“The history of artificial intelligence in cinema dates back to the early 20th century, with the first notable AI character being Maria in Fritz Lang’s iconic film Metropolis (1927). The portrayal of a humanoid robot ..
.” I was tempted not to put quotation marks around those lines. What fun to lure readers into thinking they were beginning a boilerplate article on artificial intelligence in culture only to have them then discover that a free website had generated the copy.
No. Better not go there. Even a hint of confusion is dangerous.
The (I’ll confess, eerily convincing) cyberarticle went big on technoapocalypse but declined to note how books, movies and TV had failed to conjure up the low-grade tediousness of so much AI. The “art” in particular. Who would bother structuring a science-fiction novel around not-quite-photorealistic images of blandly attractive lady warriors with seven fingers on each hand? Speculative nightmares are not fashioned from autogenerated reviews on travel sites that deal in suspiciously interchangeable rave clauses.
The perils of death by robot are everywhere. The perils of midlife redundancy thanks to programs that produce indifferent simulacrums of hand-drawn animation – or greeting-card text, or ambient soundscapes – are just a little too ordinarily depressing to interest zesty creatives (as nobody then called HG Wells or Georges Méliès). There is, here, a misty parallel with speculative fiction about manned space exploration.
