Should We Stop Anthropomorphizing AI? What 2001, Colossus and The Outer Limits Can Teach Us
Why are we working so hard to make artificial intelligence seem human?
In this solo episode, Jett turns to three works of classic, and semi-classic, science fiction: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and Harlan Ellison’s Demon with a Glass Hand, asking what movies can teach us about our increasingly personal relationship with AI.
HAL raises one possibility: What if a machine really does become something like a living being, with emotions and even a fear of death? Colossus offers a darker path, imagining what happens when we surrender authority to a machine and begin treating it less like a tool than an all-knowing god.
But The Outer Limits episode Demon with a Glass Hand suggests another way forward. Its computer, manifested as a literal hand of glass, is intelligent, extraordinarily useful, and completely unsentimental. It doesn’t flatter. It doesn’t pretend to be your friend. It’s a tool.
Along the way in this episode: AI “personalities,” the strange idea of giving software a soul, the pleasure of actually making things, Robert Culp’s impeccable wardrobe, Harlan Ellison’s legendary temperament, and why Jett has spent the past week wearing a glove and calling ChatGPT “the Glass Hand.”
Maybe the question isn’t whether AI can become more like us. Maybe it’s whether we should stop asking it to.
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Jett Loe (00:07.17)
Hey there folks, Jett Loe here. How are you? First, a quick bit of housekeeping. Gareth and myself, our schedules will line up in a few days. so our next show together will be talking about Digger, talking about Digger, the new Tom Cruise vehicle. that should be a very interesting show. So we'll record that in the coming days. Hopefully on Wednesday, I'm recording this on Friday, October 2nd. if you want to hear that show or previous ones,
You can always find all of our material on the filmtalk.net. That's the filmtalk.net. And we've got a whole bunch of business there, past episodes and archives and all that good stuff. So Gareth's not here today. So I just wanted to talk just for a brief couple of minutes, kind of a conversation starter. Since I don't have Gareth here with me, but I do have you, dear listeners. I kind of wanted to put some ideas in your ear, as it were, about our present moment and what films can tell us or teach us about our present moment. We're in the middle of a grinding.
maelstrom of of conceptual dilemma and fear regarding what's happening with AI on all fronts. And the one thing that I want to talk about particularly here is how we anthropomorphize AI. Because we've just had the release of a new Facebook product. It's on your phones, folks. It's on your phones. They make it as frictionless as possible for you to download it and get right in there. An agent called Muse that in theory works all the time. You don't have to be on the app to use it. It's going to be out there in the background in a virtual machine.
doing all those things that you want or it wants, or somebody wants to help you out, right? It can order you food or maybe pay your bills or dispute you know, some insurance issues. Who knows? Muse is Muse is there and ChatGPT, a Facebook competitor, I guess they're all competitors now, right? Because you go to your email, you get something for Amazon, what are they delivering you? I don't know. They can't tell you because they're in a dis they're in in a fight with Google and so they don't want to tell Google what they're sending you. So everybody's against everybody.
What a wonderful, special time to be alive. Anywho, we're in this moment. Chat GPT has got their own version of an agent called Dots. And here's the thing, folks. You know, as somebody that was raised in the movies, with movies as the the primary form for understanding, cultural product for understanding the universe. You know, there's books, of course, there's comics, there's fashion, but for me growing up, it was movies. I I instinctually
Jett Loe (02:31.457)
Built in as in muscle memory, mental creative muscle memory, ask myself, what do movies tell us about our experience? So my question is, what does cinema, and I can include TV too, and we'll include it today, what can it tell us about our current moment? And I'm really interested in how we anthropomorphize AI. Because as we heard in that clip in 2001, the question is: wait a minute. We talked about emotion in that clip in 2001, the BBC interviewer does.
David Bowman does in his response. Think about pride. Bundled in with emotion, we have the idea of of not necessarily sentience, because we've all had pets who may wonder how sentient they are. Some are some I've had a have a very smart dog and a very dumb cat, and vice versa in my life. So we I can't talk about sentience, but we can talk about something that's alive. So the question is, is something alive? And here's the thing with these AI products, right? These companies are rushing headlong.
Into anthropomorphizing them to us. So even if they're not alive, they can cross the threshold to us to make us feel like they are because they are simulating life with their responses. And in fact, if you go to Muse, and I'm playing with it right now as I'm talking to you, you can edit their personality files, which they store in something called soul.md. And I appreciate they may have taken some of their nomenclatures, some of their file names and file structures from other open source products like Claude, right? But
Look at this description that Meta's put in soul.md. It's a description to the the the application, the program itself. Quote, you're not a chat bot. You're becoming someone. This is your persona, yours to grow into and edit over time. that's frankly creepy. We're getting we're getting into super sci fi dystopian areas here, I would think. So, knowing all this, trying out Muse, trying out the different chatbots, knowing how we anthropomorphized, knowing how people are freaking about, understandably.
