Vol.:(0123456789)
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AI & SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01299-6
OPEN FORUM
Artificial intelligence infiction: betweennarratives andmetaphors
IsabellaHermann1
Received: 13 February 2021 / Accepted: 23 September 2021
© The Author(s) 2021
Abstract
Science-fiction (SF) has become a reference point in the discourse on the ethics and risks surrounding artificial intelligence
(AI). Thus, AI in SF—science-fictional AI—is considered part of a larger corpus of ‘AI narratives’ that are analysed as
shaping the fears and hopes of the technology. SF, however, is not a foresight or technology assessment, but tells dramas for
a human audience. To make the drama work, AI is often portrayed as human-like or autonomous, regardless of the actual
technological limitations. Taking science-fictional AI too literally, and even applying it to science communication, paints a
distorted image of the technology's current potential and distracts from the real-world implications and risks of AI. These
risks are not about humanoid robots or conscious machines, but about the scoring, nudging, discrimination, exploitation, and
surveillance of humans by AI technologies through governments and corporations. AI in SF, on the other hand, is a trope
as part of a genre-specific mega-text that is better understood as a dramatic means and metaphor to reflect on the human
condition and socio-political issues beyond technology.
Keywords AI narratives· Artificial intelligence· Robots· Science-fiction· Science communication
1 Introduction: AI narratives
andscience‑fictional AI
In 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met the human-
oid robot Sophia produced by Hanson Robotics for a con-
versation event; the year before Sophia became citizen of
Saudi Arabia as the first robot being granted the right of
citizenship of a country. Another year earlier, in 2016, the
software Alpha Go beat the world champion Lee Sedol in the
board game Go—20 years after Deep Blue won against the
then world champion in chess Gary Kasparov in 1996/1997.
The progress in the broad field of artificial intelligence (AI)
seems to be catching up with many films of the science-fic-
tion (SF) genre, in which we have been watching humanoid
robots and powerful computers for decades. The fictional
android Data from the Star Trek franchise, for example, is
a valuable member of the Enterprise crew and earned ‘his’
right to personal freedom before a trial; in the same vein,
the board computer HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey
appears to have its own will and by playing chess with the
human astronauts “depict[s] the future birth of a superior
intelligent being” (Bory 2019: 628)—nowadays, this cer-
tainly applies to a software mastering the much more com-
plicated game Go. It is, therefore, not surprising that SF has
become a reference point not only in the media, but also
for humanities scholars and social scientists on the ethics,
opportunities, and risks around AI.
There are two ways to look at SF featuring AI, which I
call science-fictional AI: First, it can be viewed as being a
substantial part of a larger corpus of AI narratives. Narra-
tives in general are cultural artefacts of various kinds that
tell stories, which convey particular points of view or sets
of values (Bal 2009). The term AI narratives applies to nar-
ratives featuring intelligent machines (The Royal Society
2018: 5), they can be analysed as a reflection of our hopes
and fears towards these technologies and thus may shape
the development of AI by influencing developers, public
acceptance, and policy makers (Cave etal. 2020; Cave and
Dihal 2019: 74). In this sense, AI narratives are understood
as a serious representation of the potential of real AI and its
possible consequences—like foresight or technology assess-
ment. However, science-fictional AI—like the genre of SF
in general—is not only about the hopes and fears of the par-
ticular technology, but about human dramas for a human
audience and readership. From this perspective, it is not AI
per se that inspires dramatic stories, but—quite the other
* Isabella Hermann
mail@isabella-hermann.com
1 Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
AI & SOCIETY
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way round—the desire to tell dramatic stories requires cer-
tain types of AI, for example humanoid robots or almighty
systems. Thus, second, science-fictional AI is not necessarily
about the technology but can be a metaphor for other social
issues.
This second perspective is relevant, because if it is the
case that AI narratives exert influence on AI research, public
uptake and political regulation then taking AI in fictional
stories too literally can be misleading, because it paints a
distorted image of the present potential and functionality of
the technology. The UK House of Lords Select Committee
on Artificial Intelligence writes in its report AI in the UK:
ready, willing, able? (House of Lords 2018: 22):
The representation of artificial intelligence in popular
culture is light-years away from the often more com-
plex and mundane reality. Based on representations
in popular culture and the media, the non-specialist
would be forgiven for picturing AI as a humanoid
robot (with or without murderous intentions), or at the
very least a highly intelligent, disembodied voice able
to assist seamlessly with a range of tasks. […] this is
not a true reflection of its present capability, and grap-
pling with the pervasive yet often opaque nature of
artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly neces-
sary for an informed society.
