3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Artifice Girl

2022,  Franklin Ritch (feature debut) -- download

I saw this trailer come out around the same time as M3GAN, another movie about an AI girl, and I assumed this was going to be another cautionary tale about AI weirdly wrapped up in the body of a young girl (that, unpacked, is so problematic). That much is true, but I did see it had an additional plot point -- that the AI girl is built to lure child predators. That idea is both deeply unsettling and fascinating, as it gives the AI theory something to build on -- what if it was created to protect people, children specifically. I naturally assumed, because of the other movie, it would end up being another pseudo-horror where the girl bot ends up killing people, because people suck.

I could not have been more wrong.

P.S. Kent saw M3GAN, I did not. And that is weird.

Of note, this will be one of three back to back posts about AI, so my current thoughts on it will jumble together, cross over, and come out the other side. And probably back again.

I have been thinking about AI a lot. One of the themes in my thoughts, and in the myriad of unfinished stories I write in my notebooks, is why the AI gets created, and how its creation influences its inevitable behaviour. Despite the numerous "evil robot" movies, I doubt anyone is going to create AI inside the shell of a single humanoid body at the first attempt. To do that, we would have either come to understand how consciousness & self is smushed into our 3 pounds of fleshy goo, or we would have to find a new, incredibly compact method of storing data, i.e. the 60s room sized computers that got us to the Moon are now in our phones, posting videos of young woman dancing badly. I am more attracted to the idea of vastly networked computers becoming the first independently thinking AI.

Cherry is created by a single man on a mission, to stop child predation. It starts with something we are familiar with -- a chat bot that can pretend to be a girl, to draw out predators in chat rooms. The film postulates they are the only ones really still using chat rooms. But as this creator expands the programs capacity, the predictive modelling, the capacity for it to learn from those it hunts, it becomes more than he expected. Much more.

The movie has three acts. The first is all setup, a sly nod at the economy of indie film making, with only 4 characters, a single room, bare bones furniture which had me wondering what I had grabbed. An agency tasked with catching child predators has detained an awkward, nerdy, uncomfortable man and grills him about chat rooms and content found on his computer.  You think it is going one way. Its most definitely not. 

The dialogue is classic interrogation, until it bends to the actual will of the movie, and then... enlightenment. He is still a predator but one of a different kind, an abused child who now hunts down his abusers. And at his disposal, his program, his fake little girl. They want to assist him, provide him resources. He hesitates, afraid the anonymity that allows him to work will be lost to governmental and organization bureaucracy. But behind that is another reason, that Cherry has already become more than a predictive model capable of pretending to be an innocent young girl in a video chat room.

The second act, the same room, but... decorated. Years later. The organization, now successful beyond its wildest dreams, has an opportunity to expand Cherry beyond her current confines, to give her access to other sources of data, to become a bigger system, to have a body. But one member vetoes the idea, and he has a reason. He wants Cherry to drop her artifice, to show them what she really is. He uses violence on Gareth, her creator, until she cracks. Suddenly there isn't an algorithm on the screen, reacting to input, but a real girl... with feelings, over protective of her maker, her friend. Cherry has not been a "dumb program" for a very long time, she is an autonomous AI, a real superintelligence, a real... person. 

Act three, a distant future, Gareth is wheelchair bound, Cherry is independent, an android style body tethered to cables. He knows his life is coming to an end, so a conversation is to be had. He wants her to continue with her "prime objective", the hunting of child predators (that they still need to be hunted down, now, after all this time, is troubling) but he also acknowledges how much more she has become. The conversation is more about freedom, about choice, about independence. So, he gives her a choice, something she never had before.

The movie may be about a hunt for child predators, but really, its more a conversation about the emergence of fully thinking, fully feeling AIs, that which scifi loves to explore. The movie is a vehicle to discuss the topic, and everything about the movie is conversation; there is no action, there is nothing but talking in rooms. Despite its misleading opening sequence that feels like undercooked indie film making, it is incredibly well thought through, well constructed, tightly defined.

Don't forget the toss away scene!

OK. There is one scene, at the beginning of act two, with two brief characters, where it establishes the expansion of the predator hunting agency. Two minor functionaries assigned to working on Cherry are chatting, one about how she still has those brief moments of "glitching", a small latency when she is presented with a query for which she has no basis to respond. Meanwhile the other character is talking about how he needs a warmer jacket now, toss away small talk. The first character asks him about Cherry's pauses, he pauses himself, and then continues to talk about getting a warmer coat.