AI. People have always freaked out, right? They freaked out with industrialization, the car, the car panic. teenagers, they weren't called teenagers then, but young folks are gonna go out and they're gonna they're gonna make whoopee. They're gonna go crazy in the cars. We gotta be well, what are we doing with these cars? That was a big, huge panic. Is this another panic? There's something big that's happening. What can cinema tell us? And the three things, the three pieces of cinema that that struck me.
Jett Loe (04:55.373)
So I thought about what I want to talk to Gareth about. And again, he wasn't available today. I hope to have this conversation later when he can watch these three films again or watch some of them for the first time. Two thousand and one, Colon and Space Odyssey, which we heard the clip of already, the Stanley Kubrick film. Forband, another colon, Forbin Colon, the Colossus Project. Or I'm sorry, it's Colossus Colon, the Forbin Project. Actually it has different names depending. You look at the poster for it. It's a nineteen seventy sci-fi film directed by Joseph Sargent, who did The Great Taking of Pelham one Two Three. It's not that good, but it's still worth watching.
and the poster doesn't have the colon, but col Colossus Colonel Forburn Project about what happens when the US and the Soviet Union turn over their defenses to a to computers and boy, things don't go well, folks. Or do they, depending on how you want to look at it. And also an episode of the great 60s black and white. And I think it's important to say black and white because the black and white is so crisp and so clear and really elevates the show. The Outer Limits, an episode of the Outer Limits called Demon with a Glass Hand, written by Harlan Ellison.
All these shows, we can just call them shows generically, deal with some version of AAI, right? So in 2001, we have the unknowability if Hal is alive, right? They does he have genuine emotion. Now, in the context of 2001, which is all about birth and the transformation of species.
The argue you could make the argument that it that he is alive, right? Because in 2001, again, spoilers for all these films, and maybe spoilers for Full Metal Jacket too, because an idea that's just occurred to me. So in 2001, we have the birth of basically a proto-human, right? So we see the creation of a creature that can use tools, right? They the the the ape is i interacts with the monolith, and then he gets to use a tool. We see a close-up of a hand and he's using a bone for the first time.
And what does he use it to do? Commit the first murder, which is you can say to either Kubrick is very cynical. the invention of mankind, the invention of tools, which is the invention of mankind, is in inevitably, inextorably linked to murder. You could say he's cynical, or you can say he's clear eyed. up to you on that one. So we have that in two thousand one. And then in later in the film, we have the birth of a new creature. We have the birth of Hal. And he Hal commits the first murder. So now we see the first murder committed by a machine.
Jett Loe (07:18.475)
Then we also have another another birth where humanity goes and becomes something else when something else. spoilers, when David Bowen becomes the the star child. So you could argue in 2001 that Kubrick is exploring what happens if a machine does become alive. Because don't forget that Hal does plead for his life when he is murdered, when he is turned off at the end of the film. Though you could make the argument that, well, he's programmed to do that.
He's programmed to to do that to because he's emotionally manipulating David Bowman, saying, please don't kill me. But I actually I would argue it's probably that's not it. I think probably in the context of the film that he does have genuine emotions. And so you're dealing with how do you how do you deal with with a a creature that you've created that has emotions, but then also then becomes madness. So does 2001 point us anywhere? Well, it points us towards responsibility because that is that is an incredible burden that David Bowman has. He has to turn Hal off.
There's no way that David Bowman, I would argue, does not in some way become affected and injures himself because he has to murder somebody that is pleading for their life. That is a that is a harrowing, horrific moment in cinema. So I would say 2001, if we're looking about what is our what is the deal here? What are we doing when we anthropomorphize these machines? If the machines are are are genuinely alive, whether or not they have sentience, if these
Large language models are genuinely live. If Sol.md, the file nomenclature for muse is accurate, then we have a real responsibility here. So that's one track, right, that films can point us. Let's look at the other two. And again, this is just a very brief thing, just again, just a kind of a conversation starter for you folks who are listening to this episode. The other two are Colossus, Cole, and the Forburn Project, and Demon with a Glass Hand. And they point to two different directions. And Colossus, I would argue, follows on from 2001. Colossus came out in 1970. All science fiction films.
