Hollywood Is Losing Audiences to AI Fatigue

Acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky is the executive producer of a new web series that matches human voice actors with video images generated in part by Google DeepMind.Photograph: Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images

An insurrectionist robot unleashed by a mad inventor in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. HAL 9000 sabotaging a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet, the self-aware global defense network that seeks to exterminate humanity throughout the Terminator franchise.

Hollywood has never wanted for audacious depictions of artificial intelligence or the ways in which it could alter the fate of our species. But the rapid integration of AI into the studio system and our now unavoidable interactions with it have severely compromised the genre, not to mention film as a medium.

On the one hand, it’s perfectly understandable that screenwriters and studios would return to the subject of AI in recent years, particularly since ...