oh my god no i was genuinely in the middle of writing a post about this EXACT SAME THING as soon as i saw the movie.
it just perfectly mirrors ai's tendency to gather data from existing people and places, only to misremember the small details that make it human: six fingers instead of five, blank stares instead of knotted eyebrows, perfectly shaped hairs with no flyaways, and blank expressions instead of looks of terror.
i think clark telling mary "the more it remembers, the less it does" is such a fitting way to describe how ai has the ability to instantly gather information and remake what it believes is a perfect replication of the world.
and with clark's sudden acclimation to his surroundings (which he was at first unsettled by) it just goes to show how dangerous constant exposure to generative ai can be to people who might turn to it as a substitute reality, while in turn drifting further and further away from it. they're stuck in a positive feedback loop.
one of the scariest similarities that stuck out to me was when mary was being questioned at the end, while a few floors down a misremembered version of her lay motionless, as if waiting for another clark to discover her.
i don't think enough people realise when they ask genai to draw them a picture of a little boy or girl that to do that the engine had to swallow thousands of pictures of real children, whose parents will never know that a morphed version of their child's face is stuck smiling on a greeting card on a stranger's fridge.
"we all have our loops. behaviours that keep us walking in circles. thinking each time it will take you somewhere new, but it never does. and still, it's a path that kept you safe. a path you made."
mary was talking about humans creating a mental space to escape to as a trauma response. except it's different. because it's not a path you made. it's a path that was made for you. it's no longer an innocent "happy place" to keep your mind safe, but an elaborate system made by a machine that has never and will never understand the human mind.
"and now, as an adult, you're still stuck right where you started. alone."
if i hadn't been put off by generative ai before, this movie would've done it. and i hope it did for other people too, assuming generative ai hasn't already killed their curiosity to uncover deeper meanings themselves. stopping them from analysing a movie exposing the loop it creates to be far more dangerous and destructive than anything humans could ever do.