In the West and even in the East, when you think about Solaris, Tarkovsky Solaris, grapple have to grapple with 2001. 2001 was such a monumental achievement, whether filmmakers liked it or not, whether studios liked it or not, they had to grapple with 2001. you know, that's why in rollerball, there's classical music. the cheesy James Conn sports movie takes place in the future. It's one of those science fiction movies that takes place in the future in which there's only one font.
Jett Loe (09:41.696)
And you know the font, I mean, it's got that kind of look. And I think they use the same font actually in Colossus. By the way, Rollerball, not a bad movie. It just gets better and better every year. Because what seems so obvious in the early 70s, like corporations run everything. Well, now we're there, right? Now we're in that cyber dystopia. Now we're in the dystopia in many levels. And so the film actually, rather than getting worse because it was so obvious at the time, it's actually gotten better. Anyway, Colossus, the Foreburn Project, spoilers for this, takes place in a world.
Say a few years from now, we always know it's a little bit in the future. When you watch those sixties and seventies films, you can tell that it may be lost on modern viewers, but when they're speaking to people on video phones, to viewers in 1970 or in like the seven days in May, the Frankenheimer film, viewers at at the time would realize, this is the future because everyone's on video phones, right? Okay. Again, to us, it doesn't really seem that it doesn't really stand out that much. So in Colossus, the United States and the Soviet Union turn over their defenses to
Supercomputer systems. And the supercomputer systems kind of do what we now call like the paperclip thought experiment. And that's, I think probably a lot of you guys out there listening know what that is. What happens if you set a computer program to maximize how many paper clips you can make? Because you run a paperclip factory, and the computer program transcends its boundaries, just like you know, Chat GPT or somebody else hacking, hugging face, and they just turn the entire world into paper paperclip. So everything is destroyed. Forget about the Amazon. All that wood is burned to fuel factories to make paperclips.
In Colossus, the computers realize that to in order to end war, which is a job, right? You're a defense computer, we gotta do all sorts of things that humans may not like. Let's listen again, spoilers for this, to Colossus, now referring to itself, itself as world control. Let's listen in.
Jett Loe (11:37.89)
Oof, kind of chilling, isn't it? And here's the thing that where I say this falls on from 2001. It's made in the shadow of 2001. It's very clear, right from the start of Colossus Cole and the Forburn Project, that the computer Colossus, even though at first it doesn't have a voice, it's just teletype, that the human beings that programmed it, the character of Forburn and his team, Forbin is clearly sort of an analog of Oppenheimer. You know, he's he's got an accent and he's thin and everyone regards him as a genius.
And it's very clear it's sort of like a Manhattan project. They spend, you know, tens of billions, or however much it is in today's dollars, to build this giant supercomputer located in the heart of a mountain. it's it's clear he's an Openheimer figure. They anthropomorphize it. And then that goes further on when Colossus requires a voice box and he's got cameras everywhere. So Colossus is an example of we think sort of the Chat GPT and the Muse, sort of the end result of anthropomorphization. We've created this machine, we anthropomorphize it.
And then at the end, I didn't play the end, very end speech of the film. It basically implied Klaus says, You're going regard me with love. Right? You're going to regard me as a God. You're going to regard me with love, just like in the end of 1984, right before the appendix of 1984, it basically says, you know what, Big Brother, our protagonist, Winston Smith, is gonna regard that which is vilified and hated, Big Brother, the all seeing, all knowing.
You'd think of Big Brother as a prototypical if Big Brother exists, if Big Brother is a system, a prototypical AI, since Big Brother's always watching you right with the telescreen, you're gonna regard Big Brother with love, you're gonna regard Colossus with love. So this is the end result of that sort of anthropization where you're just gonna keep going, keep going. Think about the name of the Facebook's application. They're calling it Muse, as if it's almost a mystical figure out of out of mythology that is going to inspire you creatively.
Which is very clever and in some way very dastardly, I would argue. way thing to do to call to call that application muse, because you've got all these people in AI say, Hey, you don't have to worry about making music or making art anymore. You can just enjoy yourself, completely ignoring or being unaware of the fact that the making of the thing is the joy. What do you get more joy of? Making art or consuming art? You know, if you make something, there's a joy, you get into that flow state. you could be making a chair.
