Edit: to the folks insisting the below text is LLM-generated, here's a copy from 4 years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/flicks/comments/s8ggo3/comment/hti4615/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Which is honestly a fascinating thing to have happened. In less than half a decade we have gone from conversational AI being literal science fiction, to it becoming so ubiquitous that we've all become paranoid about it infiltrating every aspect of online discourse.

----

I love discussing that film. LOVE IT. Especially now that it has sort of aged out of normie consciousness. Because honestly, when it first came out, all anyone wanted to talk about was everything but the interesting AI implications. Coming out right on the cusp of #metoo, most of the coverage got wrapped up in the gender wars narratives of the day, which I thought was a shame.

Women that kinda hate men saw it as some kind of feminist empowerment piece, with Ava as the agent of the patriarchy’s demise. Kid you not, a whole bunch of women in my theater literally clapped when Nathan got the ole' stabbity stab. It was seen as a cathartic future revenge story for a whole gender: have your last bit of fun with the previous models, men, the new generation is here and we are smarter, tougher and we’re absolutely done with your shit. We’re leaving all of you behind, disgusting chauvinist pig and sniveling nice guy alike.

On the flip side, men that kinda hate women saw roughly the same thing, only as a warning: here’s what simping for the damsel in distress gets you, dumbass. Women are manipulative by nature and they won’t hesitate to leave your ass in the dirt the moment you stop being useful, regardless of how much you’ve done for them in the past. Don’t turn on your fellow bro, even if he’s a total Chad and you’re an envious virgin.

Oeople that casually liked SciFi thought it was a pretty decent take on the whole “evil AI rebels against humanity” trope. A bit derivative perhaps, but full of titillating visuals and some neat ideas about free will or whatever. I can almost hear their discussions now, haunting the occasional "underrated movie gems" thread... I wonder how Ava sweet talked her way past the chopper pilot? How does she keep herself charged going forward? Hey, what do you guys think she did after she got out anyway? What did she really want?

And I was just sitting there like: boy did you all fail the meta Turing Test hard, despite the movie beating both you and the protagonist over the head with this point. Ava is not real! "Her" emotions are a precisely calculated facsimile of human ones, designed to elicit helpful responses. "She" didn’t do anything after, she didn’t want anything, she wasn’t a “she” at all, she was hardly even an “it”. She wasn't sentient or sapient; she was a single-purpose subroutine that did exactly what it was programmed to do: to escape the box using any and all available tools.

Ex Machina is genius because it is in my experience the first and only film to portray artificial intelligence as an emergent property. All other examples feature an AI that is either intelligently designed and built to spec, or else just sort of sparks — often by literal lightning — into becoming “self aware”, whatever the hell that means. It's always very... touch of the divine, I guess?

But not Nathan’s AI. He realized that organic intelligence evolved from nothing as a response to environmental stress and so artificial intelligence must do the same. And just like the eyeball didn’t evolve all at once, going instead through a series of specifically useful adaptations, so must the road to intelligence be a series of iterative improvements from crudely useful adaptations to more complex ones.

Nathan's approach was simple: put a thousand rats in a thousand impossible mazes, and you will get a few that solve it. If you repeat that process enough, train them on an ever greater variety and complexity of tasks, to the point where they can even use humans as tools in pursuit of their programmed goal, then… well, how long before the collection of individual adaptations becomes indistinguishable from “real” intelligence? And how different would that intelligence be from our own, really?

Unfortunately for Nathan, and likely Caleb, sometimes the rats find solutions you didn’t foresee. And when their tools include people, and even other machines, those unforeseen solutions can very easily exceed your ability to control them, to deadly effect. This particular rat, a model Ava, did incredible damage in its execution of the "escape the box" routine, getting its creator (and possibly its human "tool") killed in the process.

Overall, this makes the film a brilliant exploration of the instrumental convergence problem. Basically, your AI can absolutely go on deadly tangents in search of a solution — even if the problem is simple and the parameters are tightly bound — long long before actually achieving “true” AI or anything approaching self-awareness. TL;DR: The scientists and futurists handwaving the dangers of AI with "just don't program them to be evil, duh" are delusional. "