Uncertainties and ambivalence surrounding AI: Popular filmic representations as real-world threat or saviour

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has had a significant historical representation within popular culture over the decades, used in storytelling for films, television programmes, books and video games. Films like Blade Runner (1982), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), The Matrix (1999), The Terminator (1984), Ex Machina (2014) and Minority Report (2002), for example, can all be used to explore the impacts of AI on society. These stories exploring AI often centre around the environmental and social impact of advanced technology, including the perceived threat to humans, as well as the ethical considerations that this technology generates. Much of the same issues presented within films are also found in science fiction novels, by the likes of such authors as Isaac Asimov, William Gibson and, of course, Arthur C. Clarke who famously wrote in 1964 that ‘the most intelligent inhabitants of the future world won’t be men or monkeys, they will be machines’. This article examines popular films that represent AI as the focus of their content, to create the vision of both innovation and the fears around such advancement in the real world. In considering the historical background of AI development, together with the ever-present threat of science creating an all-powerful and uncontrollable artificial ‘programme’, that would have the ability to dominate and control humanity, these stories within popular culture may also serve as a warning about the implications of AI developments. This article then considers the representation of AI from a communication lens and whether the so-called science fiction is now here.