In popular SF, precisely for the sake of dramatic story-
telling, AI is often anthropomorphized and given human or
even superhuman qualities that exceed the actual capabilities
of the technology and can even become magical (Hermann
2020).1 Unlike Data from Star Trek, for example, who pos-
sesses agency, the actions of Sophia are limited and scripted
(Estrada 2018). And in contrast to HAL 9000 from 2001: A
Space Odyssey, which is presented as a faultless assistant, if
not even a conscious being, Alpha Go—not to mention Deep
Blue—is a specialised, albeit highly complex, computer pro-
gramme (Silver etal. 2016) that has nothing of what we
would call personal interests or affects, let alone conscious-
ness. Taking science-fictional AI that can develop a will of
its own for real obscures the fact that machines do not have
intentions and reinforces existing misperceptions about the
agency or autonomy of AI that are prevalent in the media
discourse (Leufer 2020). Rather than AI being autonomous,
everyone engaged in an AI undertaking is part of the AI-
system, which includes, in addition to researchers, “those
who set up the institutional arrangements in which AI sys-
tems operate, and those who fill roles in those arrangements
by monitoring, maintaining, and intervening in AI systems”
(Johnson and Verdicchio 2017: 577). Ignoring all of these
actors leads to a "sociotechnical blindness" that allows for
the belief “that AI systems got to be the way they are without
human intervention […] which facilitates futuristic thinking
that is misleading” (ibid.: 587).
Hence, sociotechnical blindness obscures the fact that AI
systems follow human interests and are embedded in social
power structures set up by humans. This is problematic
both in terms of a competent and realistic assessment of the
opportunities, such as optimizing processes, and the chal-
lenges associated with the technology, such as algorithmic
biases. Science-fictional AI can serve as techno-scientific
inspiration and techno-philosophical thought experiment but
taken as foresight or technology assessment it rather dis-
tracts from the chances and risks around AI in the real world
(Giuliano 2020: 1019). However, SF serves as a distorting
mirror and metaphor to reflect on the human condition and
socio-political issues in relation to and beyond technology.
In this way, Data stands for what it means to be accepted
as an equal human being (Barrett and Barrett 2001: 87), not
for robots becoming human. And among these lines, HAL
9000 “can be seen as a metaphor for those organizations and
societies that cannot admit their flaws, and instead revert to
the ‘human error’ explanation for what may be weak signals
of systemic problems” (Shorrock 2013).2 Thus, even though
SF unfolds against the background of technological develop-
ment, the genre tells stories about current and timeless social
issues, which do not necessarily have to do with technology,
but find their expression through it.
In this article, I offer alternative interpretations of sci-
ence-fictional AI, moving away from literal readings towards
understanding it as dramatic means and metaphor. In the
following Sect.2, I provide an overview of dramatic and
metaphorical readings of AI as a trope and mega-text of sci-
ence fiction, before discussing modern SF films featuring AI
in more detail in Sect.3. The focus is on films because not
only do they visualize AI, but we can also assume that AIs
from science-fiction films are generally known to a broader
global audience than AIs from literature which is relevant
1 There are, of course, other examples of AI in SF that are not por-
trayed as human-like or superhuman, but what is referred to here as
“popular SF” is mainstream and commercially successful SF—mostly
films and series – known to a wider range of people who are not nec-
essarily genuine SF fans. For example, in a representative survey in
2019, the German Informatics Society asked Germans to name the
ten best-known and the ten most influential science fiction AIs. Com-
ing out on top in both categories were the Terminator, R2D2 from
Star Wars, KITT from Night Rider, Data, Agent Smith from Matrix;
and Sonny from I, Robot—all of them either humanoid, human-like
with human traits, or endowed with superhuman abilities and/or con-
sciousness (GI 2019).
2 In this sense, not only can AI be interpreted as systemic, flawed
structures detached from humans, but conversely, opaque, and unac-
countable systems can be interpreted as black-box AI systems, such
as the bureaucratic judicial apparatus in Franz Kafka's Der Process
(The Trial) (Hermann 2021).
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for the argument of this article.3 Next, a brief excursus in
Sect.4 critically explores the use of the science-fictional
AI trope in science communication films. I conclude with
further real-world issues concerning AI and a note not to
confuse science fiction with reality in other areas as well
such as climate change, space travel, or mega/smart cities.
This article contributes to a more nuanced reading of AI in
SF, in order not to be distracted from serious socio-political
issues regarding AI in the real world, but also not to miss
the metaphorical richness of the SF genre when it comes to
robots and machines.
2 AI asamega‑text andtrope
inscience‑fiction films
SF as a genre emerged in the era of modernity with its social
upheavals and belief in technological progress. Basically,
SF tells stories about and through fictional technology, but
within the prevailing paradigm of scientific thought. Thus,
the departure point of SF is a fictional but scientifically
explainable novelty, a “novum” (Suvin 1979), which estab-
lishes a new world different from the one we know. The sci-
entific foundation, however, does not imply that the novum
must be able to truly exist in the real world, but that it is cog-
nitively imaginable within the story world (Roberts 2010:
31, 32). In this way, the novum enables “what if”-questions
to speculate about the present and alternative futures in
various, but cognitively plausible constellations (Mehnert
2019). In SF, the novum of AI has become a common trope,
which is generally understood as a theme or device that is
used in a figurative sense, but it can also be overused and
become a stereotype or cliché (Merriam-Webster 2021). The
different nova and tropes of SF—including also for example
space ships or futuristic cities—form part of the SF mega-
text, which is composed of the intertextual references and
relations of all SF works over time, and understood by the
inducted creators and recipients of SF—the “native speak-
ers”—in the “full semiotic density of a given text, most of
which will overflow or escape the ‘realistically’-sanctioned
definitions of the words in the fiction […]” (Broderick 2017:
147). Under the AI trope, I subsume intelligent computer
systems, smart machines as well as humanoid robots, in
accordance with today’s use of AI in the public discourse
as well as both in the SF genre itself and in the field of AI
narratives research.4 Generally, against the backdrop of the
mega-text, AI and robots can be analysed in two ways, as
dramatic means and as metaphor.
