GHOST IN THE ALGORITHM Justin Krook’s Machine and Advancing AI
‘I think Black Mirror got it right,’ says director Justin Krook. ‘Technology is a reflection of ourselves.’1 The filmmaker is speaking at a Q&A after the world premiere of his documentary Machine at the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival, answering – alongside co-producer Michael Hilliard, co–executive producer Brian McGinn and artificial intelligence (AI) professor Toby Walsh – all the big questions duly raised by a movie peering into the near-future evolution of machine learning. Krook’s evocation of the acclaimed Netflix / Channel 4 anthology series is notable, given that his film recounts cases of life imitating art.
In Owen Harris’ classic 2013 Black Mirror episode ‘Be Right Back’, a young woman loses her husband in a car accident. To cope with her grief, she signs up for a service in which an algorithm mines all the emails and social-media posts of a late loved one and creates an AI persona that can communicate, via text, in their ‘voice’; the episode is a commentary not just on the grieving process, but on the broad acceptance, in the digital age, of ersatz approximations of human connection. Series creator Charlie Brooker, who wrote the episode, was inspired, while up late at night scrolling through Twitter, by the paranoid thought: ‘[W]hat if these people were dead and it was software emulating their thoughts?’2
In 2015, Eugenia Kuyda – whom we meet in Machine – lost her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, after he was struck by a car in San Within a year, the Luka app offered a Roman bot that users could interact with, mimicking Mazurenko’s tech-mediated use of language. In 2017, Kuyda then released Replika, an app through which users could customise personal bots and exchange messages with them.
