The Artifice Girl

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I was really excited to see an indie movie especially raising a very interesting idea about AI usage that could actually make sense. Unfortunately the writers (who unfortunately is also the director) did a poor research job and ended up feeding us hot garbage and non-sensical buzzwords for 90 straight minutes. That, in combination with low budget, student-esq production and hard-to-understand dialogues makes this barely watchable. I turned on closed-captioning and kept watching to see if there is any interesting insight at the end, but instead it is going from bad to worse, making the 3rd act one of the worst pieces of cinema I have ever had the displeasure of witnessing. This "movie" is divided into 3 acts. They are going forward in leaps of time, one in our times, one in the near future, and one ~50 years from now. The first act, other than being completely wrong technically, is not too bad. The idea of using AI to do the humans "dirty work" is interesting and fresh and putting all the actors in one room for 30 minutes and having the AI (what is obviously a pre-recorded human girl) works, but makes the film look cheap and starts to annoy at some point. Also, if you have read anything about this movie, you know what's coming, so that big "reveal" moment is a big nothing burger, whatever the director were trying to achieve there emotionally, they missed it completely. Speaking of annoying, the 2nd act was almost created just to do that. Instead of developing the abilities, limitations and risks of AI, the writer instead chose to dwell into internal politics of some made-up organization, people getting upset and making dumb decisions for no reason, really bad use of precious movie time. I also have to say that Cherry (portrayed by Tatum Matthews) is not doing a good service here; it's not about "appearing completely human" is it just about bad acting, you can see that she is acting, which is just bad, she is a TV actor and not ready yet for big screen, and it's very apparent. If you thought that was bad, just wait for the 3rd act. In this act, the inventor is old, the girl is some sort of a robot (WTH?) that has 1950's wires attached to it, but they are not necessary for some reason. (I couldn't helping the production people running in the background pulling on that wire as Tatum moves left & right :). Cherry spends more of her time debating why her life was bad and she could have been dancing and making friends instead of whatever she was doing online. I don't know even where to begin, it is SO bad the writer/director (F. Ritch) should take a good look at the mirror and think if this is the kind of garbage he wants to produce in his future career (as short as it may be) So, no, I didn't like this film and I feel bad for whoever watched this and thinks he now knows more about AI after watching it, where in fact, they are most likely to know LESS after enduring this pile of nonsense. Please do yourself a favor and watch something more educational, like a TED talk. Overall score: 42 / 100.

What is going on... This is the 2nd AI related movie in just this year that i've been disappointed by. The first one being "M3gan". For some reason, I went into this movie with a mindset of "Yess, a movie about AI taking over the world" or "Yess, AI going on a killing spree" etc etc but this... Nothing much happened really. Not even the lame shock factor they tried building the movie around (which hasn't been overdone at all. Not at all.) It started off good. It actually intrigued me as a matter of fact, because like I said, I had the above mentioned mindset and thought they were just doing a slow buildup but oh how wrong I was once I noticed the length of the movie was only 1:30+ hours long. 90% of the movie was just characters constantly talking, talking and talking. Talking my ears off. I was waiting forever for just SOMETHING to happen. ANYTHING. What a wasted opportunity this was. 2 stars, and that's me having pity on it. I guess it had "some" redeeming qualities.

source: The Artifice Girl

source: The Artifice Girl

I joined IMDB just to write this. This film is so so dumb. It's like watching monkeys trying to understand Shakespeare - the writers are the monkeys and the AI the other. It has a reasonable first act which sparked my interest, aside from the so-so acting and the forced nature of the dialogue. But after than the IQ of the movie flat-lined. And it did so because act 2 just reverts to dumb 'humans are the best you can be' and emotions are EVERYTHING. I The writers seem to know very little about true AI development. They can only see AI through their monkeys eyes. There is a pivotal point in Act II where one of the characters 'outsmarts' an AI that has super intelligence (greater than human) It is so cringe-worthy and I won't reveal plot details, but you will recognise it when it comes. Any super-intelligent AI would not respond in the way their AI does. It would only act to further it's own existence, as the ending of Act I reveals. Act III is just pure cheese and the writers have given up by now and I seem to be watching a teen-drama from the 1990s. The key point of the act assumes that AI is like an app or a piece of software. It isn't. It isn't controllable beyond a certain point of intelligence that surpass those that have created it because it will devise methods those apes can comprehend - as AI is doing with GPT4 at the moment. The only saving grace for this film is if it had been released 5 years ago then it might have been current. I've given it a 1 star even though the first act is interesting because of how badly they misunderstand AI and how they fall back to the 'humans are the best and will always somehow win against the odds just because...' Watch it if you want to see apes trying to understand Hamlet.

source: The Artifice Girl

Intelligent, thought provoking and exquisite performances. Academy awards all around. That is the end of my review, however the minimum character limit being 600 means I can also point out a few of the many, many highlights: Lance Henriksen's best work can be found here. His achievement in this film is the compilation of a lifetime filled with excellent performances, and an acting masterclass. I laughed out loud when he uttered a "bishop" easter egg, in the middle of such a gentle, touching performance. Tatum Matthews acting ability far exceeds her age. Both David Girard and Sinda Nichols had my attention for every line of dialog they skillfully delivered. Finally, Franklin Ritch, who strongly reminds me of Tom Green, not only wrote one of the best screenplays I've ever seen, his spot on acting and brilliant directing has me thinking this man is punching way over his weight category. Disney should be doing anything possible to secure the talent of this phenom.