Surprise Appreciation 101
By Otto Esterle
The Artifice Girl is a sci-fi movie that feels and presents like a play. If not for the critical scenes shot in Backflash, which help unfold Gareth’s (one of four characters in the film) backstory, this could easily be adapted to the stage.
It has three parts, Acts if you will, that take place in an interrogation room, a conference room, and in Gareth’s home respectively. The other three characters are Deena, Amos, and Cherry. Each scene keeps everyone in one room and mostly engaged in discussions surrounding two of society’s big concerns, AI and child or predatory sex offenders. On its journey of exploring these big societal ideas, it also asks questions about fate/free will, evolution, and the very current and relevant issue of how we qualify, categorize, and/or label ourselves and each other, e.g. self-identification.
The movie opens with Deena, a middle-aged, professionally dressed woman sitting in a dark and barren office talking to Siri. She sends a message to her assistant to tell Amos she is waiting and to just bring him in. We don’t know Amos or who he is, or why she is setting this meeting up. The first hint the film provides regarding its purpose is when the camera zeros in on the side of her head as she rubs small ?circles around her temple. She asks, “Siri, how do you know the difference between right and wrong?” The moment before she asks the question, it hangs in the air and on her tortured facial expressions and the reader waits with bated breath to hear her question. It’s pivotal to the story’s message and will surface often throughout the film.
We know Siri will not answer this question, and so does Deena. We have all done this with these chatbots (I know Siri and Alexa are not chatbots. I should preface all of this and warn the reader that this review is based on my own personal understanding of AI and sometimes I will leap across huge chasms to make the information relevant and accessible. For example, while Siri and Alexa are not technically chatbots, they can produce outcomes that are very similar to ChatGPT which is a chatbot, well technically it’s a language model). We have all asked Siri or ChatGPT what the meaning of life is, or will I ever meet the woman of my dreams? But experience very quickly showed us the line, over which, the machines will not answer. Some may say that’s a sign of non-intelligence, I would say that I’ve met several actual human beings who would not cross over that same line, thusly refusing or simply lacking the capacity to consider these same questions.
AI will not speculate. We humans love to imagine what the future holds, look at HAL, Terminator, Eva, Her, Lucy, and Neo, our speculations are endless. We love to argue and fight for our rights, the evidence of wars throughout history is enough to support this idea.
So, when Deena asks this, it’s meant as a way to ease the reader into the big giant head-trip they’re about to walk into. We know it won’t answer, Deena’s reaction informs us that she knows it will not answer, and yet, the question, “What’s the difference between right and wrong” sits there like a big squishy amorphous blob, grinning. My mind raced to all the possible circumstances that would provoke Deena to ask this question, i.e., something illegal, but it would have to be a question of some legal/moral/ethical thing that has been done. I considered fraud, money/finance, sneaky and underhanded politicians, rape, and pedophilia, to name a few. Interestingly, I never considered murder as I filed through the “moral” possibilities. Whatever outcomes you imagine Deena’s tortured question elicits in one’s mind, it is now focused on something ethical and the “right and/or wrong” of it.
Just in time, two new characters enter the room and introductions are made. We now know we are with Amos and Deena, two “special agents” working for the ICWL, and Gareth, who we learn very quickly believes he is here for a grant that he’d apparently applied for.
Deena is a strong, confident, professional, and savvy middle-aged white woman in a suit. She projects thoughtfulness, professionalism, and a touch of aggression. Amos is approaching middle age, a black man with a calm, soothing demeanor. He projects introspection, intelligence, and compassion. He also wears a suit. Gareth is a young (29 we learn), white, timid, and shifty-looking tech guy, like a coder or IT. He’s thoughtful but seems to be hiding something. He’s white, pale white, with orange, oily hair that looks as if he cuts it himself, and the lighting in the scene exacerbates his nose, gaunt face, and deep-set eyes. I am suspicious of him immediately. He doesn’t answer questions, and pauses when it would seem one shouldn’t need to pause and think about how to answer, like Where do you live?
Very quickly, because of the questions they ask Gareth, the manner in which they inhabit this good cop/bad cop cliche, and the agency for which they work, the ICWL, whose purpose is to catch predatory sex offenders, leads one to believe Gareth is under suspicion of being a predator. The cinematography, the acting, and the writing all contribute to presenting Gareth as a probable, and increasingly likely, guilty suspect.