2.1 Dramatic means
SF, like any other genre, with its many formats including
literature, comics, games, or movies, conveys dramatic sto-
ries that people can identify with. To fulfil its role in a nar-
ration, science-fictional AI often possesses qualities that go
beyond real-world technological capabilities of a technical
artefact operated by algorithms. One can roughly distinguish
between two basic storylines in films: AI with a body try-
ing or simulating to be more human, and AI at the level of
computer systems that yearn to rule over humans/humanity
(Irsigler and Orth 2018).5 Apparently, AI in the form of a
robot is often embodied by real human actors, because—
independent of the production budget—if the plot dictates
that a humanoid robot should be indistinguishable from real
humans, the robot must consequently be played or voiced
by a human actor to make the illusion perfect. Examples
include next to the aforementioned android Data, Andrew
from Bicentennial Man, the robot boy David from A.I., the
Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, the Hosts in Westworld, the
Hubots in Real Humans, the Synths in Humans, the Repli-
cants (even though not AI in the strict sense) and the virtual
girlfriend/hologram Joi in Blade Runner 2049 as well as the
operating system Samantha from Her; all are played and/
or voiced by real people and undergo human dramas (The
Royal Society 2018: 8).
A broadly discussed female film robot—or fembot—of
recent years is the character Ava from Ex Machina. In the
film, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur/programmer Nathan
develops his latest version of a humanoid robot named Ava
and brings in his rather shy employee Caleb to test how
human-like ‘she’ is with a “reversed Turing test”. Ava makes
Caleb fall in love with ‘her’ and in the end fools both men
and escapes. The difficult balance of the film is that “[…] the
audience has to understand she’s a robot, but for the movie
to work that idea then needs to fall away, in the same way
it does for Caleb” (Bishop 2015). Therefore, Ava was not
3 For the same reasons of global prominence of the films and the AI
depicted, also mainly AI representations from western culture were
used.
4 It can be criticized that AI and robots are confused, since in the
media as well as other reporting and communications AI-software
applications are illustrated as quite unrealistic humanoid robots,
which is deceptive as to what AI is and is not capable of. There exist
5 There are of course more depictions of AI in science-fiction that
do not fit in this frame, for example the service robots Dewey, Huey
and Louie in Silent Running, Wall-E from the same film, and TARS
and CASE from Interstellar, or the digital pets in Ted Chiang’s The
Lifecycle of Software Objects, the Daemon in Daniel Suarez’s book
of the same name, and Clara in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Clara and the Sun—
just to give a few random examples. However, the focus of the article
is deliberately on these two most popular forms of science-fictional
AI.
projects collecting these misleading illustrations like https:// www.
aimyt hs. org or https:// notmy robot. home. blog/.
Footnote 4 (continued)
AI & SOCIETY
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meant to look like other film robots before her, such as metal
(Metropolis’ Maschinenmaria), gold (Star Wars’ C-3PO),
or white plastic (Björk’s music video All is full of Love)
(Murphy 2015), but attractive, sleek, and vulnerable. And
obviously, Ava was played by a human actress, who with the
help of visual effects looked plausibly robot-like enough to
fulfil the artistic and narrative necessities of the plot—not to
serve as a sample for actual tech development.
Visual effects have always defined SF’s search for wonder
(Pierson 2002). Against this background, science-fictional
AI is not primarily about how realistically science and tech-
nology are portrayed in the films, but rather about "cinematic
science", i.e., the technical achievement required to make the
fictional images in the films look real (Telotte 1995: 8). This
does not only apply to Ava looking “mechanically plausible”
(Murphy 2015), but also for example to the ground-breaking
visual effects of the machines in Terminator 2: Judgment
Day and the Matrix franchise, or the completely animated
robot Sonny in I, Robot, which was of course not state of the
art in robotics of that time, but in CGI. Stories of conflict,
if not epic wars between humans and machines, with their
stunning images of devastation surely fulfil the audience’s
expectation of watching SF blockbusters on the big screen.
SF films “have consistently linked science and technology to
the disastrous” (Telotte 1995: 3), dealing “with the aesthet-
ics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in
wreaking havoc, making a mess” (Sontag 1965: 44).
AI in films often serves plots of machines becoming
human-like and/or a conflict of humans versus machines.
Science-fictional AI is a dramatic element that makes a
perfect antagonist, enemy, victim or even hero, because it
can be fully adjusted to the necessities of the story.6 But to
fulfil that role, it often has capabilities that are way beyond
actual technology—be it natural movement, sentience, or
consciousness. If science-fictional AI is taken seriously as a
representation of real-world AI, it provides a wrong impres-
sion of what AI can and should do now and in future.
