With all the amazement and controversy surrounding AI programs like ChatGPT, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the next phase of human progress will revolve around AI. Love it or hate it, the technology has been around for a while and will certainly be with us in the future, but it has also proven to be highly polarizing. While most people see the potential for AI to make our lives more convenient, others only see the drawbacks. Movies have played a major role in creating stigma and fear around AI for nearly a century with movies like Metropolis dating back to 1927.
The most famous artificial intelligence movies, such as The Terminator, it plays on our worst fears and naturally gravitates towards sentient AI that seeks to destroy or dominate humans. However entertaining as such films are, most never convey the amazing complexity, beauty, and true ethical conundrums that AI technology actually encompasses. log into The girl of the artifice, an understated film that is more of a dazzling insight into these nuances of AI than most other films in the genre could ever hope to be. A fantastic movie, a must see, that’s why we think it’s probably the best AI movie out there right now.
The artificial girl showed amazing restraint
The girl of the artifice it may have been an independently made film without massive studio support, but it still managed to find ingenious ways to close the quality gap by playing to its strengths. Rather than veering into mindless ramblings about rogue AI programs that outrun their creators, the film downplayed such outlandish themes by subsisting on a kind of closed loop. Instead, once its most important components were included, the film defended these traits to perfection.
Surf the internet right now and you won’t find much about an indie filmmaker named Franklin Ritch. Unlike superstar writers and directors, he doesn’t have millions of Twitter followers, or even a Wikipedia page, but if you look at The artifice girl, it’s clear that he has a special quality to him that is way ahead of most filmmakers today, aside from perhaps a few true cinematic greats.
The movie itself is basically just a series of conversations between three people and a very special little girl. Rather than give in to temptation and make another AI movie about a sentient robot gone evil, Ritch has shown incredible restraint in making his film a brilliant meditation on the nuances of AI and trauma, brilliantly plotting and putting paralleling the journey of developing an artificial intelligence program is growth through the eyes of a child.
What is The Artifice Girl about?
While so many AI movies portray superficial goals and applications, The girl of the artifice focuses on one of the most significant uses it can have: a tool to protect vulnerable children from online predators and pedophiles. It centers on a trio of people who work together to train and improve an AI-generated program called Cherry who has the ability to drag chat groups and trap predators by appearing as a little girl who they can actually see, speak and interact with. .
The problem is that the program is perhaps too surprisingly good. Using the elegant brilliance of machine learning, Cherry rapidly begins to better itself, surpass her primitive beginnings and goals, and evolve far beyond anything its developer or other managers could ever have imagined. As the film charts this journey through three highly lucid chapters at the pivotal points of Cherry’s development, we see the incredibly poignant changes in how she executes her primary purpose and interacts with her handlers – seemingly caught between an intriguing but humanly unknowable dilemma between what she was created for versus what she is evolving into.
What makes The Artifice Girl such a brilliant film?
Most likely caught in the gaps between being hampered by budget constraints and a deliberately eloquent design, Franklin Ritch crafted his film in a minimalistic fashion that revolved around four characters. It begins in an interrogation room where a developer named Gareth is dragged in by two agents with very different approaches. Ritch plays the developer himself and is fantastic as he convincingly portrays Gareth’s twisted mix of being an arrogant tech genius, a trauma survivor, and a unique kind of selfless. The dialogue brilliantly makes you initially think that he is a paedophile until the complex truth emerges.
Gareth has created an artificial intelligence program capable of realistically representing a child who is unique but real in appearance, speech and personality. He agonizes and analyzes how much he should divulge about his agenda or whether he can trust the agents, Deena and Amos. His explanations and reflections on what he created, how he handled it, what it can really do and how he intends to use it, give him the impression of being the kind of genius that makes real-life tech gurus like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg look like amateurs. Alone, just when you think he’s a true god of technology, Gareth succumbs to a rare bout of humility and admits his own limitations – that he stumbled upon Cherry’s more advanced features – she took over from there and did largely resting itself since then.
The sharp dialogue, the amazing threesomes and interactions between him, Deena and Amos, and the even more impressive conversations between them and Cherry all converge to make the film a writing masterpiece. The script is so incisive that it immediately makes you understand why the current Hollywood writers’ strike is such a necessary and worthy cause. After all, the ability to write so masterfully is truly an art form that differentiates good movies from great ones, and it takes a rare kind of skill to write with the kind of elegance Franklin Ritch displays with The girl of the artifice.
Tatum Matthews – The Made Girl herself
The true heart and soul of The girl of the artifice is simply stunning acting by Tatum Matthews, a 14-year-old actress who displays more poise and skill on film than most performers well beyond her age are able to muster. To play Cherry, Tatum studied Amazon’s Alexa and achieved the incredible feat of playing a real girl playing an AI machine version of a real girl, who essentially ends up becoming one. The sheer complexity and nuance of this role is mind-boggling to behold, but Tatum pulls off it with simply awe-inspiring skill.
Her robotic voice and deadpan gaze as Cherry in “developer mode” are mind-blowing considering that the role required a fine balance between being a machine and passing for a real girl. Since she’s a real person playing the role, Tatum manages shimmering depths with his acting range to convincingly pull off such an advanced machine, he only has subtle hints that he’s not. However, she achieves all of that without us even mentioning the dizzying complexity of the script and the technical jargon she had to master to make it as smooth as she does.
Why The Artifice Girl is different from other AI movies
In the third chapter of the film, Cherry goes from a software program to an actual android. At that point, her advances in her design and evolving priorities, coupled with the advanced prosthetics of her era, allow her to become a physical person. By this point, Gareth is an old man and his conversation with Cherry shows the complexity of their bond. While it’s easier to imagine him as a father figure to her, the natural obstacle to this is the sick implication that she can’t be a “daughter” to him since he’s essentially forced her to spend her entire life as a decoy. for pedophiles. Instead, they share more of a maker and a making dynamic, something Gareth highlights by sometimes holding her off callously with reminders of the shortcomings that keep her from being a real person.
Meanwhile, Cherry has advanced to the point where she’s able to emit — not just primitive emotions like happiness or sadness, but the deeply complex emotions of her own form of teenage angst. She shows it with cold contempt as she points out Gareth’s flaw with painful accuracy when she tells him he was wrong to infuse his own trauma into her, but still has enough humanistic empathy to thwart the blow by pointing out her one redeeming quality: he created her for one noble purpose. While Gareth spends much of the film haunted by his fears of what he might become, he’s actually always kept an ace up his sleeve. When he finally realizes that he can trust Cherry enough to finally let her evolve into a real sensibility, his ultimate gift from her is to remove his primary focus from her.
The most beautiful and touching way that The girl of the artifice differs from conventional AI tropes is displayed when Cherry finally achieves free will. Rather than using it to dominate the world or enslave humanity, her goals are more laudable as she contemplates ways to create a better world for humans and machines. Even though she is no longer bound by her primary focus, she gladly chooses to continue her work protecting children as Gareth has not only imbued her with her trauma, but also with her innate goodness. Only now does she also have the freedom to pursue her own interests, her first being the simple desire to learn to dance.
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