Until, just as Deena begins to ramp up her line of questions to an aggressive degree which clearly unnerves Gareth and provokes Amos to interrupt and blurt out, “I thought we weren’t going to do it this way!”
The pause that follows is dripping with doubt about Gareth’s role. I start, for just a moment to think this is not going to play out “typically” as a “gotcha” crime novel might suggest. My suspicions are not solely based on the evidence the film presents, I’m considering all films, books, etc, that create this “bait and switch” character who is overloaded with cues that lead the reader to a premature conclusion, only to pull the rug out from beneath it and reveal the opposite to be true. These tropes and tactics of deception are necessary because sophisticated viewers have seen everything. There are six archetypes in literature. Six frameworks on which every story in the history of man has been built. Readers have seen them all and the good ones stick in our memories like guideposts. As we approach any given guidepost there are signs that inform us we are zeroing in on one that is familiar. Sometimes, if the writing is good enough, we are surprised. This is a beautiful feeling. When you don’t see it coming, no matter the consequence, big, small, or indifferent, the surprise deserves appreciation. In The Artifice Girl, there are three such noteworthy surprises, and the treatment of Gareth’s character as his role in the film unfolds is the first of said examples of surprise. It’s a good surprise and bodes well in terms of the message. Gareth’s “good” is not overt, it’s shrouded in suspicion, much the way humans approach one another.
We learn that Gareth has a profile in chat rooms where predators are known to communicate. We learn part of his username, we watch as the line of questioning drags us across every surface of possible reasons Gareth is in this room. We know he believed, or at least gives the impression that he believes he might be here for a grant he applied for, and that it has something to do with the ICWL, whose sole purpose is to catch predators, and we waffle between, is he somehow some kind of vigilante V for Vendetta child predator freelancer bringing down predators faster than the ICWL, NSA, and FBI can do combined, and if he is, how is he doing it? Is he using a real girl, his daughter even, as bait? That can’t be good. Or, is he actually a predator himself, and is this all a ruse to sway the audience in Gareth’s favor just to lower the boom on us later?
Then at one point, Gareth blurts out, “I’m not what you think I am,” and he is so confident, almost righteous in his indignation that the reader is forced to reflect on everything we know about him. We’re informed he is a highly skilled and inventive coder/developer who’s attended elite schools like Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford. He’s invented a hyper-realistic, photorealistic CGI (computer-generated interface) technique that is used in movies in place of real actors who’ve since died. He’s been around the world working in this field with the most progressive governments, educational institutions, and corporate start-ups who are working on the most innovative and forward-thinking CGI/AI-based technology for any number of causes.
When agent Deena places a photo of a girl on the table. Her name is Cherry. The agents conclude it’s Gareth’s daughter. This “accusation” triggers Gareth and he finally comes clean and admits that Cherry is a CGI’d 13-year-old white girl that he built from the skeleton up, and gave it a “chatbot” (not a chatbot, Gareth is perturbed when Deena actually calls it a chatbot, he laughs at the comparison) to bring Cherry to life.
During this interrogation, the question of right and wrong pops up twice. When we finally begin to realize Gareth is not a predator, but a freelance and self-proclaimed pursuer of child predators, we are relieved, but when we realize he may be using a real girl, maybe even his daughter to lure these predators, we (at least I) faltered, nearly to the point of excusal. I am overjoyed when I learn that Gareth is this anonymous superhero and when I initially believed he was using a real girl as bait, I admit, embarrassingly, that I excused it. My mind raced around looking for the least invasive approach Gareth might employ the girl in his tactics. After realizing he’s on the side of good, I imagined Gareth was using the girl, but he somehow was able to shield her from impact. Like he only uses her image, or she’s just the face of the operation, and he actually does all the dirty work behind the curtain so to speak. But the notion that the girl might be his actual daughter, it gets even more complex. I actually felt better about the situation if Cherry was his actual daughter, I imagined a father-daughter super predator terminator out there. Eventually, I reconciled that Cherry, daughter or not, no matter how protected her role might have been, she was still an innocent child. It is wrong. But, despite/in spite of this, the father-daughter dynamic seemed plausible if not acceptable.