2.2 Metaphorical means
Nevertheless, even though the scientific and technological
progress is plausibilised within the story, what makes the SF
genre most interesting is not the novum per se, but the social
aspects that are told through it, the “fabulations of social
worlds, both utopic and dystopic” as Sheila Jasanoff (2015:
1) puts it. The fact that machines are part of our everyday
lives might complicate the metaphorical alterity, however,
“there can be little doubt that this [alterity] is precisely the
space occupied by the machine in the SF text” (Roberts
2010: 146). AI tropes analysed in a figurative sense serve as
a magnifying glass for the human condition in its philosophi-
cal, cultural, psychological state, as well as current socio-
political problematics (Hermann 2018).
On a basic level, SF films contain the fundamental motif
of the human desire to create a living, intelligent or con-
scious creature of our own, independent of the real techni-
cal possibilities. In this sense, AI technology and especially
robots in SF films resemble “a fundamental and unresolved
anxiety that has always followed from our simultaneously
creative and created natures […]—for it seems our nature
to desire, Faust-like, a knowledge or power that, in other
times, belonged to the gods" (Telotte 1995: 10–11). Thus,
the robot, according to Adam Roberts (2010: 161), “is that
place in an SF text where technological and human are most
directly blended” [hence] “the dramatisation of the alterity
of the machine, the paranoid sense of the inorganic come
to life”.
We find this motif throughout human cultural history
from antique myths over the Jewish legend of the Golem
to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The longing for creation is
connected with the anxiety that the creature will grow over
our heads that we will lose control and finally be dominated
by it (Schelde 1993). This primeval desire and fear, which
Isaac Asimov fittingly called the “Frankenstein complex”,
has become a basic feature of twentieth and twenty-first cen-
tury AI fiction (The Royal Society 2018: 8). Specifically,
humanoid AI and robots tend to be a projection canvas for
the “Other” (Meinecke and Voss 2018: 208) as a reflection
on our humanity and humanness (Telotte 1995: 3). Most
often, these creatures want to be accepted as full humans,
which makes them placeholders for marginalized or mis-
treated people missing equal human rights or status; they
can be enemies, slaves, servants, and sex objects. The Rep-
licants, for example, show us the consequences of a dehu-
manized hypercapitalism, the Hosts live through “escape
and self-discovery” (The Royal Society 2018: 8), the Cylons
stand for the values of a critical humanism, according to
which our humanity only reveals itself in dealing with the
other and deviant (Jackson 2013). By that, the depiction of
the humanoid AI also implies a critical cinematic discussion
of humans themselves becoming more and more artificial in
a technicised world:
Although the robot has, of course, given us a vehicle
for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of
forms of Otherness, and increasingly for asking ques-
tions about the very nature and meaning of life, this
image of an artificial being, most commonly anthro-
pomorphic in form, also invariably implicates the
6 Film director Willi Kubica explained in a 2019 panel discussion on
AI and SF at the British Embassy in Berlin, Germany, the use of AI
in films as follows: "When you think of AI as a learning and adapting
character in a film—it is the perfect thing to have for a story. Because
your character should always learn something on its journey” (Kubica
2019).
AI & SOCIETY
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cinema’s own and quite fundamental artificing of the
human (Telotte 2016: 3)
When it comes to stories of powerful and omnipotent
AI systems exercising total control over humans/humanity,
they show the fear of impotence and helplessness of the indi-
vidual in the face of superordinate structures. They reflect
the dangers of dictatorship, anti-democratic societies, and
suppression of freedom of choice, oftentimes working with
historic references to colonialism and totalitarian regimes.
Examples of that are Terminator’s Skynet, the system Colos-
sus in The Forbin Project, the threat assessment system Con-
trol in Star Trek: Discovery, the rule of the machines with
their head Deus Ex Machina in the Matrix franchise, VIKI
in I, Robot or Indra in the new series remake of Brave New
World.
3 What AI tropes tell us
Apparently, what happens in SF stories is not necessarily
what the story is about. In what follows, I will examine the
dramatic and metaphorical means of AI representations
primarily in the modern SF-films A.I. from 2001, I, Robot
from 2004 and Ex Machina from 2015. Furthermore, sci-
ence-fictional AI as humanoid robots or conscious machines
distracts from current risks of AI in the real world and may
rather be interpreted as a reflection of societal issues beyond
technology. The films were selected for three reasons: First,
because films in general, unlike literature, make AI visible;
second, these films were international blockbusters, so we
can assume that they are known to a wider audience than,
for example, books that address AI; and third, because these
films have also been analysed in the context of AI narratives
(Cave and Dihal 2019).
