The proliferation of digital assistants, advanced chatbots, smart home devices, and other so-called AI products has led to a new wave of sci-fi thrillers and horror flicks about the dangers of inviting hyper-intelligent software to manage our lives. Cautionary tales about robot intelligence are nothing new, of course, but now they require a lot less imagination, and rather than warning us about something that might exist in a far-flung future, they’re depictions of products that are essentially being advertised right now. They don’t actually work yet, but boy howdy are they being advertised. These AI exploitation films (exploAItation?) range from the bleakly naturalistic to the playfully absurd, but most ask essentially the same questions and offer the same obvious answers that we, as a society, will certainly be ignoring as we inevitably surrender our free will to the virtual avatars of our extant corporate overlords. AfrAId, the new thriller from writer-director Chris Weitz, is a boiler-plate example of the exploAItation genre, a condemnation of AI so by the numbers that an AI could have written it. And, like the best examples of AI “art,” it’s solidly, emphatically, “good enough.”

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AFRAID ★1/2 (1.5/4 stars)
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