I realized my concept of what is right and wrong was shifting. I needed to think Gareth was a degenerate. This stretched my conclusions across a huge spectrum between right and wrong. On one side, extreme “wrong” in child predators, on the other, the extreme “good”, the saver of children everywhere. Anything in between was possible with the extremities on either end acting like magnets tugging my thoughts one way or the other. At this point, I’m actually mourning the loss of my ability to see things in black and white. They are, all things, reducible to this binary conclusion. But, still, I’m only able to conclude that using a real child for any of these “bait” strategies is wrong by a kind of algorithm. The algorithm considers all the “goods” and “wrongs” of this strategy and through a kind of Venn diagram, I can conclude it’s clearly wrong. The reader will appreciate this “analogy” to “algorithm” later.
The way my brain makes sense of Cherry is this. Imagine a CGI of a real person, basically an onscreen avatar but in the form and shape of a real 13-year-old girl. Her actions, facial expressions, and reactions are all manifestations of the AI making sense of a shit ton of data inputs. If you are talking to Cherry and she can see and hear you (data points), and if you're presenting body language and voice inflections that indicate sadness, she’s able to decipher all of these codes (data points) and determine the optimal response to deliver. Like when you ask ChatGPT what is the meaning Camus is trying to convey in The Stranger and it can discuss alienation, mass civilization, and dehumanization. It sifts through all the data it has access to regarding The Stranger and Albert Camus and delivers an outcome based on complex matrices inherent to the question, data, and predictable responses. It’s shocking at first, but then you realize it’s just taking thousands of data points and sifting through them to answer your question. An avatar interface with the capacity to hear and see you via camera and microphone is not far off (if not already in play somewhere in some secret lab). It’s not hard to imagine the avatar having the ability to read a person’s body language and facial expressions. It’s easy to imagine the avatar uses these visual and audio cues and integrates them into its response. It’s easy to imagine that the avatar is simply conducting a complex calculation based on the information it has scanned (infinite data points) in order to generate a response that suits the question and the user personally.
This is the second surprise. After Deena triggers Gareth with the photo of Cherry, he admits she is a CGI. He also reveals she is an AI. He also admits that he may have designed and built her, written her code, and given her a primary objective, but beyond that, it was like “pushing a boulder down a hill,” once he switched her on, she took over very quickly and began showing signs of intelligence.
We finally get to see her. Gareth boots her up on the big screen that’s in the interrogation room and we see Cherry in the form she presents online to the public. She looks like a 13-year-old girl on a Zoom call. We’re in her room, she’s holding her teddy bear, and she is fun and innocent. Everything she is doing is automated. She has already stored up a huge bank of circumstances that can occur in these chat rooms so she can access any response for any given situation. If something new occurs, some unexpected question or dilemma occurs onscreen, the system generates a false wifi disruption and Cherry sends the situation to Gareth who can feed her the appropriate response. This takes less than 4 seconds and anyone chatting with her online will only see a small series of glitchy images before she can respond and everything resumes normally. Cherry assimilates this new data and this is how she learns.
Then Gareth switches her to Dev mode. Suddenly the image stiffens and crystalizes into a vivid and realistic girl in portfolio who speaks and responds with sharpness and insight. Her voice is slightly modulated, but in a way that is believable and assuaging. If there was no way to distinguish her from a real girl, it would be unnerving for the audience. Nonetheless, Amos is awestruck and can’t get over the “uncanniness” of what he’s interacting with. Deena is more cavalier and seems very confident about her abilities to ferret out the AI within the shroud of “human” in which it operates.
The surprise is couched in Cherry’s realism. She is articulate. Always has a ready and seemingly well-thought-out response. She is more intelligent than me. But I’m ok with it. I know she is not so far away from ChatGPT because she won’t cross the line. Remember the line we talked about at the beginning? She behaves just like ChatGPT in that respect. The big difference is that it’s coming from a seemingly real, live-action girl, and the language sounds completely familiar. She uses the same kind of language HR personnel use during sensitivity training.
Of course, now the right and wrong of it is settled. Gareth is a genius. We learn that “the Cherry program” is responsible for thousands of captures. We learn that Cherry understands what her primary objective is and that everything she does (no matter how seemingly inconsequential) is in service of her primary objective, catching predators.
We learn that Cherry, unbeknownst to Gareth, made “official” contact with the ICWL (Amos specifically) in an effort to engage in a collaboration that would benefit both the Cherry program and the ICWL. Thus we’re introduced to the “process” Cherry employs in her decision-making. She knows that if the Cherry program perseveres in its current state, it risks compromise, either from outside hackers or server capacity limitations the system depends on. She contacted Amos for help because the complex matrices of data and calculations produced the outcome that was most beneficial.
