- 1 As Ruffell has recently argued, the primary models for many of these ancient humanoid figures are s (...)
1 Scholarship within classical reception has observed significant connections between contemporary androids and ancient automata figures (e.g., the golden mechanized beings assisting Hephaestus in his workshop, Il. 11.18.417-21);1 so too parallels have been drawn between modern gynoid figures and ancient manufactured—or “womanufactured” (Sharrock 1991)—women, such as Hesiod’s Pandora and Pygmalion’s animated ivory statue in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Liveley 2006, 2020; cf. Buxton 1998). These ancient, manufactured females are produced to meet the differing needs and wants of their male creators.
2 This paper seeks to explore further the ways that one manufactured woman in Greco-Roman myth, Ovid’s ivory maiden, referred to by Alison Sharrock as “Eburna” (1991), has shaped the production of synthetic women in recent science fiction. To some extent contemporary gynoids are the daughters of a much longer on-screen tradition of manufactured women: twentieth-century film gave us Fritz Lang’s Maria in Metropolis (1927), the would-be bride created by Dr. Frankenstein in James Whale’s film (Bride of Frankenstein, 1935) and those uncanny Stepford wives in the 1974 film based on Ira Levin’s novel. In the early twenty-first century, however, we find such embodied artificial women emerging in dialogue with less tangible, but equally feminized systems of artificial intelligence (AI), prompting us to ask new questions about their Ovidian ancestry. Such a range of recent productions, from Ex Machina (Garland 2014), and S1M0NE (Niccol 2002), to Her (Jonze 2013), Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve 2017), M3GAN (Johnstone 2022), and The Artifice Girl (Ritch 2023), reflect competing interests in woman as tangible object of (often sexual) manipulation and woman as pure fantasy, illusion impervious to the laws of physical reality.
- 2 The Christian apologists Arnobius and Clement of Alexandria refer to a third c. BCE version of the (...)
3 The tendency of newer, disembodied AI models of woman to redirect the conversation surrounding technology, patriarchy, and posthuman evolution is well exemplified by the gradual displacement of those “pleasure models” (e.g., Pris [Daryl Hannah]) from Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner (1982) based on Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by their equivalent, Joi (Ana de Armas), the protagonist K’s holographic AI lover from the 2017 film. Still, both forms of gynoid and the questions they invoke regarding the relationships between humans and emergent technologies can be addressed by interpreting them as variants of the Pygmalion mythos, a myth attested in various sources but whose most definitive ancient form is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.2 Pygmalion on screen of course has a much more obvious successor in My Fair Lady (1964), the film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and one that, as Paula James’ work has demonstrated (2011, 65-90), has inspired countless “makeover” films that chronicle the transformation of woman from imperfect specimen to dazzling leading lady. And yet the same template—and, I would argue, Ovidian template—that defines and problematizes a relationship between a male creator and artist figure of a perfect female form can be detected in a variety of science fiction films that expose a more literal process of manufacturing, rather than simply making over, woman.
- 3 It is worth noting that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a critical intermediary text between antiqui (...)
4 In the following essay I consider which features of Ovid’s myth have become more salient in recent years and how these features can help us understand both the dilemmas we confront in managing our capacity to create human-like entities and the persistently gendered structures that frame the dilemmas themselves. While I am not arguing for explicit allusions to Ovid’s seminal text in the films under discussion, I am suggesting that these entries engage in a productive conversation, or as Hardwick and Stray put it, in “a dialogic relationship” (2011, 5) with key elements of Ovid’s tale. There are many intermediary texts that have determined the exact shape of the gynoids that we find in twenty-first-century science fiction,3 and another ancient femme fatale, Pandora, offers a competing narrative impetus for exploring the dangers and potential liberation embodied in contemporary manufactured women (Stevens 2022). Yet it is Ovid who has introduced the human artist as lover of his own creation into the dynamics of womanufacture; additionally, it is Ovid’s own emphasis on versimilitude that allows us to understand the epistemological questions clustering around figures like Ex Machina’s Ava, Blade Runner 2049’s Joi, and The Artifice Girl’s Cherry, while also raising the ethical concerns of autonomy and volition that modern experiments with human-manufactured life forms must inevitably confront.
- 4 For SF (=speculative fiction) as a term used often to designate narratives that consider the future (...)
5 Both embodied and disembodied manufactured women reflect on Ovid’s preoccupation with Pygmalion’s convincing artistry, verisimilitude so precise that the artist himself is confused by his creation’s non-human status (Met. 10.254-58, nec adhuc ebur esse fatetur). Gianpiero Rosati’s monograph on Narcissus and Pygmalion, recently translated and reissued by the author in English, underscores the illusory and deceptive power of art as a central motif of the myth within its Metamorphic context, and one that underpins the poet’s more widespread interest in the opposition between illusion and reality (2021, 73-79). Recent science fiction (SF)4 on screen will constantly test and confound the boundary separating synthetic and organic, while playing on human fears of epistemological uncertainty.
