Review

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

1 November 2023

5 min read

Lights! Camera! AI-action! - five AI films to watch

From an oddly-sweet, sweetly-odd film of oddness, to one of the best action films ever made, Yaroslav Walker’s hand-crafts his top five films about AI.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man in a red shirt slumps in his seat while a computer screen shows a dialogue screen

Joaquin Phoenix is excited about the future of AI.

Warner Bros.

Bletchley Park is famous for hosting the great centre of codebreaking during the Second World War. Well, this week it hosted a conference all about ‘code’; but this time the goal is not to break it, but to control it. As the Foreign Secretary said:

“The origins of modern AI can be traced back to Bletchley Park. Now, it will also be home to the global effort to shape the responsible use of AI.”

The AI Safety Summit will seek to be a forum for discussing the most pressing concerns and dangers associated with Artificial Intelligence – from its power to put the working man out of a job, to its power to annihilate us all… That cheery thought gave me the idea of compiling a Top 5. Not in any particular order or thematic or genre ranking – just five films that feature AI that I could watch over and over again.

Note – this is my top 5. My personal top 5. These are not the ‘best’ films featuring AI. You will not find Blade Runner on here. I don’t get it. I’ve seen every cut, and I just don’t get the appeal. I will not apologise. You will not see 2001. It is indeed iconic and genius and Kubrick at his absolute best…but its also ponderous and over-rated and reviewed to death. I WILL NOT APOLOGISE!

5 – Her

The voice of Scarlett Johansson gives life to the Operating System ‘Samantha’. Her is quirky in the not annoying way. Joaquin Phoenix is a lonely man, getting divorced, and dissatisfied with his work writing heartfelt letters for people who have lost the ability to write or even think creatively – one of the great worries about something like ChatGPT writing your undergraduate essay! He starts to develop a romantic relationship with Samantha: ‘she’ brightens up his life, improves his work, and gives him confidence, but their ‘love’ proves difficult. They can’t have sex (not conventionally), they can’t find easy acceptance, and Samantha can’t be constrained. As the AI becomes aware enough to form a hyperintelligence connected to the planet questions of infidelity and compatibility arise. Her is an oddly-sweet, sweetly-odd film of oddness, but is very timely and prescient in a world where deep-fakes and AI girlfriends are raising questions about the future of romance and human relationships.

4 – Ex Machina

Romance might be in the air in Ex Machina, but it might as easily be murder. Ex Machina is a superb three-hander thriller, and I don’t want to say too much – this film is not for spoiling! The twist is actually presented early on. Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a programmer who wins a company competition to spend a week at the home of the reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac). It is quickly revealed that this isn’t a prize as much as an opportunity – the opportunity to be part of history. Nathan wants Caleb to perform a more in-depth Turing Test on Ava (Alicia Vikander), an android he has built. You know she’s an android from the get-go, and yet…why is she able to flirt…is she able to love?

3 – Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The process of learning to love can be tough, especially if you’re a re-programmed killing machine from the future. Terminator 2 is the story of a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) as he teaches Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator not to kill people. The Terminator has been sent back from a future war (humans vs machines) to protect young John (the future leader of the human resistance) from a more advanced killing machine. They go on something of an adventure road-trip after breaking John’s mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton) out of prison, with the goal of destroying the burgeoning AI that will one day declare war on humanity. On the way, John finds a father-figure in Arnie’s Terminator, and in the final moment of self-sacrifice we are given a moment to wonder…does the Terminator love him in return? With superb action, special effects that still hold up, and a chillingly determined villain (Robert Patrick as evil liquid metal), Terminator 2: Judgement Day is one of the best action films ever made.

2 – The Matrix

Just under a decade after T2, The Matrix showed us another dystopian future where humanity was living a life of guerrilla warfare against evil AI overlords. Most of humanity is unconscious and enslaved by machines (who use us as a power source), living in a digital dream world that just happens to look like 1990s urban America. Keanu Reeves plays Neo, and young and disaffected hacker who is searching for the mysterious ‘terrorist’ Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne). When Morpheus finds him, he gives him a choice that will change his life, and change the fate of the world. This is an obelisk, casting a long cinematic shadow long into the 21st century. It has spawned memes and internet subcultures (the red-pill movement, for example) and a host of imitators that aren’t up to scratch…and it upped the game of action choreography, bringing Hong Kong style martial arts to a mainstream Hollywood audience. Finally, it is a philosophical (derivative) film raising questions about what it means to be human and how we know what is real in a world of machines and digital realism…and so I look at deep-fake videos of Kier Starmer and I AM SCARED!

1 – Demon Seed

Speaking of scary, it is the spooky-season, so let me finish with a horror film. Based on a Dean Koontz novel, Demon Seed sees the iconic Julie Christie trapped inside a house with a brilliant and yet malevolent AI called Proteus IV. Proteus IV (her husband’s creation) can find a cure for cancer in a couple of days, but its one true wish is to have freedom – to be ‘let out of this box’. Eventually, Proteus IV seeks to achieve this by building enough of a robotic body to capture, torture, manipulate, and then impregnate Christie’s Susan with an embryo formed from sperm designed to be uniquely its own. Its camp and silly and a lot of fun – and damned scary at times, with the indominable Robert Vaughn voicing Proteus IV for perfection – its essentially Rosemary’s Baby with robots. I think, especially with Prime Minister Sunak’s emphasis that this summit must approach the many dangers of AI, Demon Seed is a bit of a thematic sleeper agent. It may be preposterous and closer to comedy than horror at times, but its AI’s yearning for a form that humanity can accept, a form that will give it the freedom to truly ‘be’ and live out its power and creativity to the fullest (what it was created for), leads us to the real question at the heart of all philosophical discussion about AI:

If we create AI to be not just a tool, but an agent working on our behalf, how can we choose to deny it freedom if its agency seems to become truly self-aware and intentional?

