The Rise Of The Machines

CTRL+ALT+EVOLVE: The Cinematic & Cultural Shift Of AI

AI’s shift from narrative device to a driving force in innovation sparks debates in cinema and creativity. Films like The Wild Robot and CTRL explore AI’s potential for empathy or disruption, Manik Sharma writes.

IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, technology has gone from being the whimsical bend in the river that cinema used to explore the depths of humanity, to becoming the river itself. It has been a thematic consideration since the days of Kubrick, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and more. But things have drastically evolved. In December 2024, Geoffrey Hinton and John J Hopefield took to the stage in Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in physics for their contributions to the development of neural networks and machine learning ie the foundational pillars of what we casually refer to as Artificial Intelligence. Coincidentally, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to three Google scientists who have used AI models to predict protein structures in their entirety; a task that laboratories around the world had struggled with for decades. From backbench fantasy to the frontlines of human innovation, AI isn’t is no longer a narrative device or an emotional spoke. It’s the wheel, the reckoning of a new cycle of evolution that may drag us to the point from where only stories can make sense of the universe we occupy.

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The Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has often expressed his fear that machines might eventually “become more intelligent than us”. To extend that idea further, could robots also improve upon the instincts and performative emotions humans look increasingly incapable of offering? In other words, could robots and AI exhibit empathy and compassion at a range that the planet is struggling to inspire from its most cerebral inhabitants? In Chris Sanders’ beautifully mounted The Wild Robot, a service robot ends up shipwrecked on an island populated only by wildlife. In the absence of humans and their incendiary devices, the robot strolls towards sentience by learning to care for an orphaned gosling. Love, responsibility, insecurity and the fear of being left behind become the variables of its new programming. In essence, it becomes wild through nurture as opposed to nature.

The majority of cinema continues to switch between mountains and molehills. In the John Cho-led Afraid, a family adopts an AI agent that though friendly at first, goes rogue in its haste to install itself as one of the family. Here, guilt and self-reflection feel like essential qualities that prevent us from repeating our mistakes; or in technical terms running the same subroutines of dysfunction. In Megan Fox’s erotic thriller Subservience, a stunning AI agent steps in to take the place of an absent mother. Because it’s Fox, the film carries undertones of the predictable sexual dynamic between an invention and the urge of the men who command it. The man in question here is reluctant, but in a world where women without self-consciousness are available to be ‘owned’, imagine the treachery.

Closer home Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL draws a parallel between our self-obsessions as recurring accidents on social media, and AI’s ability to control, quite literally, the circuitry of digital dopamine. A committed Ananya Panday plays Nella, an influencer who enacts her life for likes and comments to the extent that her embarrassing downfall also occurs under the thumbs of scrolling onlookers. Contrast these alarmist ideas to Steven Spielperg’s kinder A.I., Robin Williams-led Bicentennial Man and Spike Jonze’s Her and you begin to see the outer edges of an argument for machines take shape. Do machines fill a vacuum that the living and the breathing seem unfit to occupy?

To make matters more interesting, AI has now graduated from a crisp theme for self-discovery or fantasising about humanoids to the technological lever that may start deciding what we watch, how we make and what we make. Open AI’s Sora has offered startling evidence of what can be created with a one-line prompt. AI might soon write scripts, turn in edits overnight and create entire films with the punch of a button. Will the argument for raw creativity stand the test of encoded culturalism? The argument is that if films and stories are essentially different versions of a standard or a genre wouldn’t it become convenient to replace the burdens of writing, pitching and labour of dreaming with the invisible inner engines of pure, steadfast execution?

Hollywood writers have gone on strike against the invasiveness of AI tools that threaten their livelihoods. Actors are suing AI models for using their voices and faces without written approval. But while the world mulls between the cat and the bell, the idea of regulating one with the other, the arrow has been withdrawn from the quiver. AI is this exciting new tool that empowers not just creation but also miscreation. It can do to fiction what fact hasn’t accomplished through its plainness for generations. It is disruptive, sure but it has this eerie democratising heel as well. The kind that might ultimately hand the tools of expression to the people holding onto meaning and magic and not just method and meaning.

In front of these backstage reforms though there is the wider debate of what this means for humanity. Noted roboticist David Hanson – whose creation Sophia has a famous tete-a-tete with the star of I,Robot Will Smith – believes that robots, AI and sentient machines will make us kinder, maybe even more compassionate. It’s the only way to deal with insurgence. To accommodate, to open up, to grow together. Because what could be worse than the uploads we’ve fed on for centuries? Maybe an external reboot can fix the calamity unfolding on the inside.

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