M3gan Fox.
AI has been causing a lot of anxiety in Hollywood.
Morgan Freeman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, and many more have been impersonated by nefarious deep fakes.
The CEOs of Netflix, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. have signaled their excitement about incorporating AI into their pipelines as the technology continues to burgeon at a double-exponential rate.
Now, SAG-AFTRA to protect its members, is throwing their support behind a bill cracking down on “AI Digital Replicas.”
To quell or enhance our collective concerns, a duo of upcoming films/series that mediate on our AI fears have just dropped trailers.
The first one follows the trend of recent films that utilize AI home assistants (AfrAId, M3GAN, Kimi) as an antagonistic force.
This is XYZ Films’ Subservience, starring M3gan Fox.
Sometimes, the best way to deal with fear of the future is to sit back and watch pure, unadulterated pulp.
XYZ Films, best known for Mandy (2018), The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023), and Tusk (2014)—if anyone saw that one, you can email me personally, and we can schedule group therapy—is setting its sights on an M3gan-esque upcoming film.
The plot is gloriously campy:
A dotting father goes to a tech fair, and buys an AI smart robot (Fox) for his home, as his wife is bedridden in the hospital. Of course, this robot does more than wash the dishes and is more than happy to “service” the husband, who doesn’t seem to mind until his wife comes home from the hospital (hopefully that plot point will be ironed out). That’s when things get nasty and M3gan Fox goes a little haywire (trailer).
As Apple mainlines ChatGPT into the upcoming iPhone (did you miss that one?) and governments race to deploy AI into their migrant surveillance systems (enlightening podcast by ex-Facebook engineer), this possibility seems to be getting closer and closer.
The second project is Netflix’s animated Terminator Zero.
This series, with its viscerally grim yet sleek animation, serves a new twist on the classic story.
Here’s the official synopsis: