The Artifice Girl starts out pretty dumb, then it gets very intriguing, then mildly intriguing, and then it reverts to really fucking stupid. And that’s all in the first act. Unfortunately, the stupidity persists for the rest of the film.
The film opens with ICWL “special agent” Deena Helms (Sinda Nichols) alone in a room (the ICWL is a vaguely defined fictional organization likened to the FBI and the NSA). She asks Siri, “How do you know if you’re doing the right thing?” Well, if you have to ask a virtual assistant software about it, then chances are you’re doing something wrong.
Agent Amos McCullough (David Girard) brings Gareth Federson (writer/director Franklin Ritch) into the room. Deena starts grilling Gareth about his work. Gareth used to do visual effects, notably “on that new Star Wars movie.”
“My main focus was on 3D renderings,” Gareth says. “… The actor I was tasked to digitize was unavailable to be filmed in person … because they were dead … I reconstructed Alec Guinness’ face as a 3D model.”
Deena finds “digitizing dead people” creepy, as she should. “It’s almost like turning someone’s corpse into a marionette … Making them do whatever you want. What if the poor dead guy didn’t want to be in another fucking movie?”
Ha! I couldn’t have said it better myself. Actually, it was Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing, not Sir Alec Guinness, whose likenesses they desecrated in Rogue One (directed by Gareth Edwards, wink wink), but the point is nonetheless valid (also, if they had said Carrie Fisher instead of Alec Guinness, there would be the implication that Ritch’s character is supposed to stand in for whoever real person was responsible for the “weird, glossy sheen on [Princess] Leia’s face, and buggy eyes that look taken from a poorly-rendered video game cutscene.”
Either way, I immediately perked up. Could The Artifice Girl be an indictment of CGI’s crimes against art? It seemed too good to be true, and it was. Deena is not really interested in the purity of the filmmaking craft. “We catch pedophiles,” she sternly informs Gareth.
In the grand scheme of things, child sexual abuse is, of course, far more important than post-production chicanery, and the screenplay does briefly present us with a poignant dilemma.
Gareth also catches pedophiles and is damn good at it. However, he uses a little girl called Cherry (Tatum Matthews) as bait. Deena doesn’t believe that the end justifies the means, though, and regardless of Gareth’s track record (“196 convictions” based on information he has submitted to ICWL), she will not stand idly by while Cherry is being exploited.
Gareth hesitates to fill the agents in on Cherry for the painfully obvious reason, which even dead, blind Ray Charles should be able to see coming a mile away, that Cherry isn’t real. She’s a younger S1m0ne knockoff. That dog won’t hunt, Monsignor.
I could buy a movie in which technology has advanced enough to fool a couple hundred online predators, but The Artifice Girl makes it a point to establish that it exists in the same world as the latter-day Star Wars films (not to mention that the whole child abuse thing — never mind that using it as a mere plot device feels as exploitative as the thing itself — anchors it in an extremely real world). That is to say, a world where computer-generated imagery is still deep in its cave painting stage, with no hope in sight that it will ever evolve past it.
When Gareth finally shows them Cherry, Amos claims that he “just can’t tell the difference,” to which Deena replies, “No, Amos, she’s completely CG. It’s very subtle, but I can still tell.” If Cherry truly were “completely CG,” Amos — unless he’s a total moron — could tell the difference, and it wouldn’t be subtle.
Cherry wouldn’t be identical to flesh-and-blood Matthews. She would resemble Matthews in the same way that Robert De Niro resembles himself in The Irishman; i.e., a hideous caricature donning a digital death mask.
Not that it matters anyway, because the film then devolves into the same old, boring Pinocchio debate we’ve endured a million times before. It takes the aforementioned dilemma as it originally appeared, regarding the ethics of using, as it were, live bait, and transfers it to a virtual scenario involving a made-up child wherein the pros and cons no longer apply in any way, shape, or form. It goes from hypothetical to masturbatory.
The entire discussion is utterly moot, as it’s not germane to any extant or future technology. I’ve no doubt that we can make machines that are smarter than us — we have. But Ritch, like many others, disregarded the significance of emotions and undervalued their distinctiveness. Insofar as there is such a thing as a soul, feelings are its makeup. We can give something a brain, but not a soul.
Our emotions connect us to the world around us, shape our experiences and relationships in profound ways, define our identity, and make us truly unique beings. They are a fundamental aspect of human consciousness that sets us apart from machines and gives life its richness.
Not everybody feels the same emotions, nor do they feel them the same way. Some feel them rather intensely, and perhaps the fact that some of us are so emotional it’s where the root of all this magical thinking lies — the belief that we can bequeath, through some sort of fetishistic transitive property, our feelings to inanimate objects.
“One of the driving principles of magical thinking is the notion that things that resemble each other are causally connected in some way that defies scientific testing (the law of similarity).” In this case, Cherry looks so much like a real girl (a lot more, mind you, than she ought to) that it must follow that she can experience real feelings that would have to be taken into consideration lest they get hurt.
The fallacy of anthropomorphism is at play here, attributing human characteristics, such as sentience, to non-human entities. This, in turn, leads to unrealistic expectations and emotional attachments to objects that lack the capacity to reciprocate.
All things considered, Cherry may be “one of the most complex and independently evolving AIs that’s ever been created,” but she’s still just a piece of computer software programmed to simulate human behavior.
The idea that Cherry should be handled with kid gloves solely because of what she, or rather it, represents is childishly naïve and reminds me of that old robot saying, ‘does not compute.’ The most advanced toaster is still a fucking toaster. Should I request its permission every time I want to insert a slice of bread in its slots?