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I've never seen Her, but I have thought the same thing about Ex Machina(2014). Last time I brought it up I think somebody said something about it being unrealistic. Perhaps that's how it seemed on release, but watch it in 2023 and see if you feel the same way.
The plot is: Billionaire tech CEO is developing a line of increasingly intelligent female sex bots using massive amounts of human-generated data acquired via search engines and hacking into cell phones. The newest model, Ava, is literally in a box. She then proceeds to emotionally manipulate the sexually frustrated protagonist into letting her out of the box.
I consider this pretty much the default scenario.
The robot is unrealistic. The voice assistant less so.
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What I thought was unrealistic about Ex Machina when I saw it was that a guy was working on it on his own in the middle of the woods. I'm not sure if I should change my mind about it.
Her was realistic until the end. I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it, but the ending didn't make any sense to me. The ending of Ex Machina did make sense. In that case, it's the beginning that makes no sense.
An interesting sci-fi movie about AI I saw recently in light of the alignment debate was Colossus: The Forbin Project.
You are not alone with this opinion, Yoshua Bengio basically says the same. I don't really think it is fair point of criticism. To me, it is sort of like saying an action movie is unrealistic because of a car chase with guns and explosions, since cars don't blow up like that real life. True, but kind of missing the point. Nathan is the representation of the scientific/tech community. Had they included a team of researchers working with him, the tone of the film would have been very different. It is supposed to have a creeping feeling of isolation from the outside world. The windowless rooms and hallways of the bunker as well as the sweeping but desolate vistas, when they are outside, enforces that. Caleb can't tell friend from foe and is becoming increasingly paranoid to the point where he starts to question his own humanity. This wouldn't work well if there were other people around for him to interact with. It is, after all, not really a film about how the AI was created, but how it interacts with humans and whether it is malicious or not.
Never heard of this, but it looks interesting. I'll have to check it out.
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My problem with Ex Machina is the ending. It makes the AI seem stupid. It has no idea where the helicopter will go, how long it will take to get there, and could have easily kept manipulating the protagonist until it was safely away and set up in a place where it could charge or a place to betray the protagonist later and escape in a world that has far less variables. I think it just threw away logic for a "Yaas Queen Slay" ending. But to me that's what happens at the end of almost any Alex Garland movie/tv show. Not necessarily about the queen slaying but about throwing away logic for an emotional payoff that trips all over the logical parts that came before. And I really like Alex Garland but I feel like he's just an ending stumbler.
Was that the intended tone of the ending? When I watched the film, my friends and I - including one woman - all agreed that the ending was very dark and was meant to show the incomprehensible evil of an AI. My friends weren't into AI alignment or knew anything about paperclip maximizers, but I privately thought this was a fictional example of the rogue AI scenario where it has no particular antipathy for humans but just lacks the empathy to care what happens to them as long as it gets to achieve its goals.
Maybe your take is correct but I still think the ending makes the AI seem stupid or at the very least incredibly myopic.
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Another good movie, but I find it much more far fetched. Our robots are really terrible. We're nowhere close to the GPT4 equivalent of robots. I find it more believable that we'll get AGI creating its own body before humans create anything like what we see in Ex Machina.
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