A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) is surprisingly relevant in an LLM era

Back in May, I had the opportunity to watch A.I. Artificial Intelligence for the first time. Given that my only exposure to the movie was its appearance on VFX Artists React (YouTube) (a great show by the way!), I was not really sure what to expect. While its story and writing have many flaws, I was surprised by how relevant it still is and the amount of parallels I was able to draw with today’s latest craze, Large Language Models (LLMs). To begin with, the movie is set in a not-so-distant future in which global warming became so severe that it wiped out costal cities and caused famines, leading to a significant decline in population. To keep their economy alive, developed countries replaced most of their workforce with humanoid robots. We are not two minutes in that the story already hits too close to home: as I am writing this, we are experiencing the third heatwave of 2026. We are then introduced to a roboticist proclaiming to an assembly of his peers that robots can achieve…