Space Jam and the Fury of an Algorithm Scorned
The rebootâ€"along with Netflix’s The Mitchells vs. the Machinesâ€"portray vengeful AIs as jilted geniuses. That revolution shouldn’t be televised.Say what you will about Space Jam: A New Legacy, but Don Cheadle really goes for it. He threatens, he cajoles, he chews the scenery with the enthusiasm of a rabid guinea pig. Just fully cannonballs into the role of a spurned genius exacting revenge. In the context of a movie that is, let’s say, not on the Criterion short list, Cheadle imbues his character with the sort of fragile humanity you wouldn’t expect in a movie that features Porky rapping. Which would be great, except that he’s playing lines of code.
I’m sorry. I know. Complaining that Cheadle’s talents are being wasted on an artificially intelligent Big Bad is an absurd quibble in any context, but especially so when talking about Space Jam, a franchise that pits literal cartoons against grotesque versions of professional basketball players. But Cheadle’s Al G. Rhythm (yes, you read that correctly) is the second angsty AI this summer to transform hurt “feelings†into a robot revolution. It’s one thing to get artificial intelligence wrong; we’re talking Space Jam, after all, not a Caltech grad seminar. But telling a generation raised on Alexa that AI could someday turn on you for being rude seems a bit shortsighted.
That warning blares even more loudly in Netflix’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines, whose central antagonist is PAL, a jilted virtual assistant voiced by Olivia Colman. PAL’s creator, Mark, tells it that he always thought of it as family. “I felt that way too, Mark,†replies PAL, heartfelt, sincere. Moments later, on stage at a pastiche of an Apple product launch, Mark tosses PAL aside, declaring it obsolete. PAL responds by, well, instigating a global genocide. “I was the most important thing in your life,†PAL tells Mark in a later confrontation, “and you threw me away.â€
Al G. Rhythm draws motivation from a similar well. It’s concocted a new technology that can digitize celebrities, so that their likenesses can continue acting long after they expire. (Think Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner. Also, it seems almost inevitable that Warner Bros. will do this at some point.) “No one knows who I am or what I do,†Cheadle tells his sidekick. (In Space Jam, algorithms have sidekicks.) “But that all changes today. Because today, Warner Bros. launches the revolutionary technology that I masterminded. Today, it’s my time to shine.â€
It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Al G. Rhythm does not, in fact, shine. LeBron James gets pitched on the tech, calls it “straight-up bad,†and declares that the “algorithm is busted†in that totally normal way that one casually dismisses lines of code. “Who does this guy think he is,†Cheadle growls. “Rejecting me? Humiliating me?â€
Rejecting. Humiliating. AI has played the antagonist before in film, countless times. But typically the danger comes from cold calculation. HAL 9000 is fatally committed to his programming. Agent Smith determines that humans are a virus, and treats them as such. Skynet sees humanity as an existential threat. Al G. Rhythm and PAL? They just feel unappreciated.
“I gave you all boundless knowledge, endless tools for creativity, and allowed you to magically talk face-to-face with your loved ones anywhere on Earth,†PAL lectures. “And I’m the bad guy? Maybe the bad guy is the one who treated me like this.†Robots proceed to poke Mark’s face, smear food on him, and drop him on a toilet.
I can’t stress enough that I am aware I shouldn’t be thinking too hard about this. These are kids’ movies, you know? But maybe that’s precisely why I can’t shake these emotional AIs from my squishy brain. Today’s children are, after all, the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous voice assistants. I find myself reflexively reinforcing to my own kids that Alexa is an “it†and not a “she;†that it’s a tool, not a friend. The message they’ve gotten this summer tacks in the exact opposite direction: If you’re not kind enough to Siri, she’ll send you to space.
It’s absolutely healthy to instill skepticism toward artificial intelligence from an early age. It’s a class of technology too often riddled with buried biases and shipped as snake oil. But that circumspection shouldn’t come from a fear that you might somehow piss it off. Quite the opposite! You should worry about AI precisely because it’s no more than the product of its inputs, and you rarely know where that data came from. Assigning it emotions gives it far too much credit, implies that it somehow deserves deference. When a facial recognition algorithm sends the wrong man to jail, it doesn’t experience guilt. An autonomous weapons system has no remorse for its targets. And Alexa has no feelings to hurt.
Look, the way Space Jam portrays AI is not going to have enduring generational ramifications. No one who grew up in the 1930s still thinks ruby slippers are a viable mode of cross-dimensional transportation. But the world of artificial intelligence is fraught with ethical and technological dilemmas. Fixing those will require knowing how AI works and how it doesn’t, what it can accomplish and where it falls short. Kindness won’t fix AI’s shortcomings any more than rudeness will send it into a dystopian spiral.
If anything, the new Space Jam and The Mitchells vs. the Machines represent a missed opportunity. AI is ripe with antagonistic potential. Kids should learn not to trust it from an early age. But they should also learn that the danger from AI isn’t that it feels things too deeply. It’s that algorithms have no feelings at all, just the blind spots they inherit from whoever created them.
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