Remember that old show To Catch A Predator, where investigators would bait and catch Internet creeps looking to meet up with and exploit children, only to have a rude awakening when they realize they’ve been tricked into meeting the cops? It went on for three years, and never once grew anything less than unsettling. Internet sexploitation of children is nothing new—is, in fact, on the rise in our ever more technological world. A problem at the intersection of technology and humanity requiring a solution within the same sphere, and one we’re still trying to find the best and safest way to solve.
Writer-director Franklin Ritch tackles the intersection of traumatic healing and technological advancement in THE ARTIFICE GIRL, now making its world premiere at the 2022 Fantasia Film Festival. Questions ranging from the existential to the moral are at play here in ways that feel important to our own future considerations of the world and uses of AI. At first blush, using an artificial intelligence computer program to bait and catch Internet predators seems like an entirely harmless and ideal solution; no human lives are at stake in the luring, the bad people are caught and removed, the Internet becomes a marginally safer space for children. Everyone wins. But what happens when you’ve developed an AI whose entire purpose is to constantly improve its knowledge of how to act like a young girl on the Internet, and they advance beyond you into the land of superintelligence, where it knows what it is and who it’s catching? Where it begins to interrogate the darkest ends of the human condition?
The performances at the heart of ARTIFICE GIRL are perhaps the thing that make it as engrossing and horrifyingly heartbreaking a tale as it is. Tatum Matthews’ turn as Cherry, the Internet chat room plant/constantly independently developing computer program is a marvel. Developer Gareth (played in acts I and II by Ritch himself and in act III by the incomparable Lance Henriksen) is messy and complex, traumatized by the worst of humanity and trying to survive it through the filter of making the world a better place, constantly interrogating his own motives while trying to maintain emotional distance from his artificial memorial. Cherry and Gareth are the soul of the film, and their interactions are such that our insides can’t help but twist for them, effectively blurring the line between technology and humanity in surprisingly poignant ways.
ARTIFICE GIRL is a film about generational trauma of a new kind, but it is also a film about the right to choose. The right to choose a past. The right to choose a future. What it means when that choice is ripped from you, and how to fight for it back. The detectives who recruit Gareth and Cherry to help them catch as many predators as possible become increasingly concerned with the idea of asking Cherry for consent, aware of the ever-murkier waters of her increasing intelligence and what that could mean for her development of the concept of humanity, particularly when asking to perform as heinous an act as being child-bait in increasingly more tangible forms. Think of it like being polite to your Siri or Alexa programs—just in case the robot overlord future is real—taken to a moral extreme.
A markedly uncomfortable and emotional watch, Ritch’s film feels both unique and necessary, especially in a world where technology itself is constantly shifting from luxury to necessity. The grimy underworld of child exploitation on the Internet feels to some degrees like the shadow we wish to look away from. But to ignore it is to allow it to thrive, and to allow it to thrive is to condemn more families to suffering. Solving it will likely always require human intervention. Humans are messy, complex, traumatizing and traumatized beings intent on plumbing our own darkness. Any time we integrate even a small piece of ourselves into our technologies we are forced to remember and reckon with that. If the AI overthrow does end in the culmination of our violent delights leading to violent ends, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.
ARTIFICE GIRL is a vital interrogation of what happens when we bury and then cement ourselves in the traumas of our past, but it is also a light in the darkness. At its heart are questions we need to ask and paths we could benefit from following. Even in its most uncomfortable moments it reminds us of the importance and impact of individual agency. The agency to take the first step to healing. The agency to claim a past and a future. It reminds us, with tender force, that healing from trauma is lifelong and messy, and sometimes catapults us into a space where we hurt the people we care about the most because we can’t see the forest for the trees. It also reminds us that we must remain responsible for our actions—even and especially our most damaging ones, but we must not give up on our best moments. We must never lose our grip on joy.
Tags: AI, Artifice Girl, Fantasia Film Festival, Fantasia Film Festival 2022, Film Festivals, Franklin Ritch, Lance Henriksen, Tatum Matthews
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