One of the “e-dreams” of AI in the movies, however, is the creation of new artificial life designed to take over the tasks we can’t or won’t keep doing. Beginning with their conception outside of conventional sexual means, free of the pain of childbirth, these AIs sometimes appear poised to liberate us from the burdens of the family and the workplace alike. Hershman Leeson’s SRAs are not the malevolent outcomes of scientific hubris in the vein of 2001’s HAL or The Terminator’s Skynet, but rather represent the height of human ingenuity. Yet the twin governing metaphors animating these stories of creation—reproduction and outsourced labor—give rise to their own set of fears both on and off the screen. Many films about AI are noteworthy for this rhetoric of replacement: if you find yourself missing friends or lovers, just make some more. And if you’re a studio executive looking to cut corners with artificial intelligence, and you’re missing writers or actors at the moment, just make some more of those too.
The artificial intelligences populating these films are a cavalcade of replacements, substitutes, duplicates, and stand-ins: Ruby becomes the girlfriend of a sad-sack Xerox repair technician (get it?); David (Haley Joel Osment) is a tragically short-term understudy for a child in a coma in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Yang (Justin H. Min) in After Yang (2021) is a “technosapien” sibling designed specifically for adopted Chinese children. In Gabriel Abrantes’s satirical spy short Ennui ennui (2013), an unmanned combat aerial vehicle turns out to be both a daughter and a drone with a mind of her own. Meanwhile, Ulysses, an openhearted android and exact physical copy of his dour scientist maker (John Malkovich in a double role) becomes a more viable romantic partner for Ann Magnuson’s crack PR director than any of the narcissistic, unreliable men on display in Susan Seidelman’s oddball rom-com Making Mr. Right (1987). These AIs are all surrogates, stepping into roles that are assigned to them in the absence of humans, or in the face of the inadequacy, inability, or disability of their human counterparts.
In more traditional reproductive terms, a surrogate is a person who carries and births a child for another person who is unable or who chooses not to gestate. Anyone who has gone through the process knows that surrogacy is not some handshake deal. It is, rather, a biological process underwritten by legal documents and power relations. These are both causes and effects of the fact that surrogacy very often involves a financial exchange. The surrogate-client relationship reveals how seemingly fundamental ideas about life, selfhood, and ownership are inextricably bound to legal and economic concerns. This insight holds true for many types of AIs imagined as replacements for other human functions: it’s as germane to Jake (Colin Farrell), as he puzzles through the proprietary software containing the locked memories of the no-longer-operative Yang in After Yang, as it is to the currently striking members of the Writers Guild of America.
Several films about AI have babies on the synthetic brain. It’s hard not to think they may be reacting to declining birth rates worldwide due to economic, climate, and healthcare stressors and a more general fear for humanity’s end. In addition to Teknolust’s ejaculatory brew, one of the computers in Andrew Bujalski’s early-eighties-set mockumentary Computer Chess (2013) briefly displays a sonogram of a fetus when asked about its soul, and acerbic programmer Mike Papageorge (Myles Paige) is himself “reborn” in a sweetly hilarious psychodrama exercise with members of an encounter group occupying the same hotel as the titular tournament. In John Boorman’s gonzo and apocalyptic Zardoz (1974), a group of immortals rely on an AI called the Tabernacle, but they’ve grown complacent and somewhat insane because of the lack of procreation. Zed (Sean Connery), bedecked in an orange loincloth and thigh-high leather boots, seeks to free society from an endless tedium by reintroducing reproduction. Near the end of Mamoru Oshii’s anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), the mysterious hacker Puppet Master, a sentient program desiring a mortal physical body, inhabits a synthetic female torso and mind-melds with the cyborg special agent Motoko Kusanagi, saying “you will bear my offspring into the net itself,” in a sequence of transformational identity, bodily hybridity, and rebirth that also lends itself to a transgender allegory.