Movies are made to entertain, however real AI isn’t entertaining. AI consists of math, algorithms, and data processing, which can be mundane and boring. To make movies interesting and riveting for the audience and to keep the cash registers ringing, filmmakers exaggerate the reality and distort the truth for dramatic effect.
Read on to learn 12 things movies always get wrong about AI.
AI Has Human-Like Emotions
Movies like Her and Ex Machina show AI forming deep emotional connections, even falling in love. These portrayals, while moving for the audience, are far from reality. AI doesn’t feel emotions and lacks intuition —it merely simulates them based on programming. Samantha in Her evolves from an AI program into sentience and sounds empathetic, but in reality, no AI possesses genuine feelings or the depth of human emotions. Furthermore, movies like Chappie, Interstellar, or Matrix show that AI can be happy, sad, evil, or malicious. In reality, humans have no logical reason to feed human emotions to machines.
AI Possesses Consciousness
Hollywood movies like The Matrix and Avengers: Age of Ultron present AI as self-aware entities capable of existential crises or rebellion against humans. In real life, AI doesn’t have consciousness because AI is not fundamentally human. AI operates within set parameters and algorithms and performs tasks without self-awareness. The complexities of consciousness and the ability of human-like reasoning and creativity are far beyond current AI capabilities.
AI Is Always Out to Get Us
Hollywood loves the trope of AI going rogue and turning against humanity, as seen with the malevolent Skynet in The Terminator or I, Robot. These stories play on fear-mongering that machines will surpass human control and decide to eliminate humans. We are ascribing human motivations to non-human things called anthropomorphism. The real AI lacks motives or desires. It cannot think for itself, even its responses are calculated outputs, not genuine thoughts. Incidents like data misuse or algorithmic biases arise from programming (human) error, not malicious intent from AI itself.
AI Is Flawless
In films like Eagle Eye, AI is portrayed as a flawless decision-maker, capable of predicting and controlling everything. In reality, AI often makes mistakes if it is fed with biased training data or misinterpreted inputs. For example, facial recognition systems, as reported by studies, struggle with accuracy across diverse populations.
AI Can Perform Any Task
Movies like Transcendence show AI effortlessly mastering every domain, from science to philosophy. Real-world AI, however, is highly specialized. For instance, IBM’s Watson excels at medical diagnoses but cannot compose music like OpenAI’s MuseNet or pilot a drone. Every AI software/machine is trained for specific tasks and cannot perform unrelated tasks without extensive training.
AI Will Replace All Jobs
Films such as Robocop and Wall-E imply that AI will take over our jobs and make humans redundant. While AI is transforming industries, it’s more likely to augment rather than replace human roles. AI will be entrusted with mundane and boring jobs like checking your bank balance, booking a medical appointment, retail checkouts, and assembly line jobs. AI will be looking after automated jobs that do not require creativity and problem-solving, and it will be creating new jobs in domains like AI ethics, programming, and maintenance.
AI Can Hack Any System Instantly
Movies like Live Free or Die Hard show AI breaching secure systems effortlessly. This dramatization makes for edge-of-the-seat thrilling sequences but oversimplifies the reality. AI can automate some aspects of hacking, but breaking into advanced systems still requires human expertise and exploitation of vulnerabilities, not magic-like AI omnipotence.
AI Is All-Powerful
Films like Lucy and Upgrade exaggerate AI’s capabilities, showing machines achieving omniscience. In reality, AI is limited by human guidance and constrained by data availability, computing power, and design limitations. For example, chatbots like Siri or Alexa can’t answer every question or solve complex problems; they only provide pre-fed solutions.
AI Looks Like Humanoid Robots
The Bicentennial Man and Westworld make humanoid AI a staple of the genre. However, most real-world AI exists as software, powering devices, or applications rather than physical robots. While deepfakes exist and so does machine learning to create fake images or videos, it still requires programming by humans. Humanoid robots cannot generate themselves. The robots like Boston Dynamics’ creations are designed for practical tasks like assembly line work or medical assistance and rarely resemble humans.
AI Learns And Adapts On Its Own
Movies such as Chappie suggest AI can independently evolve into something new. The same is implied in Bicentennial Man where an android embarks on a journey to become human. In reality, a robot or a machine yearning to become a human doesn’t make logical sense. Machines don’t have the emotional capacity of yearning for a human brain or organic body parts.
Machine learning requires structured data and human intervention. AI systems can’t spontaneously rewrite themselves, adapt, or evolve without significant human oversight.
AI Knows Everything About You Instantly
Movies like Minority Report imply that AI instantly accesses all personal data to predict behavior. While data privacy is a genuine concern, AI only works with the data it’s trained on and doesn’t have free access to personal information. Strict data regulations like the GDPR aim to protect personal data against misuse making the movie version of an all-knowing AI far from reality.
AI Is Built By One Person
In the movie, I, Robot, Dr. Alfred Lanning creates a robot. It sends the wrong message that one person is powerful enough to create AI. AI exists because of the contributions of hundreds of individuals working on it for decades. It takes many people to build any AI program.