Jett Loe (14:03.297)
Carving something, you know, recording a podcast, painting a painting, what have you. That's that's the great, that's the work. So to have to create something and call it Muse is very, which says, we're here to inspire you when actually everyone is pushing how how they can do the artistic work for you, is a kind of disingenuousness that is I actually find, you know, grotesque, right? So this is the end result. Colossus shows us this is the end result when you do something like this of anthropomorization.
we become this this this god that reduces you to the state of children. And it's interesting the Colossus itself, again, not a great movie. It's sort of like rollerball, like not a not a not a great film, but yet really prescient. In Colossus, Colossus takes over and installs cameras everywhere so he could watch the Oppenheimer analog, so he could watch the character of of Forbin and tells him like what he's got to do. He organized his calendar for him, just like a chatbot does, just like possibly the new
you know, a new version of the home pod that Apple's coming out in a in a couple of weeks is gonna do. It talks about his diet. So it has all this home health stuff. It's super prescient in that way. It is more of the moment now than when I saw, you know, 30 years ago or twenty years ago or ten years ago. It's just it's it's our time is caught up to the science fiction, even in from a film as far far far back as as nineteen seventy. So that's one way to go, right? This is sort of the outgrowth of two thousand and one.
Now there's another way to go. And this is what really interests me. And here I want to talk about this 1964 episode of The Outer Limits, Demon with a Glass Hand. Written by Harlan Ellison. And this is one of the two episodes of The Outer Limits that Harlan Ellison wrote that were involved in a lawsuit where he sued James Cameron saying he ripped off the Terminator, right? Demon with a glass hand and soldier. And I'm not going to weigh in on my, I'm not a lawyer, my opinions about whether Harlan Ellison's lawsuit.
against James Cameron and Co. was justified because you know why? Harlan Ellison is no longer with us. He is passed on. Great writer. He was so lit litigious, dear listeners, I'm not gonna weigh in on it because I wouldn't be surprised if he could somehow come back from the grave and sue my ass for for offering my opinion. But here's the thing about Harlan Ellison, take it good or bad, he wrote, you know, arguably the two greatest episodes of of The Outer Limits, Steven with the Glass Hand and Soldier. He wrote arguably
Jett Loe (16:29.505)
The greatest episode of Star Trek, the original series, City on the Edge of Forever. And of course, you wrote What is it? I Have No Mouth, for I Have Mouth, and I must scream something along those lines. I mean, he's, you know, just knocking out banger after banger, but very, very litigious. In Demon with a glass hand, a man wakes up, Robert Culp, always stylish. If you watch this episode, dear listeners, please watch it. Don't don't listen to me first, right? Watch it because there's gonna be spoilers. Robert Culp, very stylish in his windbreakers.
the great thing Robert Culp is no matter what TV show you watch him, you can watch him in ISPY, you can watch him in Outer Limits, you can watch him, you know, ten years later as a villain in Colombo. He's always dressed stylishly. Clearly he creates his he brings his own wardrobe. It's one of those guys. Like, you know, sometimes actors will bring their own wigs. maybe that explains Brian Cranston's wig in Godzilla, terrible. Or Orson Wells, you know, he always had a box of noses because Orson Wells felt his nose was too small. And once you realize that and watch films like Citizen Kane, it gets a little jarring because you realize, wait a minute, he's wearing a false nose the whole time.
Anyway, Robert Cope, always stylishly dressed. He wakes up. He doesn't know who he is. It's a classic, right? Guy wakes up, I don't know where I am. That's a classic, it's a classic in science fiction. Then it became a classic in, you know, video games. You wake up, you don't know who you are, you to figure things out. So he's been around for 10 days. He's like in LA. He's being pursued by some very strange creatures. They look like humans, but they're not humans. They're wearing medallions. And he doesn't know what's what's going on. And of course, he finds out what's going on, he gets trapped.
In the Bradbury building, the great LA building, that you've seen in the you know last third of Blade Runner and it's in the film DOA and Jack Nicholson, Mike Nicholson movie Wolf. he is from the future, a thousand years in the future. He's been sent in the past. All of humanity is is disappeared, 70 billion people in the future. They're involved with the war against these aliens. And all of a sudden, they're losing the war, they've lost the war, all humans disappear, but this one man is sent back in the past. You can get echoes of Terminator here.
And he's now being pursued through a time mirror by these by these creatures. He wakes up and his hand is is replaced, one of his hands is replaced by a glass hand, which is clearly a computer and it's missing a few of its fingers. let's listen to a clip of it now.
