Robots, Animals, and Generative Images. Understanding Fear and Promethean Shame in Human/AI Interaction through Film and Media

Abstract

As highlighted by Donna Haraway (1991), the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence belong to the wider field of human/non-human relationships, which in turn are the expressions of the individual’s relationship with otherness (Giuliani 2020). Within this context, human/animal interaction stands out as a privileged field of investigation, as it is chronologically the oldest, thus serving as the foundational paradigm upon which subsequent interactions have been developed. This interplay between human/animal and human/AI interactions encompasses not only philosophy, but also the creative implementation of this technology – as exemplified by Artbreeder, an image generation software rooted in this analogy – and speculative fiction, a genre capable of both identifying and shaping social anxieties and expectations. With this in mind, building on the notion of the subjectivity of consciousness (Nagel, 1974), it is possible to compare these two human/non-human interactions by analysing a set of films using the oppositional categories of domesticated/wild, fear/trust, and consciousness/intelligence, which are derived from human/animal relationships. Specifically, the relationship between individuals and AI can be explored by examining the interaction between humans and non-humans in films such as Frankenstein (Whale, 1931), Terminator (Cameron, 1984), and Matrix Resurrections (Wachowski, 2021), with a specific focus on the critical theme of the replicability of consciousness and its link with techonophobia. This, in turn, raises fundamental questions about consciousness and its actual relevance in human/human interaction, imposing a re-discussion of the “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1995), driving the discourse towards an object-oriented theory of mind (Manzotti, 2019).