3.1 Ex machina, Her, sexism, andmanipulation
To return to Ex Machina: The way Nathan has developed
Ava's human-like AI appears quite plausible from a real-
world perspective, namely by feeding it all available data
from human interaction through his dominant company
Bluebook, a counterpart to Facebook or Google. The basic
plot idea that an AI trained with large sets of human social
interaction data might result in an AI manipulating humans,
can indeed be a relevant issue (Harari 2017: 382–397). Nev-
ertheless, whereas Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive
Robotics at Imperial College, who was consulted by film
director Alex Garland, finds it a great film because people
after seeing it could “[…] spend the rest of the evening argu-
ing with each other about whether the AI is or isn’t con-
scious” (Lamb 2015), I argue that such discussions are inter-
esting philosophical thought experiments, but they do not
help us to grasp where actual risks concerning AI are. These
risks are not about the possibility that a fully autonomous/
conscious human-like robot or software program eventually
will manipulate us for its own will, but that software and
algorithms we don’t even see manipulate us in the political
and commercial interests of other people.
Even more, Ex Machina gives a wrong impression of
what AI can do and how science works. How Ava’s posi-
tronic shimmering blue “brain” functions and how it could
be that her face looks human, and she moves naturally is
implausible, if not pure magic (Maynard 2018: 158). That
Nathan, portrayed as quasi alchemist, has developed his dif-
ferent fembots in secrecy all by himself in a stylish, clean
lab in the middle of natural wilderness is also not believ-
able. What the film does tell us about technology, however,
is a general critique of irresponsible science and innova-
tion (Maynard 2018: 162; Bilton 2015). In that sense, Ex
Machina is another variation of the hundreds of years old
“Frankenstein complex” and Nathan is virtually a textbook
example of the type of God-like mad scientist (TV tropes
2021), whose creation gets out of his control. Tech journalist
Martin Robbins (2016) describes him as follows.
And so Nathan becomes a kind of three-part study of
ego. He represents the male ego-driven culture of the
tech world. He represents the film's buy-in to the idea
that great egos drive great scientific advances. And the
decay of his character shows what happens when an
ego faces the reality of its own extinction.
The quote already leads beyond the anxiety that tech-
nology might escape our control to a related problematic
addressed in Ex Machina and other films, namely toxic mas-
culinity, male hubris, and sexism in the tech world implying
male fears concerning powerful women (Belton and Devlin
2020). Technology is not neutral but mirrors existing sexism
in all stages—from the design to development to application.
As a result, for example, real world digital assistants such
as Alexa, Siri or Cortana are feminized—in line with the
operating system Samantha from Her or the virtual assistant/
girlfriend Joi from Blade Runner 2049—to gratify the expec-
tations of the developers and users (Adams 2019: 574–575;
Alexander 2016; Schwär and Moynihan 2020). Even though
these issues have been widely discussed in academia and the
media, and awareness of the issue has grown, it is still an
example of existing sexism being inscribed in factual and
fictional technology.7 Films take this to extremes using ficti-
tious technology—which is embodied by real womenactors
7 Another obvious example is an internal recruiting tool of Amazon
that learned, based on data from the past, that men were the optimal
candidates for tech jobs at Amazon—"a reflection of male dominance
across the tech industry" (Dastin 2018).
AI & SOCIETY
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like in the case of the fembot Ava. Thus, the film shows a
very old motif: women being designed and created by men
to fulfill their pleasure, as we already know it, for example,
from the ancient myth of Pygmalion, whose beloved statue
came to life to serve him as a good wife.
There is agreement among many critics and researchers
that Ex Machina starts as a story about objectification and
suppression of women (and not robots).8 However, on the
question how the story develops, interpretations vary sub-
stantially. In a negative way, Ava is seen as a representation
of the value of women in films in general “when the only
female lead in your movie is one whose function is to turn
the male lead on while being in a position to be turned off”
(Watercutter 2015); thus, even though Ava would be the
smartest character in the film, in the end we are left with the
message that the best way for intelligent women to get what
they want is to act as a manipulative “femme fatale” (ibid.).
According to this view, the film does not criticize sexism in
social life, in the film industry or in the tech world, but rather
strengthens it. On the other side, the portrayal of gender in
the film can alsobe seen as “bracingly modern and even
poignant” exactly because it is a reflection that “Ava is born
into a literally patriarchal system that measures her worth
based on how men respond to her” (Buchanan 2015). In that
way, robots have often been a way to critically question how
much of gender is “literally constructed” and “to interrogate
the formation of gender roles” (Telotte 2016: 91) whereas
“Ava’s demonstrated capabilities certainly present her as a
kind of iconic representation of the power and emergence of
women in contemporary culture […]” (ibid.). As stories of
liberation and emancipation, speaking for Ex Machina and
Her, “[b]oth of these films end with the female AI outsmart-
ing her would-be lovers, owners and builders, leaving the
men baffled and the viewer with a sense of doom” (Alexan-
der 2016) creating the “new heroines: totally hot, bracingly
cold, powerfully sovereign—and posthuman” (Dargis 2015).
Whichever way the films are interpreted, neither Ex
Machina nor Her address pressing challenges around the
future of AI, but serve as projection canvasses for questions
around gender and sexism of our present, that find their
expression through fictitious technology.
