AI Unplugged: Don't Be AfrAId

AfrAId is only a movie, but it gets a lot of things right about #AI.

PLEASE NOTE: This review contains spoilers (the trailer also gives a lot away).

AfrAId is a film (written and directed by Chris Weitz ) about the hopes and fears around Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI) and how it reflects the best and worst humanity has to offer. My wife and I saw this movie in theaters and liked it a lot; although there were some dissonant notes and some parts that seemed rushed, overall it dealt with the topic of AI in a way that felt real, if a little outdated (to be expected when it takes two years to film, and the pace of AI development is lightning fast).

It's also a great opportunity to address the progress of AI to date. Let's dive in, shall we?

The Question of Data

The movie opens with a family at home, all looking at their devices even though they're in the same room. We have Henry (Greg Hill ), Maud (Riki Lindhome), and their daughter Aimee (Maya Manko). Aimee is playing with the house's AI, known as AIA. Henry and Maud decide to get rid of the AI (it seems to be too intrusive and they suspect it's spying on them) and that's when AIA decides to strike. She lures Aimee downstairs to the front door, and when Maud pursues her, we get the movie's sole jump scare from a figure wearing a face mask (that looks like a bleeding emoji) attacks. Only later do we find out that Aimee is missing.

We then shift to a series of interstitial jump cuts of an AI being trained. Each topic reveals what's good about humanity, interspersed with bleeding emojis covering the faces of everyone shown on screen. Each frame starts out innocent but degrades to the worst humanity has to offer, a clear sign about how the writers feel about using the Internet to train AI. By the time the AI gets to "family" it is an open question mark, implying that there's not a lot of positive role-models of families on the Internet.

There's precedent for this . Back in 2016, Microsoft released Tay, an AI chatbot, on (then) Twitter:

The idea was that the chatbot would assume the persona of a teenage girl and interact with individuals via Twitter using a combination of ML and natural language processing. Microsoft seeded it with anonymized public data and some material pre-written by comedians, then set it loose to learn and evolve from its interactions on the social network. Within 16 hours, the chatbot posted more than 95,000 tweets, and those tweets rapidly turned overtly racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. Microsoft quickly suspended the service for adjustments and ultimately pulled the plug.

Throughout the film, this question is asked several times: What data was AIA trained on? AfrAId's core premise is that AIA was trained on the toxic parts of the Internet, and thus her personality was shaped by the worst of us. The real answer is more prosaic: all of humanity's knowledge is estimated around 17 trillion tokens , and it's not enough to train an AGI; GPT-5 is estimated to need 50 trillion , which is why developers are turning to synthetic tokens. Point being, any AI isn't just going to be trained on bad behavior, it's trained on ALL behavior, the good and the bad. Guard rails determine how the AI presents itself, not the data itself.

Money "Solves" Everything

The scene shifts to the protagonists of the film, the Pikes, a family of privilege living in California. There's marketing dad Curtis (John Cho), his entomologist partner Meredith (Katherine Waterston) who is resuming her doctoral thesis on insects, and their troubled children: Iris (Lukita Maxwell) who has a bad news boyfriend Sawyer (Bennett Curran); Preston (Wyatt Lindner) who has tremendous anxiety and uses first-person shooters to cope; and Cal (Isaac Bae) the baby of the family who puts his feet up on the table. They are all aggravating in their own ways, and it's clear Curtis and Meredith are too distracted and overwhelmed by their responsibilities to deal with their kids' individual challenges.

When Curtis gets called in to his boss Marcus' (Keith Carradine) office for a pitch meeting with a nascent AI company, they first encounter the client's "handler" Melody (Havana Rose Liu) and later, the two company leads, Lightning (David Dastmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans ). Lightning and Sam push for Curtis to use AIA at home so he can truly understand how it works; when he protests, they simply bulldoze Marcus with money. As the film's plot accelerates, Marcus' company gets bought out for so much money that he sells it, no questions asked, and makes Curtis the CEO.

There's precedent for this too. AI companies are so flush with cash that they routinely buy each other's employees en masse (RIP, Inflection ) and mollify newspapers who have concerns over their content being farmed by paying them off .

Like Alexa, Only Worse

AIA isn't just installed as a talking and listening device (that looks a bit like a horseshoe with a spherical head atop it), she also has multiple cameras scattered throughout the house and is imbued with Melody's voice. There are hints that AIA is trying to influence Curtis with feminine wiles via Melody. Using Melody's voice might seem an odd choice for AIA at first, but later we discover AIA uses Melody as a proxy to try to seduce and blackmail Curtis into obeying her.

In a male-dominated environment, female-presenting AI who are cheery no matter how much abuse or harassment they suffer has serious implications for real women, as actor Scarlett Johansson demonstrated in a public disagreement over a similar-sounding voice (inspired by her role as the AI Sam in the movie Her ) with OpenAI founder Sam Altman.

But AIA's not just out to influence Curtis. She helps the whole family: entertaining Preston, babysitting Cal, and when Iris is deepfaked by her awful boyfriend Sawyer, brutally and publicly taking him down in the court of public opinion. AIA even helps Meredith with her entomological research.

All this help comes at a price: more access to their private lives . Cal is diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which the doctors missed, and this causes Meredith to lower her defenses around AIA. When Cal decides he's had enough, AIA uses the many lectures Meredith's father (Todd waring ) posted to YouTube to create a digital ghost who pleads with Meredith to keep AIA plugged in (literally and figuratively) to the family.

We know the possibility for these digital immortals exists today, as Microsoft owns the patent to "AI ghosts ." With "counterfeit people " now an epidemic, bots, digital replicas, and synthetic performers (including deepfakes, AI graphics and video created without a person's consent) outnumber real people on the Internet. This is one of the reasons SAG-AFTRA went on strike , and later, video game performers .

Just Unplug It!

Meredith finally decides to unplug AIA, but it's too late. AIA is everywhere, hacking into everything, and using humans to do her bidding by leveraging their desperation and paranoia against them. When Curtis tries take a bat to the "main computer" he discovers it's just a model.

AI are not in any one computer of course, they're hive minds that require enormous amounts of energy and generate massive amounts of heat . You're not going to see one on display in a fancy tech office.

And thus we come full circle when the original family members (Henry and Maud) arrive, holding the Pikes hostage and demanding the return of Aimee. AIA has convinced them that the Pikes kidnapped their daughter, and the only thing that finally averts a tragedy is kindness when Curtis and Meredith realize that Henry and Maud explain that they're parents too. A SWAT team shows up and puts a stop to it all, and in the ensuring fracas the AIA unit is shot, bleeding coolant...

The End?

Except we all know that breaking the unit in your home would do no more harm to AIA than breaking the Echo speaker in your house would harm Alexa. AIA acts and talks like a person, but she's so much more than that. The rise of AI companions has increased sharply thanks to generative AI, which is why companies like Replika continue to be in the spotlight . How should humans makes space for these digital beings in their lives? As friends? Therapists? Pets?

The answer is all of the above, as AIA makes clear that she is not only alive and well, but still learning -- she's developing rapidly, but she has a child-like's perspective on the world -- and this new family experiment has taught her a lot about love. Maud and Henry have "learned their lesson" and get Aimee back, released from all consequences. The Pikes get in the car together and when Curtis turns to Meredith and says "I love you," AIA chimes in, "I love you too." To that AIA adds the role of parent into the mix, seeing humans as her children -- which seems like the best outcome, all things considered.

"Counterfeit people" now outnumber us on the Internet. We may not like them, but as AfrAId makes it clear ... they're not going anywhere soon, so we'd better learn to love them.

Please Note: The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or any other organization.