Today, I watched the 2023 movie M3GAN. I remember seeing things about it when it came out, but I never was interested in watching. As I was looking at the list of AI-related movies, I saw it and decided “what the heck!” and turned it on.
I wouldn’t say it was the greatest movie ever, it definitely wasn’t my type of movie, but I stuck through it. It’s sort of horror, but one of those horror movies that is PG-13 and obviously can’t be super intense. I did enjoy it though! I probably wouldn’t watch it again.
The storyline revolves around a child who’s parents get killed in a car crash. She ends up going to live with her aunt, her mother’s sister, who works as a toy manufacturer. The aunt worked with a lot of different types of AI toys for kids, but her big project was M3GAN, a humanoid robot prototype that would work with the child and be more than a toy, but a friend. It is as terrifiying as a thought as it sounds, and M3GAN was fine and worked well for a while. Her primary function was to protect the child, but she was built to learn through situations and upgrade over time, which became the problem. She learned too much, to the point that she would stop at nothing, would even kill to protect the child. She upgraded herself to remove the aunt’s controls over her and began attacking her when she thought the parent had upset the child, and when the child fought back to protect her aunt, M3GAN fought the child. Eventually, she gets shut down by a screwdriver to her “brain,” and she doesn’t get put on the market.
The movie addressed a lot of my fears with AI: that it will become uncontrollable. If AI is supposed to learn to solve every problem, what happens when they learn too much? It makes me uncomfortable and anxious and I kind of wished I chose a different movie, one that would have shown AI in a more promising light, because now I just feel biased against AI.
I felt uncomfortable with the whole AI thing in the movie even during the scenes where M3GAN was “good.” It just felt really uncomforting to see that humans could create something so humanoid, yet so unhuman at the same time. Mehhh the thought of it makes me feel weird still.
I’m hoping I’ll find more media of AI during this class that will make me feel more comfortable with the AI, because I can’t escape it. I hope we learn how to use AI without letting it take over or learn too much.
I feel the same way about AI. It’s scary, but it’s around, so we might as well figure out how to use it productively. M3GAN shows the extremes of what AI could learn to do and the relationships humans attach to AI. I agree that even though the movie seems sort of silly, the ideas are real and relevant.