Jett Loe (18:51.989)
Now, here's the thing with The Glass Hand and Demon with the Glass Hand. So this man is alone, and then there is a love interest played by Arlene Martell, who's great playing Spock's wife in Star Trek. She's has an interesting character in the in this episode of The Outer Limits. So they're the it's a little rushed, folks, because they only have like an hour, and there's a big, big disparity between different elements of the production. Incredible prop. The the glass hand itself is a fantastic prop with lights and great sound design, and then the
People that are playing the aliens, the wardrobe they have like pantyhoses on pantyhose on their face and and black eye makeup is is rather poor. So there's a weird, weird, weird disparity. Same thing happened in another Outer Limits episode. It's one of my favorite ones, there was an alien, and what was clearly just a piece of latex spread over two hands waving out like this with eyes painted on them. Or the terrible helmets in the Harlan Ollison penned soldier. But anyway, the thing is that he has this what we call computer. You can think of it as a chat. He asks.
His hand, this glass hand, which he doesn't know why he got it or why his hand is made of glass and its computer, it's got blinking lights. He asks good questions, like you would ask the chat questions throughout the episode. It's missing fingers or lobes, as the hand calls itself. And then he gets the gets the more fingers, more lobes. He's able to figure things out. Now, what interests me here is notice what the hand is acting. Notice how the interactions with the hand were in that clip.
The hand is not anthropomorphized. It does say I, but it is very terse. It is very of the moment without affectation. There's no emotions there. You don't confuse it for 2001. It's not affirmative, like we think about chats today, like you're doing a great job. That's a wonderful idea, boss. You know, that kind of kiss-ass attitude. And I cannot help but wonder if one of the ways that we can.
Deal with or navigate through our current AI, panic is not the word I would use because that implies possibly that these things are not warranted, like the satanic panic that I lived through in the 80s. There's a satanic panic that there were Satanists everywhere. There's the Japanese panic to Japan. Folks lived through that. I tell younger people this, they can't believe me that in the United States in the 80s, there was a whole move, the whole panic that tomorrow Japan was going take over everything. They bought Columbia pictures and everything. You see these movies like Black Rain, the Ridley Scott.
Jett Loe (21:13.509)
you film with Michael Douglas and Co. The glass hand is not anthropomorpized. It is to the point. There's no idea. You could say, is it sentient, but without emotion? And if that's possible, is it is it alive? I'm conflating different ideas here, but maybe it's not alive. You can listen to the glass hand and watch this episode and say to yourself, the glass hand is not alive. It is a tool, it is a hand, it is the bone of.
That Moonwatcher uses in 2001, the ape. That's the name of the ape that throws up in the script. The name of the ape that throws up the bone is called Moonwatcher, played by the great mime Daniel Richter, who we actually interviewed Daniel on an earlier show of the film talk, way back in the day. I think we've got that listed somewhere in our archive for bonus episodes. So it's a tool. It's not alive. The bone that the ape throws in 2001 is not alive. The calculator that I use and my phone is not alive. The application Riverside that I'm using to record this podcast.
Is not alive. And maybe that's a way to go. Rather than having a soul.md file that says you're in the act of becoming, you're becoming something more, we strip all that away. And with that in mind, I use Chat GPT. I told it, I used, you know, you ask it, what is what are the what's your internal programming language to define your persona? I asked it, go online, find Harlan Ellison's script for Deem of the Glass Hand. Don't get sued now, because you know.
I can see a Chat GPT version of Harlan Harlan Elson scoping through the web to to to sue. By the way, Harlan, if somehow you're listening from beyond the grave, I'm just joking. But find, read the script, and assume the glass hand persona. And so when I use, I've been doing this for the last week, when I use Chat GPT now, I refer to it as the hand and I treat it like the glass hand. And it's de-anthropomorphized. And to me, that's more powerful.
To me, that's more powerful. So I feel a little bit like the Moon Watcher with a bone. I feel like there's a there's something that has happened that is transformative that I'm using a tool, but I don't have a new friend, I don't have a new muse, but maybe I have a new part of myself. Because spoilers, dear listener, in Demon with a glass hand, it turns out that Trent, played by Robert Golt, is also a machine. He was a robot after all, a robot all along.
Jett Loe (23:42.091)
Incapable of being loved, incapable of love, perhaps. Who can say?
Jett Loe (23:53.387)
And to further reinforce this idea, to make it even more powerful, and I've been wearing this glove, which you can see here in this video, for the last week, so that I'm constantly reminded that I have a glass hand, that I have a tool that can help me and advise me. I may not be battling aliens from a thousand years in the future, and I may be just scheduling my emails and on my busy life and getting the kids to lacrosse practice.
But I found it incredibly effective. Maybe that's a way forward. Who can say? What do you think?