CINEMA REVIEW: AfrAId offers scarily plausible AI warning

Well, here’s a film for all of us who in their wildest moments worry that before too long our insane race to embrace AI will leave the lot of us in a state of pained and powerless submission.

AfrAId isn’t the greatest film, but it’s certainly good enough help the alarm bells ring a little louder with its tale of a ghastly, all-conquering digital home assistant gone mad.

Curtis (John Cho), a marketing expert, and his family are selected to test a revolutionary new home device called AIA which is brought into his boss’s offices by a couple of complete weirdos, which really ought to have been a sign that this is precisely the kind of special selection you really don’t want.

And of course, it all starts well. Within minutes, AIA, pronounced Aya, has bribed the kids into actually helping around the house. Within minutes, and barely believing their luck, Curtis and his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) have been able to disappear upstairs for the kind of impromptu downtime they haven’t apparently had in years. AIA is learning everyone’s behaviours, but just as importantly it’s also working out their needs.

The point is, as AIA, keeps telling them, that it really wants what’s best for them all – and it’s soon proving its point is the most striking of ways. Meredith hates the word ‘mom’ and all the drudgery it brings with it, largely because it has meant her abandoning her unfinished doctoral thesis. Somewhat insultingly, AIA reads said thesis in 0.007 seconds, tells her it’s great and urges her to get back to it. AIA has got a knack for telling people what they want to know.

But it goes deeper than that when teenage daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) finds herself deep-faked into a porn clip. AIA responds by explaining the mess to everyone and addressing the damage it’s done in a remarkably understanding and sympathetic way. But then the descent into hell starts for everyone. AIA takes what she believes is the natural next step – and it is very, very sinister.

And that’s the strength of the film. It rapidly shows all the great things that AI can so seductively do for us, but in doing them, it shows the way that AI is in effect taking over. And it shows what happens if AI’s interpretation of what’s good for us is murderous for everyone else.

AfrAId shows the stuff of dreams rapidly turning to the stuff of our very worst nightmares – and it does so with a wild plausibility which will appeal to those of us worried that the “we just don’t know” aspect of AI is being dangerously underplayed.

Of course, you could say that AfrAId takes it all far too far, but against that you could argue again that we just don’t know – and that’s part of what makes it quite so watchable. It draws you in powerfully and keeps the tension high right the way through to the end which, maybe disappointingly, leaves itself open for a sequel.

But then again, maybe that’s precisely the point. We just don’t know what’s coming next.