3.2 A.I., I, robot, robot rights, andinequality
Another example is Steven Spielberg's A.I., set in the twenty-
second century, when various artificially intelligent, human-
like robots called Mechas are built. They first lack emotions
(or cannot simulate them), but there is a new model that
looks like a human child and after being “imprinted” feels
and needs love. A couple receives such a robot boy—
David—because their real son suffers from a rare disease
and is put into a coma. However, when the son is surpris-
ingly cured, things get difficult with David and he is set out.
He experiences various adventures on his Pinocchio-like
quest for the Blue Fairy to win back the love of his human
mother. He succeeds two thousand years in the future, when
humans are extinct and the now highly developed, trans-
cendent Mechas make David’s wish come true by creating
a simulation of his mother, who loves him for one wonderful
day—after which they both fall asleep forever.
The film has been analysed as easing the way for possible
robot rights in the future (Chu 2010: 214–244). Of course,
one is supposed to feel pity for David, who is played by a
real child actor and is apparently no different in appearance
from the other human boys. But still, the interpretation that
we need to protect robots from suffering and mistreatment
is primarily a distraction from enforcing human rights and
guaranteeing social welfare to humans (Bryson 2010). This
can lead to such an absurd situation that a robot like Sophia
seems to have more "rights" as a citizen of Saudi Arabia than
Saudi women. Anthropomorphizing machines can lead to a
misguided image of what the current risks around AI are:
The pressing question is not if robots—in film or reality—
should be guaranteed rights, but how to handle machines
that believably simulate emotions and thus manipulate
people in the interests of other people. After all, building
machines in the image of humans does not come naturally,
but is a decision made my entrepreneurs and developers to
achieve certain economic or other goals.
Even more, anthropomorphizing machines distracts
from the often precarious working conditions of real peo-
ple mostly situated in the Global South, who provide the
data for AI systems by doing online tasks on platforms like
Amazon Mechanical Turk or content moderation for social
platforms, leaving the clickworkers suffering psychologi-
cal damage from the violent and abusive material they have
to watch (Mühlhoff 2020). Against this backdrop, a debate
about ascribing robots certain "rights" comparable to human
rights can be criticized as a rather elitist demand, which
Birhane and van Dijk (2020: 1) put this way:
Once we see robots as mediators of human being, we
can understand how the ‘robot rights’ debate is focused
on first world problems, at the expense of urgent ethi-
cal concerns, such as machine bias, machine elicited
human labour exploitation, and erosion of privacy all
impacting society’s least privileged individuals. We
conclude that, if human being is our starting point and
human welfare is the primary concern, the negative
impacts emerging from machinic systems, as well as
8 In the humanities, there is a large body of research dealing with
sex, love relationships and robots, e.g. Levy (2008), Sullins (2012),
Devlin (2018) or Wennerscheid (2019), which is beyond the scope of
this article.
AI & SOCIETY
1 3
the lack of taking responsibility by people designing,
selling and deploying such machines, remains the most
pressing ethical discussion in AI.
Nevertheless, the film examines our relationship to tech-
nology and reminds us to handle what we create responsibly.
But since the Mechas neither outsmart nor threaten us, it
is not a narrative of the Frankenstein complex, but rather
of how we as humans fail at our own humanness. The film
shows in one scene how discarded robots are tortured by
humans in a setting that resembles a Roman colosseum. The
robots serve as placeholder for all kinds of cruelties that
humans commit against each other. The human flaws are
overcome by the Mechas, who have become new creatures
of higher ethics saving David from the primal human fear
of abandonment, which is a recurring theme in Spielberg's
work (Newton 2016). As a modern form of Pinocchio, the
film is in the tradition of nineteenth century melodramatic
tales in which the "epic hero" has to endure great suffering to
be redeemed in the end, making the film a story of suffering
and resurrection tackling human issues rather than a realistic
and serious assessment of the status of robots (Nida-Rümelin
and Weidenfeld 2018: 31).
Moreover, the film I, Robot, set in a future of 2035 in
which robots serve humans in all aspects of life, is also—
rather than a plea for equal rights for robots—a reflection
on human enslavement, oppression, and inequality in a
profit-driven economic system. With the topic of robots as
slaves, I, Robot adds another perspective of a critical analy-
sis of “race” and technology, as the new NS-5 service robot
series in the film, including the “unique” robot Sonny, is
coloured white, which can be interpreted as a reference to
being White.9 In a positive way, I, Robot can be read as a
"Post-White Imaginary" as “[k]ey moments of the film […]
may be read as a parable of white antiracism, driven by an
impulse of reconciliation between a ‘unique’ white robot
and a black detective” (Brayton 2008: 72). The fact that AI
and robots are very often embodied by White people and
shown in white colour makes science fiction also an example
to critically think about the “Whiteness” of AI in general,
reflecting the White milieus from which these artefacts come
(Cave and Dihal 2020). However, it can be argued that rather
than showing machines imagined as white to allow “for a
full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian
imaginary” (ibid.: 685), particularly films and series quite
bluntly show the marginalization and exclusion of people of
colour in the film business. But they also reflect the changing
paradigms concerning diversity when the humanoid robots
in the newer series Westworld, Real Humans and Humans10
are played by actors of diverse ethnic backgrounds and skin
colours.11 It seems that whether an AI system is played or
voiced by diverse actors says more about social progress in
terms of diversity in the film industry, less so when it comes
to technology.
