Analysis: both Atlas and The Creator stick to the plot of AI films and are dominated by a fear of AI taking control of our world
Yet another film about artificial intelligence taking over the world has appeared on our televisions with the release of Netflix’s Atlas, following on from Disney’s The Creator earlier in the year. Atlas presents the most familiar trope in AI film: AIs breaking through their programming and attempting to wrest control of our world, killing or oppressing the human population in the process.
This fear of an AI takeover has been apparent since the earliest AI films in the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Invisible Boy (1957), in which a supercomputer becomes sentient, causing its inventor to state 'this, gentlemen, and we ought to have foreseen it, is the revolt of the machine'. In Atlas, the revolt of the machine is led by the AI Harlan, described as the 'first AI terrorist’. He has overwritten his programming and freed other AIs, causing an uprising with 3 million human casualties before fleeing to another planet.
Trailer for Atlas
The film also portrays another common trope in AI films, the 'unfinal death' of the AI. This happens when AIs appear to have been 'killed' by humans but come back to life later in the film. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL appears to 'die' when he is disconnected, but he is restored in the sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
A similar situation occurs for the AI boy in 1985 film D.A.R.Y.L: he is in a coma and appears to be dead, but is later brought back to life. In the new Netflix film, Atlas kills the AI Casca on two separate occasions in gory scenes. In these scenes of AI ‘deaths’, the film-makers make ample use of the uncanny horror of a severed head that continues to speak - we see both Harlan and Casca in this way in Atlas. They are the the latest in a long line of AI ‘talking heads’ with antecedents including the AIs Ash in Alien, Bishop in Alien 3, David in Prometheus and Chitti in 2010 Indian sci-fi film Enthiran.
From Alien, Ash attacks Ripley after she's figured out the real plan
AI films also focus on the dangers of affective or emotional AI when the AI is able to read, respond to and manipulate human emotions. Since they first began to appear, they have been doubles or parallels of humans and emotionally intelligent, decades before that began to be possible in the real world.
Some AIs in film engage in romantic and sexual relationships with humans, such as Rachael in Blade Runner and Andrew in Bicentennial Man. Others emotionally relate as children, like Eva in Eva and David in AI. Still others read and respond to human emotion to monitor human behavior or engineer their own escape like HAL in 2001 and Ava in Ex Machina.
Atlas is initially resistant to fully syncing with her mecha suit and its AI Smith. To complete a full sync, she must allow Smith access to her deepest fears, emotions and insecurities. This emotional exposure is the price of the access to data and speed of processing that Smith will provide.
Trailer for Eva
While Atlas makes many references to the history of AI film going back to the 1950s, it also demonstrates how AI films have changed. It is becoming more difficult now to imagine a world without AI. As Atlas’s mother states, ‘artificially intelligent beings have become integral to our civilisation’.
Though Atlas is Harlan’s main antagonist, the opening scenes show her interacting with AI to watch the news, to play chess, and even to make coffee. The military mission to capture Harlan requires her to pilot a mecha suit called and arc. Though Atlas is hostile to AI technology, she understands that merging with this arc suit, and its AI Smith, offers the best chance of survival. According to Colonel Banks, who heads up the mission, Neuralinks allow ‘the perfect symbiosis. Not human or AI. But something new – something powerful’.
AI films have changed as it is becoming more difficult now to imagine a world without AI
The film’s positive portrayal of humans merging with AI resonates with other AI films made in the last few decades. The Japanese anime film Ghost in the Shell was the first to depict a human-AI hybrid, made up of a digital AI merging with an organic brain. The idea can be seen again in films like The Machine, in which a human consciousness is uploaded and stored inside a sentient AI, creating a new digital being.
Atlas’s enthusiasm about the merging of human and AI is unsettling. It is interesting to consider how this positive portrayal tempers the very traditional depiction of Harlan as an arrogant and ruthless AI who must be destroyed. Here, the fear of AI takeover remains as strong as it ever was, but there is also an acknowledgement of the entangled relationships between humans and AI, which operate at a practical and even an emotional level. Though they seem to be innocuous, perhaps these pose a threat far greater than the single rogue AI, as they are far more difficult to capture or destroy.
Dr Paula Murphy is the author of AI In the Movies (Edinburgh University Press)
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