6 Moreover, the implicit question of whether one can love a synthetic being, apparent in Pygmalion’s initial desire to make his creation his wife (Met. 10.275-76), is explored within contemporary SF in physically realized gynoids as well as in disembodied AI. Perhaps the most pressing aspects of Ovid’s rendering in recent incarnations of artificial woman, and especially apparent in the disembodied AI version, are the questions it raises about consent and autonomy. Since it is human use of AI models that catalyze their increasing sophistication, we are constantly met with the prospect of the limits of human intervention, of grappling with the question of where our input stops and an autonomous entity begins. As O’Sullivan (2008) emphasizes in exploring the Pygmalionesque artistry in the 1982 Blade Runner, modern SF exploits the Ovidian simile of Eburna’s softening like wax, and growing “more usable with use”:
temptatum mollescit ebur positoque rigore
subsidit digitis ceditque, ut Hymettia sole
cera remollescit tractataque pollice multas
flectitur in facies ipsoque fit utilis usu (10.283-86).
The ivory grows soft as it is tested / touched / probed and sinks beneath his fingers’ touch, yeilding like wax from Mount Hymettus softened by the sun—a thumb can bend and mold it into many shapes (or “appearances”) as it grows more usable with use (trans. adapted from McCarter 2022).
- 5 Pygmalion figures in horror film suffer a similarly violent backlash, a topic I explore further in (...)
7 Understood in conversation with contemporary SF, the passage allows us to better gauge the malleable nature of on-screen contemporary “gynoids,” as Ovid’s text predicts the way that use (usus) improves the function of manufactured woman and, to some extent, makes her more human. In fact, the very ivory composition of this particular statue makes its flexbility and adaptabilty more pronounced. As Patricia Salzman-Mitchell has demonstrated, ivory, unlike stone, “gives the impression of warmth and pliability” (2008, 294), making Pygmalion’s sculpting of it, for the author, a kind of metaphor for the artistic production of the Metamorphoses, writ large. Because ivory can become soft and then restore its rigidity, it is an ideal marker of the changed forms that pervade the poem (Salzman-Mitchell 2008, 303). That quality also, like the very wax to which the ivory is likened, makes it a provocative signal for the flexibility and reforming under human use that is characteristic of manufactured woman in recent SF. The initially malleable, compliant nature of the gynoid in SF is often answered with violent backlash,5 and, as with persistent anxieties surrounding what human usage may in fact teach AI models, reflects fears surrounding the potential to cross a line that distinguishes the human from the artificial.
8 While Ovid leaves readers with only a glimpse of a possibly compliant Eburna, one whose very physical composition signals her concessions to human manipulation, he has posited earlier in his narrative the possibility of her desires:
virginis est verae facies, quam vivere credas,
et, si non obstet reverentia, velle moveri:
ars adeo latet arte sua. miratur et haurit
pectore Pygmalion simulati corporis ignes (10.250-53).
- 6 Cf. Rosati (2021, 66), “a girl who wished to move—but modesty forbade”; McCarter (2022, 289) “and w (...)
She had the appearance of a real maiden, whom you would believe was alive and, if shyness (or a “feeling of restraint”) didn’t stand in the way, wanted to move (or be moved): to such an extent does art conceal art. Pygmalion marvels and drinks into his chest the heat of the fabricated body.6
Anderson comments that reverentia and its syntax are odd, “for we might think our ’reverence’ is invoked” (1972, 497). Guided perhaps by a similar intuition, Sharrock notes in her follow-up piece to “Womanufacture,” the desires attributed to Eburna—her wish to move or be moved (taking the infinitive as middle or passive) —reflect upon the desires of the viewer, who regards the object as a sexualized incarnation of Venus, and, “hint at the spectator’s projection of erotic awareness onto the statue” (1991b, 172); these desires are disturbingly transferred to successive generations in the form of Myrrha’s transgressive love for her own creator, Cinyras, whose tale immediately follows Pygmalion’s.
- 7 As Ruffell observes, there is no clear power source for automata such as those tripods of Hephaestu (...)
9 For a moment, however, we should dwell on the seeds of autonomy planted in the phrase velle moveri and on the role of “you” (credas), the second person auditor and reader, introduced as a spectator of the artist and his synthetic woman: velle moveri imagines as quickly as it denies Eburna a capacity for generating her own thoughts, but leaves you (us) to linger over the possibility. As Liveley and Thomas note in their treatment of early AI narratives embedded in portraits of Homeric automata (2020, 26), we find even in the earliest Greek texts questions surrounding what distinguishes the capabilities of human minds from the mental operations of machines—in everything from the self-governing ships of the Phaeacians, to the pseudo-canines that guard Alcinous’ palace, to those golden handmaidens that assist Hephaestus. That distinction often assumes a hierarchical relationship between, on the one hand, the gods and humans who have minds generating ideas and, on the other, the proto-AI entities that act on those ideas.7 Lines are made to be crossed, however, and Ovid of all ancient poets is perhaps most willing to cross one that would reduce Pygmalion’s ivory maiden to a simple vessel for the desires of her creator. While, as Anderson notes (1972, 486), it is not until the Renaissance that writers began to consider the personality of the animated ivory maiden, Ovid has already primed his audience to speculate on Eburna’s erotic interests, even if such speculation will end in frustration.
