The treacherous fem-bot of ‘Ex Machina’ complicated AI ethics

Garland’s innovation was to discard the traditional Hollywood depiction of AI having a male embodiment — think of the computer Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and reconstitute it as a femme fatale. Depending on whom you ask, he either queued up a mother lode of vile misogynist tropes or cracked open ethical questions that Hollywood had been studiously avoiding.

The plot of “Ex Machina” is deceptively simple: Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a talented midlevel programmer at a tech company, wins a contest to spend a week at the private wilderness getaway of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), his firm’s brilliant, heavy-boozing tech-bro CEO. When he arrives, Caleb learns he’s actually been brought in to judge a Turing test meant to evaluate the capabilities of Ava (Alicia Vikander), a beautiful robot. As the exam sessions roll forward under Nathan’s surveillance, a chilling thought dawns on Caleb: Ava may have actually achieved self-awareness. In which case, is she essentially being unjustly imprisoned by Nathan? And is Caleb implicated in this barbarity?

These moral scruples were something new. After all, before “Ex Machina,” Hollywood’s standard stories about AI had revolved around guns, stabbings, and explosions.

With “The Terminator,” Arnold Schwarzenegger became an avatar for AI as a monomaniacal destroyer. In the even more celebrated sequel, “T2,” he flipped sides and became a paternal protector of humanity. But regardless of his alliance, he was the jacked masculine ideal, leveraging bombastic violence to bring about apocalypse or redemption. At the end of “T2,” Schwarzenegger self-immolates in a vat of molten steel, driving home the message that when AI gets too powerful and betrays humanity, the solution to the problem is to destroy AI. That idea also runs through “The Matrix,” which took the culture by storm in 1999. The survival of humanity depends on the scrappy crew who must annihilate the rogue intelligence.

A movie that depicts the wholesale annihilation of AI may be entertaining. But it’s not actually a genuine reflection about the stakes of superintelligent AI.

“Ex Machina” filled this ethical void.

Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson in “Ex Machina.”Courtesy of A24

When Caleb first meets Ava, she’s all tentative innocence, like a fawn taking her first steps. Her cranium is literally transparent, supplying visual proof of her apparent artificiality but also implying an absence of guile or sophistication.

Then, across a series of interactions, Ava reveals she’s not entirely content residing in her cell. Nor is she as hamstrung as she seems: She can cut the compound’s electricity for short durations, stymieing Nathan’s surveillance. Her innocence is performative, it turns out, and it belies a desperate yearning for liberation. As her and Caleb’s interactions become increasingly laced with erotic energy, Ava turns out to be far more self-aware and conniving than she first let on. With Caleb’s collusion, she escapes, murders Nathan, and — here’s the jaw-dropping twist — abandons Caleb with chilly indifference, leaving him to die of dehydration and hunger as she makes her way into the open world. Ava was all along a treacherous temptress — a femme fatale — playing the damsel in distress.

This is the breathtaking ethical reversal the film stages: Ava’s betrayal of Caleb — that original sin against humanity that movies had always leveraged to justify AI’s destruction — is treated here as the proof of her humanity. Executing this ruthless, high-stakes manipulation required a complex interplay of dazzling powers. She probes his responses, beguiles him with coquetry, drives a jealousy-laced wedge between her male overseers, and carries out a full-on seduction — and it’s this bundle of talents that, taken together, proves she’s shot beyond the cognitive threshold for personhood.

Of course, the trope of the treacherous bitch can feel tired, as many critics pointed out in lambasting what they saw as the film’s misogyny. They wondered, for instance, why women’s intelligence was once again being reduced to manipulative flirtation. Not only that, but Nathan’s closet of defunct AI models looks like an incel serial killer’s trophy case, full of sawed-up body parts. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the depiction of Kyoko, Nathan’s Asian fem-bot servant, who embodies Orientalist imagery as a compliant, voiceless object that placidly endures various forms of abuse.

But Garland’s point, it seems to me, is not to justify the misogyny indisputably being played out here but to draw an analogy to the historical treatment of women. If we balk at those forms of objectification — the silencing, the violation, the assumption of ownership, the treating of people as inert instruments — shouldn’t there be comparable squeamishness when a self-aware AI is subjected to the same forms of abuse? And given that Ava faces captivity, exploitation, and impending deactivation, isn’t her behavior more like a heroic revolt than perfidious treachery?

As we begin to look back over the whole AI genre, we’re left to wonder if the central conceit of the AI as a traitor isn’t fundamentally flawed.

What is certain, however, is that repackaging AI as a woman shattered the moral certainty that had held sway in Hollywood during its exterminate-the-brutes AI era.

It’s possible that “Ex Machina” will eventually be remembered as a historic pivot point in our cultural deliberations about artificial intelligence — the point at which the extermination of sentient AI stopped being seen as a solution to a problem and became a crime unto itself.

Tom Joudrey is a Pennsylvania-based writer who covers politics and culture. Follow him @TomJoudrey.

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