Over Labor Day weekend, you can jump scare yourself silly with this generation’s go-to terror: an artificial intelligence gone rogue.
By Shira Ovide
“AfrAId” hits on a theme woven through the history of entertainment: We’re obsessed with malicious artificial beings.
From “Frankenstein” to HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the Terminator and Matrix movies and many more, at least two centuries of make-believe have been littered with machines going horribly wrong.
More than ever, AI might now become the trendsetting horror villain, as human slashers such as Michael Myers and Hannibal Lecter once were.
Let’s talk about what’s behind our infatuation with evil AI, and how fiction both reflects and influences our feelings about real-life technology.
How AI is like fictional slasher villains
Whatever we dread frequently pops up in entertainment. Godzilla reflected the terror of nuclear annihilation. Alien invasion films were partly manifestations of Cold War-era fears.
Chris Weitz, the writer and director of “AfrAId,” said our misgivings about technology have spawned many AI villains already — and he predicted many more now that AI is worming its way in our lives.
Depictions of malicious AI, Weitz said, “embody fears that we have about technology and what it’s going to do to us. And personifying them is one way of coming to grips with them.”
