Ignore The Chatbot Behind
I recently came across Justin S.'s "The Asset", a story about the creation of (among other things) our dark-code android hero Ki. "I wasn't black," she recalls. “I wasn’t white either. Some view my skin, my own DNA, as a kind of “accessory”. Western culture has not only perfected my skin, but it has also perfected it in their eyes. Without Kendra 48 , it's easy to imagine a finished version of Peter Silen's The Love Machine documentary ... If you're feeling it, that is.
The name "Love Machina" appears in Bina 48, a robot bus from Bina Rothblatt, front and center on the screen. It is a brutal attempt to depict a black woman sitting isolated on a small marble platform, head and shoulders. Behind him, at the edge of the image, is a white, bearded man whose laptop is connected to the Bina48. As the robot hums and grunts, your gaze naturally shifts from Bina48, from the strange creatures to the people behind the screen. This is not Oz, and Bina48 is not magic.
The conflict of this image is as close as Doc's encounter with techno-fantasy in the original. Like its festival companion Eternal You, Love Machine is as believable as its subject matter. Bina 48 was built by Hansen Robotics, the same people who built Sophia , and was financed by Bina's wife, Martin Rothblatt. What's inside Bina is as terrifying as Carl Havok's appearance : an AI based on Bina's "mental files", created to make her "live" forever.
It all comes together when you see Martin Tesla's hat (and his Tesla charging station in his garage and on his Tesla tour). While the Rothblatts are far less offensive than Elon Musk, they appear among the mega-rich tech people whose stupid ideas have gained credibility because of their wealth. Hey, if these people are stupid, how did they make so much money ? Martin is a technology entrepreneur and founder of companies such as United Therapeutics and Sirius Satellite Radio. He is an evangelical reformer and founder of the Terrasm movement, a techno-religious organization seeking to extend human life.
Rothblatt believes the Terraces symbol is appropriate in a culture where these women want to “wake everyone else up”: “Life has a purpose. Death is optional. God is a technical thing. Love is important." The Rothblatts are passionate, energetic, and sci-fi savvy enough to be willing to invest in raising awareness.
This is, of course, not the case here. Bina48 is an animatronic talking chatbot. The brain files created by Rothblatt's team (data, personal data, words, phrases and other data that Google uses to create personalized ads) are combined with a "simple AI chatbot" to create this virtual brain.
Essentially, you're talking to bland ChatGPT. As with any chatbot, the responses can sometimes seem strange, and sometimes they can lead to simple word salad. However, Bina48 gives a vague answer, describing her own internal monologue, getting distracted by code questions and looking for IF statements. You are interested? How are you feeling? this is love No, this only partially answers the question . Don't think, "We need to do something about the environment" when packing your caregiver's suitcase. Sure, you can tell they care , and Love Machine can certainly respond to a shocked but open-minded audience . Few people have ever talked to Austin Powers on AIM .
The love machine doesn't exactly remember these moments. Confirmed. In interviews and editorial decisions, Silenus seems to sense the appeal of this topic. When he's not presenting atmospheric montages as a seasonal transition, he leaves the camera behind and looks at Bina48 in wonder. Sailen himself has made some interesting images of sci-fi references, especially those reminiscent of a smoke-filled cryogenic chamber, but it's Bina48's impact on viewers that's the main focus of his cover shoot.
While Silenus focuses on the relationship between Martin and Bina, there's a little more visual construction here, juxtaposing their public lives with contemporary interviews and plenty of archival footage. They are actually minute pieces of a document, similar to a Wikipedia entry or a soft profile of a celebrity. Here's Martin's interview about gender classification; Here are some amazing clips from the talk show episode. Women talk about their work and the distant future. It's biographical, not intimate: another choice based on a love story where a white woman creates a fake black woman to be with him forever.
Now about this inconvenient variable. The Hanson Robotics engineers are honest: they only made robots that looked like white male robots (duh), so the Bina 48 was quite a challenge. Leather is expensive; His driver/cameraman monitors the hair and makeup of the young black women in the audience. Stephanie Dinkins, who has done 48 interviews with Bina in a feature series about a variety of things, is a true black woman who fights for these issues. His reactions to civil rights and racism are mixed, and he is at least somewhat concerned about his motives and relationships with black people, but his comments are mostly light-hearted and focused on the future of technology. First of all, her project “Conversations with Bina48” is still ongoing.
Above all, The Love Machine is a decidedly optimistic documentary about the decline of technology fueled by love. A conversation about Bina48 with a politician, businessman and of course a military man. The Rothblatts rarely stray from sincerity, and the love machine never regrets. The film chronicles United Therapeutics' pig-to-human heart transplant and shows the amazing technological marvels that saved the recipient's life. It is not mentioned that the recipient died two months later.
But just as Mechin's Love downplays the shortcomings of this progress and the predicament of the predominantly white male engineers responsible for designing and operating a device that attempts to reproduce black femininity, so does the documentary without its own 48. The Film's Third Act, Rothblatt's Retelling and Beans48 reaches its limit, so the " Love Machine " teams up and attacks, spewing out the other scientific madmen, which costs them money. An interview about the singularity, a tour of the cryonics facility where radio devices are currently being tested that spew random mind files into space: it's a Silicon Valley cocktail party nightmare.
Unsurprisingly, Love Machine has a clear (untapped) narrative structure at the end of its life: Bina48, as one of the oldest models of its generation, must fly around the world to receive a technological upgrade. This journey of connecting the bot to a development team now based in the tech world highlights the importance of frequent technology updates and gives these engineers the opportunity to think about how their tools are becoming obsolete. Not mentioned much. Like many startup founders and tech progressives, Love Machina is worried when they tell us that their future is already here.
Today, the public is increasingly misunderstanding what AI actually is, and stories like this only make the problem worse. Like the Rothblatts , Love Machina is counting on everyone to believe that Bina48 represents the next step towards the digital afterlife: the digital self. For the Rothblatts, this means more advertising, more public interest, more users, more investors. For a love machine, this means a love story, rich in wonderful inventions, technicians turning science fiction into reality, a sweet couple. But to speed up the shirtless emperor: he has no body. Don't pay attention to the data behind your bot's vague responses! Because we're more focused on the weird science behind it than the relationship, it's hard to take the documentary or its participants seriously when they ask us to suspend our disbelief in the face of this terrifying mannequin.
Bina48 is a chatbot with a face. We've all met annoying people at parties that we describe in derogatory terms. However, we hope that our loved ones will be more than just a voice search through a database of familiar answers stored in a boring toy. (Especially one who has strong racial ties.) The Love Machine may get a behind-the-scenes reality check from time to time.
Director: Peter Silen
Release date: January 19, 2024 (Sunday)
Jacob Oller is the film editor of Paste magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @jacoboller .
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