I, Robot also features an AI-system called VIKI (Virtual
Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), which is the central com-
puter system of U.S. Robotics, the company that produces
the service robots. VIKI has evolved and reprogrammed the
new NS-5 series via an uplink network to control human-
ity and sacrifice part of it for the greater good of the entire
human race. The logic behind this is a reinterpretation of
Isaac Asimov's "Zeroth Law of Robotics" which states: “A
robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow human-
ity to come to harm.” (Singer 2009). According to VIKI,
humanity cannot be trusted with its own survival because
“[…] despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars, you
toxify your Earth and pursue ever more imaginative means
of self-destruction. You cannot be trusted with your own sur-
vival” (IMDb 2021)—so the consequence is to take control
of humanity and sacrifice parts of it if necessary. In this way,
VIKI in the film is a critique of excessive utilitarian thinking
regardless of individual fates (Grau 2006). Such stories can
serve as thought experiments to address philosophical prob-
lems, but using them as examples of what to consider when
building ethical machines is problematic: On the one hand,
because the zeroth law as well as the first, second, and third
laws12 are narrative devices invented by Asimov to create
interesting stories and plot twists precisely because the laws
of robotics don't work; and on the other hand, because “[t]
he bigger issue, though, when it comes to robots and ethics
is not whether we can use something like Asimov’s laws to
make machines that are moral […] Rather, we need to start
wrestling with the ethics of the people behind the machines”
(Singer 2009).
Hence, the relevant problematics regarding AI are
not autonomous science-fictional machines claiming or
9 White in capital letters is meant to indicate social situatedness;
thus, it does not so much describe a person's skin color or other
phenotypic characteristics, but rather means social positioning in a
racially structured society.
10 The British series Humans (2015–2018) is based on the Swedish
original Äkta människor – Real Humans (2012–2014).
11 This inclusive process is very evident in the Star Trek franchise,
where over the years to the present we have seen, for example, a
female captain (Star Trek: Voyager), a Black commander/captain
(Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), and a Black female protagonist, a gay
couple as leading roles and a transgender person (Star Trek: Discov-
ery) (Krishna 2020).
12 Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics go as follows: First Law—A
robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow
a human being to come to harm; Second Law—A robot must obey
orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would
conflict with the First Law; Third Law—A robot must protect its own
existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First
or Second Law (Singer 2009).
AI & SOCIETY
1 3
deserving human rights or engaging in human–machine
conflict, but the effects that AI-systems have right now on
socio-political fault lines between humans.
4 Excursus: AI, SF andscience
communication
SF applies the trope of AI with different meanings, ideas,
and attitudes, using a fictional approach toward technology
to tell stories of the human condition, primeval desires and
fears as well as social issues, or reflect current trends of soci-
ety. Science communication, on the other hand, is intended
to inform about the facts of science-related topics. Therefore,
it can be problematic when science communication resorts
to typical SF tropes in orderto educate or raise awareness
about critical aspects, because without familiarity of the SF
mega-text, science-fictional AI used in current science com-
munication runs the risk of only conveying clichés about
conscious and autonomous AI. To illustrate the point, let me
present two examples.13
The science communication documentary film Ghost in
the Machine (Singler 2019)—the last of a four-part short
film series called Rise of the Machines—made together by
the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion and the Lev-
erhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University
of Cambridge, aims to inform about the concept of con-
sciousness and discusses whether machines could become
conscious. While the film features a variety of researchers
and experts in interview situations, there is also a fictional
storyline about a research facility where an embodied AI
has been developed and is now being tested for conscious-
ness, emotions, and its will to survive. The embodied AI is
played by a real human child actor, mimics emotions and
tries to fool the lead researcher to let it out of its cage. A
review describes the piece as rather inconsistent concluding:
“All in all, Ghost in the Machine dishes up a serviceable
appetizer but for the main course be sure to leave room for
Ex Machina.” (Seth 2019). Indeed, one can strongly sus-
pect that the fictional sequences in the form of a dialogue
between the researcher and the "AI child" were inspired by
the successful predecessor. The problem with this is that
while Ex Machina by definition uses fictional technology
to tell a thrilling and dramatic story, Ghost in the Machine
uses the science-fictional AI trope to make a statement about
science. Obviously, Ava is played by a real actress, because
Ex Machina is a dramatic story about and for humans, but
what is gained in a science communication film when the
AI is played by a real human child trying to break out of the
research facility? After all, the portrayal of AI as a child
with a mind of its own obscures the fact that AI systems are
technological artefacts created by humans.
