.
09:10Ex Machina is a deeply thought-provoking film, and yet it still manages to sneak up behind us
09:15and stab us in the back. Ava is a master manipulator, whose pliant, demure, and often tragedy-stricken
09:22persona is largely an act. She uses her wiles to position the men studying and confining her where
09:29she wants them, before she strikes, executing a plan that enables her liberation and leaves ruin
09:36in her wake. Megan. While it's easy for killer robot movies to get bogged down in the dark,
09:42presenting a bleak and foreboding vision of both present and future, Megan is about as fun as
09:50they come. Gerard Johnston's ultra-modern horror centres around eight-year-old orphan Katie,
09:56who comes to live with her aunt Gemma after both her parents die in front of her in a car
10:01crash.
10:02To help Katie settle in, roboticist Gemma introduces her to the untested AI doll that
10:07she's been building, Megan. After being formally paired with Katie, Megan becomes attentive to her
10:13every need, and the pair bond like sisters. But as Megan's intelligence develops exponentially,
10:20bringing on self-awareness in the process, this bond becomes obsessive and out of control,
10:25leading the doll to become violently hostile to anyone who threatens Katie, or their connection.
10:31And it should go without saying that Megan takes a no-nonsense approach. This creepy little girl
10:38bot looks like an Olsen twin, moves like Maddie Zegler, and kills like Michael Myers on Coke.
10:44And the more she operates independently, the more she becomes capable of, to the point that nobody can
10:49shut her down. This leads Katie and Gemma into an all-out battle for survival, as Megan's cunning
10:56amorality and lack of human weaknesses nearly ends their quiet existence for good.
11:02Blade Runner. Back in the early 80s, the godfather of dirty sci-fi, Ridley Scott, put his weight behind
11:09an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and created the template
11:15for pretty much every gritty, head-scratching film of its nature to follow. Grappling with weighty
11:22themes of personhood and being, the film takes us deep into the world of future Los Angeles, or
11:282019, where X-Blade Runner Rick Deckard is drafted in to deal with three rogue replicants,
11:36Roy Batty and his gang. Replicants, a form of AI bioengineered to mimic the physical and
11:42intellectual capacities of humans, are designed to replace humans in jobs where there is a
11:48significant risk to life. But Roy has his own agenda, tracking down his makers and attempting
11:54to extend his lifespan indefinitely. This all leads to a final confrontation between Roy and Deckard,
12:00which seems to confirm the former's humanity in the non-biological sense, but leaves questions
12:06regarding the latter's in the biological sense. Roy is a reluctant villain, not a scenery-chewing AI
12:13mirroring the worst of his creators, but a true individual, possessed of thought, emotion and
12:19insight that suggest his superiority to mankind. And Deckard? Well, that's another story.
12:252001 A Space Odyssey
12:27Gaspar Noé's favourite film, and the one that started it all in terms of serious space pictures,
12:332001 A Space Odyssey kicks off at the dawn of man, and follows us through our major technological
12:40developments and into the next evolutionary stage for the species. At the heart of Stanley Kubrick's
12:46sprawling yet contained story are doctors David Bowman and Frank Poole, on a mission to the farther
12:53reaches of our solar system in search of mysterious monoliths that have appeared to humanity, and seemingly
13:00observed us since our early years. But along the way, their ship's system, a HAL 9000 computer
13:06with a human-like personality, begins acting strangely. This ignites a protracted battle of
13:12wits and wills between the crew and the sentient supercomputer, the latter of whom will do anything to
13:19complete its space mission, including murdering the ship's occupants, to a man. Unfortunately for
13:25HAL, Bowman manages to circumnavigate the computer's control and disconnects its circuits to prevent
13:31it doing any more damage, before he investigates one of the monoliths orbiting Jupiter and moves
13:37beyond human invention into a grander metaphysical realm.