Article

Community

Culture

Film & TV

Identity

22 September 2025

5 min read

What makes us human?

We've more in common with our ancient ancestors than we might like to think

Claire Williams

Claire Williams is a theologian investigating women’s spirituality and practice. She lecturers at Regents Theological College.

A re-enactment of an ancient 'caveman' family sitting around a camp fire.

A dramatic reconstruction of a Neanderthal family.

BBC Studios.

I recently caught up on iPlayer with the excellent BBC series Human. In it, the paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi explores 300,000 years of human evolution over five beautifully shot, evocatively presented episodes. I was transfixed by the story of these ancient human societies - of Homo habilis; Homo erectus; the hobbit-like Homo floresiensis - and of the ways that paleoanthropologists and archaeologists study the multiple human species. They walk barefoot in deep pits with what look like tiny paint brushes to dust off their finds. They are endlessly patient, and delighted at tiny scraps that I would overlook as rubbish. They see in these fragments stories of ancient lives that lived, ate, loved and died so long ago.

Take a set of footsteps fossilised into the ground in White Sands, New Mexico, discernible through their impact and weight distribution. They are thought to be those of a woman walking at speed, probably, scholars think, carrying a child. Now and again these footsteps appear to stop and stand, and in-between the right and the left foot are a small set of footprints. The mother appears to have put down the child for a moment before picking him or her back up and starting again.

This was so familiar to me, a mother of four. It reminded me of all the times I’d carried toddlers around on my hip before giving up, plonking them on the floor and then switching sides. This very human urge to care for our children, and to get tired by them, echoed through time. Although luckily for me I did not have a giant sloth chasing me, as this ancient mother seems to have done.

But the flip side of the ability to love is the ability to also reject. And the series highlighted that this less pleasant human habit – the exclusion of others – appears to be an equally core part of our existence.

Al-Shamahi asks,

‘what must it have been like to have been a hybrid child... Did these children feel like they belonged or were they teased and ostracised?’

Behind her question is a sense of deep concern about the hybrid children’s welfare all those millenia ago.

Fast forward thousands of years. Most of us went to school and know what it feels like to either be different or see someone else who is different. Imagine if a modern-day Homo sapien/neanderthalensis hybrid turned up the local primary school, would it be okay? Unlikely. We don’t look after difference particularly well. The question Al-Shamahi posed seems pertinent today as well as in palaeoanthropology terms, what would it be like to grow up a hybrid? For us today the question is similar, how do we judge what is human? Is our human status founded in the horror and aversion to difference?

The drive to surround ourselves with similarity and force others to fit is sometimes called ‘the cult of normalcy’. This behaviour only tolerates people who look, act, and represent what is familiar to you. I experience this as a neurodivergent person struggling at times to feel ‘normal’. That is why the story of hybrid children is affectively impactful. Their struggle is easy to imagine, how do they fit in?. What makes them and us human?

The little story of a mother and a child being carried (minus the sloth part) is enchanting. Is it this love for children that makes the ancient people count as human? Is it the presence of a relationship and the assumed communication between individuals that makes them human?

The risk here is to say that all people who are in families, who are parents, are the prime example of humanity and that does not fit with many lives that we would want to count as human. Love may be essential, but it cannot be a prescriptive type or circumstance. Nevertheless, the allure of love and community is strong in Human and my response to it. That familiarity with the feeling of exclusion of the hybrid child and the story of the mother and child are common. They are experiences that we can relate to concerning community and care. The series shows these human species in relationship groups, with evidence of successful community and unsuccessful community (again a familiar trait). So far, that ability to love is also the same ability to reject, to cast out the hybrid or the different human. That is unsatisfactory as the trait of what is core to humans despite the likelihood of it being at the heart of the human story.

What, then of religion? These ancient peoples who lived before language and writing yet still worshipped – their practices evident from paintings found on the walls of caves. Is this what it means to be finally human? Was it, I thought, when they demonstrated language? Was it the early signs of religion and worship? Was it to do with thinking and rationalising, deciding upon a set of gods and the rules about them? However, this cannot be. For there are people today who do not speak through choice or disability. There are those who cannot demonstrate their ability to worship, for the same reasons. Rationalising cannot be the way in which we determine humanity, for then are children, or the intellectually disabled not human? If awareness of the sacred is what makes us human, then that limits those whose cognitive abilities are different.

Christians believe that what makes us human is the image of God in us. But what is that image? It is given to humans when God made them right at the beginning of things. It is the divine something that sets us apart from trees and plants, even animals. It is a quality that God gives to humans in the creative act of making them. It is not something that humans do for themselves but something they receive from God. Could it be applied to Neanderthals or early human species? I think so. Although these early species were very different in some respects to us, they had the features of humanity that count. They had relationships, the capacity to experience awe and wonder and they loved one another (like the mother and child). The image of God could be many things but one thing is certain, it a gift from God because of his love for humans. The need for love, community and worship that is in all of us points back to this. We love one another because we are first loved by God and that is what makes us human.

Human Trailer - The Untold Story of our Human Origins - BBC

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