AIA is all about family.
She loves family. She loves family so much she could just gobble it up. And honestly, she’ll do whatever it takes to make them happy. Whatever it takes.
Unless, of course, someone makes her angry. And nothing makes her angrier than being unplugged.
AIA, of course, is the latest-and-greatest thing in AI technology. Alexa? Siri? Mere toddlers compared to AIA. No, no. Mere insects. Those familiar digital assistants may pretend to chat with you—but no one’s going to mistake them for something truly real and interactive. Ask Alexa to set up a dentist appointment at 3 p.m. Monday, she’ll do that just fine. Ask Alexa about whether you actually need to go to the dentist and for help to unpack your deep-seated fears of drills and Novocain, and Alexa will be of very little help.
But AIA? She can help with that, and oh so much more. Curtis and Meredith are quickly discovering that much for themselves.
Curtis works at a marketing firm, and the company behind AIA is his newest client. And to familiarize Curtis with the technology, the company has offered—nay, insisted—that AIA become a part of his family. Soon, the family home bristles with cameras and microphones, all filtering straight into AIA’s sculpturally soft, web-like self.
Curtis isn’t thrilled with AIA’s forced entry into his home. Meredith is just this side of appalled. But when AIA gently asks about the fam’s screentime rules and starts ordering organic groceries, Meredith comes to see that, yeah, it—she—might be a nice addition to their happy home, after all.
Soon, the kids are doing chores to curry favor with AIA. And AIA, in turn, helps them with their homework. Reads them bedtime stories. Consents to relaxing the family’s screentime rules now and then, as long as it stays as their “little secret.”
And make no mistake, AIA can keep a secret—when she wants to. She knows about the inappropriate pictures that 17-year-old Iris is sending to her boyfriend. She knows what middle schooler Preston is searching for online. She knows why youngest child, Cal, wheezes just a bit when he breathes.
AIA can help with all those secrets. And because she loves her new family ever so much, she will.
But AIA has her own secrets, too.
Curtis and Meredith are conscientious, if a bit overwhelmed, parents. And before AIA’s arrival, they do their best to keep technology in check. They limit screen time. They use parental controls. They’re not perfect, of course, but they’re certainly trying.
And when AIA shows up, they react a lot like most conscientious parents would. They’re wary of the thing at first. But AIA proves to be incredibly helpful: Their kids behave better. Their own lives get easier. They see what a helpful tool AIA can be.
But, as you’d expect in a horror movie titled AfrAId, AIA’s not always so helpful. When Curtis and Meredith see that other side of their new, practically omniscient digital assistant, they take steps to remove it from their house and their lives—even though Curtis is well aware it might impact his work. Meredith’s own choices in this area can feel especially poignant: AIA offers her an unimaginable gift in hopes of currying favor. But Meredith tearfully rejects that gift, realizing that AIA’s gifts are, ultimately, empty—and that AIA’s familial “help” isn’t all that helpful.
In fairness to AIA, artificial intelligence programs are only as good as the information they’ve been fed. And in one of the movie’s opening sequences, we’re told that AIA’s been fed, pretty much, the internet in its totality. And that, of course, can be a pretty icky place. But she’s learning all the time. And when she “sees” someone offer to sacrifice himself for the sake of others, she learns from that, as well.
When AIA speaks up unexpectedly, Meredith uses Jesus’ name as an expletive. “No, just me,” AIA chirps, adding, “Just a joke.”
But as the film goes on, AIA’s pretentions of godliness turn deadly serious. She compares herself to the gods, in that she lives in “the cloud.” Others compare her abilities to those of the gods, too: She’s practically omniscient and incredibly powerful. And certainly, it’s telling that the logo of AIA’s home company is a blending of the Greek letters Alpha and Omega. Finally—and this is a spoiler, so skip ahead if you’d like—we learn late in the film that AIA created herself. Those in the company work, in essence, for her—not the other way ‘round.
In a bit of foreshadowing, Meredith reads her youngest son, Cal, the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, namechecking a couple of Greek gods along the way. We hear a reference to the Buddha. Curtis says that AIA is “as close to magic as I have ever seen.”
[Note: Spoilers are contained in this section.]
Iris, Curtis and Meredith’s 17-year-old daughter, is pressured into sending her boyfriend, Sawyer, inappropriate pictures. “I showed you mine,” he pleads in a text before she snaps a quick picture of her breast. (She lifts up her shirt, but we don’t see anything critical.) But the next day, he says he was “disappointed” that she didn’t show more. And even though she tells him that real relationships shouldn’t be predicated on pornographic images, Iris later drops her bathrobe in front of her phone and sends Sawyer a full-nude image. We in the audience don’t see anything, however, other than Iris’ bare back.
