Ava (Ex Machina)
Pretty much as soon as Lemoine went public with his claims, folks on Twitter were making comparisons to the plot of the 2014 thriller Ex Machina. And honestly, it’s easy to see why: the main character in the movie, like Lemoine, worked for a major search engine provider that happened to dabble with AI software. And just like LaMDA, the films’ AI antihero, Ava, was built to simulate human behavior based off of the vast reams of data that the parent company collected. Just like Lemoine, the films’ protagonist, a programmer named Caleb Smith, becomes fully convinced that the program he’s interacting with, Ava, is indeed sentient.
But that’s pretty much where the similarities end—and that might be a good thing. Over the course of the movie, Smith becomes pretty infatuated with Ava, and let’s just say things don’t turn out so well for him as a result.
