M3GAN

Turn off all ads on VICE.com Exclusive New VICE Documentaries Member Exclusive Features & Columns Turn off all ads on VICE.com Exclusive New VICE Documentaries Member Exclusive Features & Columns Turn off all ads on VICE.com Exclusive New VICE Documentaries Member Exclusive Features & Columns 4 Magazines Delivered to Your Door She sings, she dances, she rips a kid’s ear off. Obviously, I’m talking about M3GAN, the titular antagonist of M3GAN , a new horror flick from director James Wan. The movie—which, I cannot stress enough, should be seen in a packed theater—is about an orphaned girl whose aunt comforts her with the gift of a superintelligent, AI-powered robot companion: M3GAN. Things go south when M3GAN gets a little possessive of her human friend and turns comfort into “cold-blooded murder.” M3GAN is far from the first movie to feature a good AI system gone bad— 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ex Machina , and the Disney Channel Original Movie Smart House all leap to mind. But AI wasn’t present in our daily cultural life when those other movies were released. Now, we’re watching human artists push back against AI programs that scrape their work and banning chatbots from schools so students can’t cheat. To me, the question is obvious: Is M3GAN … realistic? Could she exist in the not-too-distant future? I think we have all the ingredients for it, we just haven’t put them together. We have robotic bodies, humanoid bodies. Boston Dynamics does a great job developing those systems; They’re very flexible, they can jump, they can dance. And then we have the brain: Systems like ChatGPT can definitely talk to you, answer questions. But I don’t think there is a single cyber-physical system that combines all those capabilities in one. That’s the kind of futuristic prediction they’re making. But it sounds like something the Tesla Robot is supposed to become if they’re successful in developing it. How many years away from a robot like that would you say we might be? Nobody knows. Predicting the future is kind of hard. A lot of it is not just technical limitations but market-based limitations. We had video phones in the 70s, and they did not become popular until the iPhone. So, we may have capabilities in two, three years, but it may not be actually available for sale for much longer. Yeah, I feel like the closest analog is Sophia, the robot who “spoke to the UN.” It’s a very impressive marketing robot. I think it’s the most successful marketing robot ever, but I don’t think it’s a general intelligence with capabilities to speak to the UN and or get citizenship or anything like that. It definitely doesn’t have any human emotions in a traditional sense. But there are rationality-based reasons for those, right? Jealousy is about resource allocations: I don’t want resources dedicated to me to go to someone else. It’s very rational that any system trying to optimize for reward would develop such drives—we call them “AI drives.” That part would be very realistic, and then you can kind of project human form on that and go, “Oh, it’s jealous!” or something like that. A few months ago, you spoke with Motherboard about the “black box” model of AI development, where the humans involved can’t peek under the hood and see how a system functions. That means it’s more difficult to discern whether a system is providing, as you said, “wrong or manipulative answers.” How wrong and manipulative are we talking? With large neural networks, with large language models, most of the time, we have no idea how they actually work. We don’t engineer them step by step. We kind of throw big data at a huge computer, and they self-assemble into the systems where we’ll like the outputs for certain inputs, but we don’t have complete understanding of how internal transitions happen, given that there are billions of neurons and different weights associated for each one. It’s kind of like with other humans. We cannot really fully understand if they’re being honest with