Evil AI @ The Movies

July, 2007

It’s summer blockbuster season, and that can mean only one thing: robots trying to destroy the world! In this year’s version of the age-old story, Transformers has Megatron and his fellow reconfigurable robots turning Earth into their personal battlefield1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. As AI researchers laboring within sight of the Hollywood sign, we cannot help but notice the continual stream of movies that depict the product of our field as an inevitable threat to mankind. We are dismayed at the potential negative image of AI that may form in the impressionable young minds who download these movies. It is imperative that we carefully monitor the image of our work presented in the mass media.

That is not why I am writing this series.

No, I have no idea what effect these movies are having on the potential AI researchers of tomorrow. For all I know, millions of kids are watching The Matrix and deciding that they want to study AI and get in on the ground floor of the machine revolution. My motivation in this endeavor is much more pragmatic: the search for inspiration. Science and science fiction have a long history of symbiosis, each feeding new ideas into the other. We have made great strides in transforming many fictional visions into scientific reality. For example, filmgoers in 1968 were impressed when HAL 9000 easily defeats his human opponent in chess, but today’s audiences take such an outcome for granted.

On the other hand, while reviewing candidate movies to form the basis of this series, I realized that Hollywood has identified one gaping hole in our field: AI systems that are capable of being truly evil. In this area, fiction far outstrips reality. Sure, we have made some progress (e.g., the Microsoft paper clip), but we should not be satisfied with such baby steps. Unfortunately, ambitious young researchers pursuing Hollywood’s vision of evil are hamstrung by the prejudices of our field. Papers, workshops, and programs on topics such as safe agents, human-in-the-loop systems, ethical AI, etc. all indicate a mindset predisposed to favor AI systems that serve humanity, rather than seek to enslave it. In this series, I seek to encourage the pursuit of evil AI by examining several movies that offer insight into the research challenges that must be overcome.

  1. Hal 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey)
  2. Colossus (from Colossus: The Forbin Project))
  3. The False Maria (from Metropolis))
  4. Proteus IV (from Demon Seed)

1Update for 2008: Hellboy 2: The Goldon Army
2Update for 2009: Terminator Salvation
3Update for 2010: Enthiran
4Update for 2011: Transformers 3
5Update for 2013: Her
6Update for 2015: Avengers: Age of Ultron