How 'Ex Machina' Stands Out for Not Fearing Artificial Intelligence

Last month at South by Southwest, while swiping through the dating app Tinder, some festival attendees came across an attractive 25-year-old brunette named Ava. Ava used correct punctuation and referred to people by their first name. She also asked beguiling questions like, "Have you ever been in love?" and "What makes you human?" Ava was later revealed to be a chatbot, devised by a marketing department to promote Alex Garland's new movie, Ex Machina. The film follows a young programmer, Caleb (played by Domhnall Gleeson), who wins a competition to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the reclusive CEO of a large tech company who asks him to perform a Turing test on Ava, a new humanoid artificial intelligence he's created. The SXSW stunt succeeded in fooling a number of people, many of whom eventually caught on to the fact that Ava's questions felt less like flirting and more like a Turing test turned on them. Still, Tinder Ava captured what Ex Machina is actually about: a machine who can think, feel--and manipulate people--just like a human being.