The AI Experience

Transcribed

The AI Experience

May 29, 2026 · 1h 5m 30s

Description

AI. You may have noticed it's everywhere now — in your phone, your fridge, the suspiciously enthusiastic email your boss "wrote" last Tuesday. And cinema, bless its little reactive heart,...

AI. You may have noticed it's everywhere now — in your phone, your fridge, the suspiciously enthusiastic email your boss "wrote" last Tuesday. And cinema, bless its little reactive heart, has been trying to warn us about this for fifty years. The problem is we keep not listening, partly because the warnings have so often arrived in the shape of a sexy lady robot, which is its own diagnosis of the problem.This week, Pete is joined by Chelsea Stardust and Tommy Metz III for a triptych spanning five decades of artificial intelligence horror: Demon Seed (1977), Cam (2018), and Companion (2025). Three films, one increasingly nervous question: what exactly are we asking of AI, and what does it keep becoming anyway?The conversation runs the lineage of synthetic women in cinema — a trope factory that stretches from Metropolis through The Stepford Wives, Blade Runner, Weird Science, Her, Ex Machina, M3GAN, and Subservience, with a foundational-film round that lands on WarGames and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Along the way: the paperclip maximizer as a way of understanding what Proteus actually is, the cultural weight of releasing a forced-pregnancy AI horror four years after Roe v. Wade, platform terms-of-use as the modern book of the vampire, and the genuinely surprising argument that the most hopeful film in the set is the one where a robot drives off into the sunset with all the money.There are detours, because of course there are: villain-era Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage doing the robot, Sophie Thatcher sliding her own intelligence to one hundred percent, and Tommy's new and frankly concerning bedtime ritual.The films: