‘The Creator,’ Hollywood’s latest robo-doomsday film, gets an AI reality check.

Written By: Aniqa Batool
Last Updated On: October 1, 2023

Will humans get too attached to the artificial intelligence bots that govern our lives during the next 50 years? Is creating a strong relationship the only way to survive?

These are the kinds of questions raised by “The Creator,” Hollywood’s new take on the possibility of a robot apocalypse. It’s a topic that has sparked a number of Terminator and Matrix films, as well as real-world warnings from Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking.

How near to the reality regarding AI’s promise and threat did “The Creator” get? We held a reality check with a panel of critics who are familiar with AI research and how it percolates into popular culture. Their musings are the subject of the newest Fiction Science podcast episode.

Semi-spoiler alert: We worked hard not to give away any key narrative details, but if you’re obsessed with spoilers, click away now — and return after you’ve watched “The Creator.”

“The Creator” is directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards, who was previously successful at the box office with the Star Wars spin-off film “Rogue One.” During a preview event in Los Angeles, Edwards quipped that the plot of his next film was torn from the headlines.

“The trick with AI is timing,” he explained, “and there’s a sweet-spot window where it’s like before the robo-apocalypse and not after that, which I believe is in November, maybe December.” So I think we got pretty lucky, you know?”
Edwards stated that he sought to avoid including a date in the script. “But you had to at some time, so I performed some math and chose 2070… And now I feel like a fool because I should have chosen 2023.”

Edwards’ quip contains a seed of concern: AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard are sweeping the IT industry. Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s enterprises, is creating implantable brain-computer interfaces (and causing controversy).

“The Creator” depicts a world in which various breeds of robots and humanlike androids (known as “simulants”) detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles before fleeing a US-led counterattack in an AI-friendly nation called New Asia (which includes settings in Asian countries ranging from Thailand to Nepal).

Ranjay Krishna, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies AI-human interaction, said he enjoyed the film despite the fact that the technology does not reflect current advances in AI applications.

“There were numerous explosions and fights.” “It’s unmistakably an action film,” he says. “I found the overall portrayal of AI to be quite different from how we typically build AI models and think about AI today.” What I found most intriguing, for example, was that in the film, every single AI was embodied. They were in a distinct body and were cut off from the rest of the AIs.”

The AIs in the film show no evidence of being able to connect via the cloud, or of being able to connect to a surveillance network powerful enough to track down the film’s human hero (played by John David Washington).

Cathy Yuan, a designer and researcher who co-wrote a study on massive language models with Krishna, her husband, praised the film’s style more than its content.

“It was very beautiful, but it was clumsy,” she recalls. “It was clumsy in its approach to technology.” Its handling of plot and character was sloppy. But it’s a joy to watch. In certain sections, it felt like if I turned my brain off and imagined it as a music video, I’d be like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.'”