8 movies about our current relationship with AI

8 movies about our current relationship with AI Features (Image credit: Netflix) (Image credit: Warner Bros) (Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures) (Image credit: Netfix) (Image credit: 20th Century Fox) (Image credit: Walt Disney) (Image credit: Orion Pictures) Becca Caddy published Eight sci-fi movies that help decode our current AI moment Her feels eerily prescient as more and more people openly talk about their emotional connections to AI. (Image credit: Warner Bros.) Science-fiction stories and real-world technologies have always been tangled together. Sci-fi gives us a way to explore our fears, hopes, and blind spots. To test ideas before they arrive in everyday life. Sometimes it even shapes the future directly, inspiring real research and products, like Star Trek ’s smart devices. However, that closeness can get a little... uncomfortable. Tech founders often treat sci-fi as a roadmap rather than a warning. And I’ve written about the way that decades of friendly, human-like robots may have primed us to form emotional bonds with tools like ChatGPT , even when we know they don’t feel a thing. But I still love sci-fi and like to think of it as a playground for thought experiments, and a way to sit with difficult questions at a safe distance. It helps us think about power, responsibility, consciousness, and control. About who gets to shape the future before it fully arrives. There are countless great films about AI, so this list was hard to narrow down. Instead of trying to be definitive, I’ve chosen eight that feel especially useful right now. In a moment when AI is no longer speculative, but embedded in our lives, whether we like it or not. Some obvious favorites are missing (sorry!), but these are the films that I believe say something specific about how we’re living with AI today, and what we may be sleepwalking toward next. 1. Ex Machina (2014) Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is a slower, subtler kind of science fiction movie than many of us are used to. But for that reason, I find it far more unsettling than a big-budget action flick. Set largely in isolation, it follows Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer invited to the remote estate of his tech CEO boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac), who has created a humanoid AI called Ava (Alicia Vikander). Caleb’s job is to test her, though the rules of that test (and what it’s really measuring) are messy. What I believe makes Ex Machina feel so relevant now is how closely it mirrors modern AI culture. A brilliant, egotistical creator, building powerful systems in isolation, with little oversight or accountability. Sound familiar? The result is an intelligence that understands human emotion well enough to exploit it, without ever truly sharing it. The film raises some deeply uncomfortable questions about emotional manipulation, simulated connection, and consent. That tension feels especially familiar in the moment we find ourselves in. An era where AI tools are designed to sound caring, reassuring, and human-like, and where the risk of mistaking convincing performance for...

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