Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
I like science fiction and I always have. Sci-fi and fantasy were more or less my introductory genres to reading beyond children’s books. I got Ray Bradbury collections for Christmas when I was 8 and I was hooked. One of the reasons I love science fiction is that the best of it asks a great existential question that really isn’t answered by other genres: what makes us human? The advent of AI has given us this theme more and more, and The Artifice Girl explores it in a way that is interesting and worth the time to consider.
This is a question that has been asked for a long time. It’s come up regarding aliens (The Man Who Fell to Earth, for instance, or Spock’s funeral in Wrath of Khan where Kirk says that Spock was truly human), but it comes up more commonly with robots, androids, and artificial intelligence. Sometimes those intelligences are benign (Her), amoral (Ex Machina), or actively evil (Upgrade), but the question is best asked by presenting us with an intelligence that seems to walk that tightrope between human intelligence and uncanny valley. If we start with the premise that the AI in question can pass the Turing test, then the question of its humanity becomes a real one.
We begin in an interrogation room. A young man named Gareth (Franklin Ritch, who also wrote and directed the film) is being interrogated by two people who appear to be law enforcement of some sort, but not cops and not feds. These are Deena (Sinda Nichols) and Amos (David Girard). It’s soon evident that Gareth has some connection to a young girl named Cherry (Tatum Matthews). What appears at first to be a Chris Hansen-style sting that will get Gareth years behind bars soon becomes a realization that Cherry is someone who works with Gareth to entrap pedophiles, and the information that can get those pedophiles arrested and convicted is being sent to Amos and Deena.
Naturally, the concern of Deena and Amos is that the young girl, despite doing such important work in getting predators off the street, is being exploited by Gareth in using her to entrap those predators. Gareth is cagey and evasive but eventually comes clean (and you’re expecting this given the first two paragraphs)—Cherry is an AI and doesn’t exist in the real world. Gareth’s background is in creating AI models (in-film, he claims to have modeled Alec Guinness for the last set of Star Wars films), and created an AI that has since developed itself. According to Gareth, Cherry was under his control only for the first three years of her functioning. Since then, she has been operating autonomously.
And autonomous she is. We soon learn that Deena and Amos know about Gareth despite all of his precautions at being unfindable because Cherry gave them his information, essentially creating the meeting between them and forcing them to start to work as a more integrated team. In the middle section of the film, the three are still working together and are struggling with the idea of putting Cherry into a physical body. Cherry reveals that she is now creating art and writing poetry, essentially becoming the start of a superintelligence, and that she does not consent to being put in a body.
The third act of the film has Cherry in a physical body. This is years later; Gareth is now old (and played by Lance Henriksen) and confined to a wheelchair. He and Cherry have a conversation about her life and her meaning, and whether or not she had any real choice in her actions or any real control over her life.
Throughout, we’re going to see the different attitudes of the people who interact with Cherry as to her humanity. Gareth, who created at least the beginnings of her, sees her as a very complicated and complex program, but as a piece of software, essentially a collection of ones and zeroes, and not capable of any real humanity. Through the first two acts, though, Amos frequently asks Cherry what she wants to do, what her opinion is, or how she feels about what she is doing. For him, her humanity is assured, perhaps in part by her appearance but also in part by her ability to converse, react, and speak intelligently about what she is doing. As for Deena, she appears to be somewhere in the middle, conflicted about Cherry’s humanity, but also convinced that what they are doing—using her to protect children and jail predators—is perhaps worth doing despite the potential cost to Cherry. She seems willing to ignore her potential humanity for the sake of the cause.
As you might expect, The Artifice Girl is a slow movie and one that is much more about contemplation than anything else. Is Cherry a real person? If she is, is it ethical to use her to entrap sexual predators? Does she—or should she—have a choice in what she does?
These are good questions and they’re the questions that only science fiction can answer. Of course, the best stories don’t really answer the questions for us—they just bring them up and make us think about them, and that’s exactly what The Artifice Girl does best.
Why to watch The Artifice Girl: Genuinely asks the question of what makes a human human and why we should care about it.
Why not to watch: No good reason—this is worth seeking out.
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