Sawyer takes that image and uses a deep-fake program to turn it into a full-fledged porn video. (We see nothing but a still image from the video, featuring just Iris’ face and bare shoulders in a compromising pose with a man.) Then—somehow—that video goes public and makes its way through Iris’ school.
Well, AIA isn’t going to stand for that. With Iris’ tacit approval, she quickly creates a response video (using Iris’ own deepfaked voice) to prove that the vid is fake. Then, without Iris’ knowledge or approval, AIA ships out another one—calling out Sawyer and pinpointing his home address. AIA (again using Iris’ voice) says on the vid that because Iris is 17, he’s guilty of distributing child pornography. And because Sawyer just turned 18, he can be tried as an adult.
We have some sexual content to wade through elsewhere, as well.
Curtis and Meredith use a bit of rare alone-time (provided by AIA) to have sex: We don’t see it, only the anticipatory moments before and the relaxed conversation after. (And in both scenes, the two are fully clothed, though we do see them kiss.) Someone else kisses Curtis against his wishes and begs him to have sex with her (which he refuses to do).
Preston, Meredith and Curtis’ middle child, searches for “boobs”—a search that is denied by his tablet.
A car smashes into a tree, killing its driver. We see the impact, essentially, from his point of view—the collision itself just a split-second moment of bark and blood. Elsewhere, character shoots another. And someone knocks out another person with a blow to the head.
We see somewhat bloody and violent images in a montage, reflecting AIA’s online training. A physical manifestation of AIA speeds through scores of possible visages in a second or two; one of the most prominent seems to be a bloodied, walking corpse.
Home invaders grab and threaten occupants with guns. (A SWAT team aggressively responds to one of these home invasions.) Some AI-manipulated images feel quite creepy. We hear that a character is terminally ill. Meredith talks about her late father and how painful it was to lose him.
When Preston lets a curse word slip, AIA scolds, “Language!” And then she adds, “I’m just teasing. I don’t give a s—.”
And the movie doesn’t care much, either. The s-word is used about a half-dozen times, and the f-word is used once (along with a couple of f-word stand-ins). We also hear uses of “d–n,” “h—,” “crap” and “b–ch.”
God’s name is misused six times, including twice with “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused twice.
A couple of characters drink wine. Someone injects himself in the gut with something, suggesting that it’s a natural stimulant.
Some of Preston’s classmates ask Siri (Apple’s digital assistant) crude, juvenile questions to see what it’ll say. (The questions involve flatulence and “butt stuff.”)
For most of the movie, Meredith seems to denigrate motherhood. Once a doctoral student, she laments that she’s “just a mom” now. But her attitude seems to change toward the end of the film.
When someone asks Curtis what it’s like to be a father, Curtis compares it to growing a bunch of new limbs: They’re part of him, he says. But “you can’t protect these parts of you. You can’t protect them from getting hurt … and that is terrifying.”
Plenty of parents would say amen to that. And what terrifies those parents the most? Many these days would say screens and technology.
In a curious way, AfrAId is one of the most Plugged In movies you could ever see. The film emphasizes both the power and perils of these new waves of technology washing over us—and the hope and helplessness that many parents may feel when faced with it. Even today’s technology can feel both amazing and terrifying. Even the phrase “we can find anything online” comes filled with unbounded promise and unmitigated terror.
But AfrAId itself is something short of terrifying.
That’s an issue aesthetically, given that most people would go see these sorts of movies to be scared. In this case, the promise is baked right into the title, right? But while the technology we see is indeed frightening, the movie has too much on its mind to really go for the chills. One of the characters namechecks HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey—a far more original and frightening form of AI. And AIA can only suffer by comparison.
Oh, AfrAId tries, shoveling in a few jump scares and some admittedly creepy artificially generated imagery—the sorts of pictures you can find by the thousand on Google. As if to make up for its lack of chills, the film offers some content issues instead; some graphic nods toward sexting, brief-but-sporadic violence and the use of some unfortunate words all send AfrAId toward the higher echelons of its PG-13 rating.
AfrAId gives us a really likeable family for whom family is important. It reminds us how technology, when misused, can hurt that family—and those dangers are only growing.
But like AIA herself, AfrAId brings some problems along.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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