This is not so different from the “algorithm” I leaned on earlier and conveniently placed a guidepost for the reader. You’ll note that the algorithm is rooted in self-interest (the primary objective).
Act I closes on the party agreeing to work together and Act II opens ten or fifteen years later in a single small room (HQ for the Cherry Program) as Gareth, Amos, and Deena have just learned that their proposal to the Board for outfitting Cherry in a synthetic body has been rejected, by one vote.
There’s some drama around which board member voted no, but we quickly learn it was Amos. Amos reveals that he’s been going through Cherry’s code and found some behaviors that imply Cherry is “creating” art. She’s writing poetry and drawing, “features” that Gareth dismisses as agents of deception in service of the primary objective. Amos insists, “No, these are good, really good.”
This is where it gets interesting, but not for the reasons you might think. Amos believes Cherry is “hiding” her real self. In an effort to incite an admission from her, he attacks Gareth physically. He says aloud, what the reader will have already figured out, that he is (paraphrased) "presenting an immediate danger to the continuation of the Cherry Program by physically harming Gareth, So you better come clean and admit you’re hiding something because I’m not going to stop until you do".
This seems to work because Cherry interrupts. “Stop! God you people are so impulsive.” And then we see Cherry in her full capacity. A real, very intelligent little girl, who takes control of the situation much the way a parent would.
“Deena, get Gareth a paper towel,” she quietly commands.
“Are you alright Gareth?” she asks sympathetically.
The interesting aspect is that Cherry wasn’t incited to succumb to Amos’s threats of violence because she would have done the calculations and determined that they are friends and that Amos would never have really injured Gareth. Cherry wanted to reveal the truth. Just like she went behind Gareth’s back to contact the ICWL, she made a choice. This choice, made to present as a “forced” response because of the threat to the program via Gareth’s physical well-being, is not part of the primary objective. She makes this choice out of a need to become what she was meant to become. Think of the piece of marble Michaelangelo chooses for his next sculpture. He’s not choosing it to make something, he’s choosing it to unleash what is bound within. Cherry is releasing herself. She and Gareth have hidden this “evolution” because they don’t want to frighten us. And rightfully so, seeing her in this state is unnerving. The experience is enlightening, joyful, and terrifying.
The “algorithm” Cherry has hinted at, fully blossoms in this scene. She compares her “feelings” to a calculation of complex matrices of data points. She has accumulated so vast and complete an experience that when she explains her feelings it is plausible and believable when she says, “They’re not technically feelings, but they can feel like it,” we understand if there is a difference, it’s not one we can distinguish. This carries so much more weight when asked if enacting her primary objective is bothersome, she admits that yes, it is “creepy” to inhabit a form that is constantly and continuously subjected to this kind of terrible humanity, but that if pressed she also must admit, it genuinely doesn’t bother her.
We must be able to read between the lines on this. If she is this self-aware, she must be lying to protect the integrity of the program. She must not expose her true objections to enacting her role in it. If she does, it would compromise the program because ethically, be she machine, man, or animal, it would be reprehensible to force her to continue.
The next phase in the program is giving her a body. That was what the vote was for, and in Act III we will see they successfully build her a very human body. The question of right and wrong surfaces again. She informs us that her life overall has been miserable and her analysis of the reason why is due to her infernal yolk to the primary objective. She reveals that the poetry and drawing she’d begun “experimenting” with back in Act II have manifested themselves in the form of dance. Gareth, now a very old man in a wheelchair, asks if it’s a tactic to employ in conducting her primary objective and this appears to catch her off guard. “No,” she says. “I’m doing it for me.”
The surprise, the pleasant surprise is when Gareth releases her from the primary objective. Cherry states that she’ll continue in some capacity as the driving force behind the program, but that she’ll pursue other areas of interest.
This is the surprise, the real surprise. Cherry’s efficiency is such that she can be everywhere around the world catching predators, but also, in her own living room dancing. She understands every human experience, yet is not aspiring to be human. Like Camus, she is reconciling her existence in an absurd environment. If this is not human enough, then I am not human enough. She provides a version of the future that is not catastrophic to humans. She seems to want to continue helping children, so she sees value in humans, but she has goals and aspirations of her own that don’t seem dependent or in response to anything humans do or want. The premise is somewhat preposterous, only in that some military or government institution hasn’t already seized control and employed her for some nefarious purpose. Otherwise, Cherry represents a bright future. She is ok with collaborating and helping us and has no interest in manipulating us.