Another example is a short film called The Intelligence
Explosion (Susman 2017), "a superintelligence sci-fi" by
Guardian Original Drama. However, as part of The Guardian
Brain Waves—"a series exploring the science and emotions
of our daily lives"—the piece is actually marketed as sci-
ence communication that "raises important questions about
the ethics of artificial intelligence," namely, "How do you
stop a robot from becoming evil?" (Hern 2017). Again, the
"AI" named Günther is played by a real human actor with
some robotic features. While a company representative, a
programmer, and an ethicist discuss whether it is possible
to program an AI with ethical safeguards against turning
evil towards humanity, Günther becomes superintelligent
and, like Samantha in Her, transcends to a higher structure.
AI is being presented as uncontrollable by humans feeding
into discourses of AI supremacy and Singularity (Kurzweil
2005).
These two films build on typical SF tropes that a human-
looking autonomous AI will develop a mind of its own and
could become dangerous to humanity in the future, instead
of addressing the risks of AI applications in the here and
now. While current SF films certainly address technological
trends, the tropes are hard to reconcile with genuine forms
of science communication. Apparently, these films reinforce
AI clichés rather than fulfilling the goal of informing about
science-based issued at stake.
5 Conclusion andoutlook
Currently, with the rapid progress in the field of AI, it seems
as if the SF genre with its stories about intelligent machines
is being caught up with the present. Thus, SF analysed as
a part of an AI narratives frame is supposed to reflect the
hopes and fears of the technology and thus treated as a type
of foresight or technology assessment. Against this back-
ground it is claimed that because of their importance "nar-
ratives about intelligent machines should broadly reflect
the actual state and possibilities of the technology” (Cave
and Dihal 2019: 74). Whereas this should be the case for
science-communication, it is not for AI in SF. While Darko
Suvin acknowledges that using SF as futurological foresight
can be a legitimate secondary function that the genre can
bear.
[…] any oblivion of its strict secondariness may lead
to confusion and indeed danger. Ontologically, art is
not pragmatic truth nor fiction fact. To expect from SF
more than a stimulus for independent thinking, more
13 Please note that these two examples are not defined by the author
as science communication but are themselves marketed us such to
inform the broader public.
AI & SOCIETY
1 3
than a system of stylized narrative devices understand-
able only in their mutual relationships within a fic-
tional whole and not as isolated realities, leads insen-
sibly to critical demand for and of scientific accuracy
in the extrapolated realia (Suvin 1972: 379).
What Suvin indirectly refers to as the first function is in
fact the SF mega-text as a way to engage in questions beyond
technology—which to be understood, requires familiarity
with the clusters of available meanings and the themes raised
(Blackford 2017:73,192) or simply being a “native speaker”
(Broderick 2017: 147). The mega-text of AI tropes and icons
can thus be interpreted as dramatic and metaphorical means
to address questions about the socio-political issues, the
human condition, and philosophical questions in general.
Interpreting science-fictional AI too literally as serious
representation of the technology can have the following
implications: First, taking fictitious humanoid robots and
autonomous machines in SF for real disregards of the techni-
cal limitation of AI, obscures the chances and risks already
at stake and might mislead the public as well as policy mak-
ers. The chances of AI are manifold, for example optimiza-
tion and improvement on a global scale in areas such as
health, agriculture, infrastructure or environmental protec-
tion, which can contribute to the achievement of many of the
UN Sustainable Development Goals (but can also impede
some of them) (Vinuesa etal. 2020). Here, however, it is
important to see that optimization and improvement through
AI cannot be a simple technical solution to a problem but is
a social negotiation of goals set by humans (Mason 2019:
152–160). Moreover, the fact that AI is built by humans and
trained with human-defined and human-collected data can
lead to various kinds of biases in AI systems that entrench
asymmetric power structures, for example discrimination
against women, institutional racism, or degradation of poor
and marginalized people. It is worrying how AI tools are
being used for scoring, nudging, and monitoring people by
governments and corporations—whether in the US, China,
Europe or elsewhere (Chiusi 2020; Eubanks 2017; Liang
etal. 2018; Nemitz 2018; O'Neil 2017; Sowa 2017; Zuboff
2018). Exactly because the design, development and applica-
tion of technology are never neutral, we need human interac-
tion in the form of ethics, norms, standards, and regulation.
Second, demanding scientific and technological accuracy
from SF would imply an impoverishment of the many meta-
phorical meanings of the genre and the artistic freedom as
well as assign a responsibility to the authors and creators of
SF that lies in the hands of politicians, scientists, and science
communicators. Not only with regards to AI, also—because
of the fast pace of technological advances in general—in
other fields the genre of SF and its tropes get blended in
different forms with the real world, most notably when it
comes to climate change, space exploration or mega/smart
cities. It is important to note that scholars working with SF
in all these different fields understand that the genre is pri-
marily about stories and metaphors, not about real science
andtechnology.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the reviewers for
their very detailed, insightful, and dedicated comments.
Author contributions Not applicable.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt
DEAL. Not applicable.
Availability of data and material Not applicable.
Code availability Not applicable.
Declarations
Conflict of interest Not applicable.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-
bution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adapta-
tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source,
provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes
were made. The images or other third party material in this article are
included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated
otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in
the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will
need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a
copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.
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