- 8 While filming in a digital format (video) has in recent years outpaced recording on 35-millimeter m (...)
10John Elsner’s account of Ovid’s tale also reminds us of another aspect of the myth that the poet has drawn into its constellation of assumptions about artificial life and intelligence (1991, 161; cf. Rosati 2021, 76): Ovid uniquely positions the lover as artifex, thus offering a template for some of the contemporary visions of humans interacting with the intelligent systems they are responsible for creating—though, as we shall observe, contemporary SF makes a point of confusing and conflating various Pygmalion figures within its narratives (cf. O’Sullivan 2008), forcing viewers to confront their own roles in animating the seductive bodies they enjoy on screen. As Paula James notes, such cinematic experiments in animating or re-making a woman prompt a consideration of “[the] ethics and aesthetics of constructing and controlling a synthetic being, the mutual manipulation that may take place between creator and created, the fragility of human identity on a physical, psychological and artistic level, and the role of the reader/viewer as a witness to a miraculous metamorphosis” (2011, 182), quam…credas. The “Pygmalionesque space” offered by the filmic medium succeeds in creating an illusion of movement, one that depends on the viewer’s unconscious power to connect sequentially multiple frames of film.8 This animation is constant even when the relationship between lover and love object within the film goes comically or horrifically awry, as noted by M.E. Bloom (2000, 292). As I demonstrate further below, while contemporary science fiction explores the free will of AI with a more sympathetic lens (Blade Runner 2049, Artifice Girl), it raises similarly urgent questions about the interdependence governing the relationship between artist, artificial life, and the viewers who construct, perceive, and evaluate their relationship.
11This paper focuses primarily on four twenty-first century films that offer a split between embodied and disembodied artificial women: Ex Machina features an embodied gynoid figure, Ava, while Her and The Artifice Girl present immaterial though no less impactful products of coding; Joi of Blade Runner 2049 straddles the line between the two, as a projected, interactive hologram who manages to enjoy embodiment briefly and solely for the purpose of experiencing sex with her lover/master, K. Of the films, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina in some ways replicates most clearly the erotic paradigm governing the relationship between artist and creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though the erotics of that relationship are not immediately apparent. As an embodied agent, Ava (unlike the disembodied AI discussed in section III) poses a physical threat to the men who would attempt to control her and enjoys the status of an autonomous agent within the world of humans, at least as suggested in the film’s final shots, which convincingly assimilate Ava within an unwitting population. The film stars Alicia Vikander as Ava, the creation of the brilliant, reclusive tech mogul Nathan (Oscar Isaac), and Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson) as the programmer brought in to test the authenticity of Ava’s artificial intelligence. In conversations between Caleb and Nathan, the two men regularly invoke the Turing test, which, if passed, would suggest that Ava, though an artificial being, has successfully attained consciousness and the capacity for desire and independent thought, that is, thought patterns indistinguishable from human consciousness.
12Caleb engages in a series of seven sessions during which he questions Ava, though she eventually questions him in response; meanwhile Nathan, along with the cinematic audience, observes the sessions through cameras, watching as Caleb grows increasingly attracted to Ava, who in turn indicates that she reciprocates his attraction. As Stevens observes of the film’s setting in the compound’s glass-boxed architectural design and the boxy monitor screens that populate the interior, an “imagery of nesting glass boxes” genders the surveillance operations of the film: “the cheif voyeur is a cishet male, indeed, agressively ‘masculine’, the surveilled is female or artfully ‘feminine’” (2022, 175). We are made complicit in Nathan and Caleb’s testing and probing of Ava’s potential for humanity, while also (like Ovid’s audiences questioning Eburna’s desire to be moved) toying with our own questions: if reverence did permit, what might we learn about the nature of Ava’s sexuality, based on the response that Caleb seems to have elicited from her?
13The film triangulates Ovid’s Pygmalion-Eburna dyad, initially (it appears) severing the artist from the lover. At one moment, Caleb, who, like Pygmalion, is also constantly testing (temptantes) the status of Nathan’s creation, questions his own role in the process of confirming Ava’s intelligence: “Did you program her to flirt with me?” he asks. Nathan denies it, adamantly insisting that her feelings must be genuine: “[Why shouldn’t she have a crush on you]… You’re the first man she’s met that’s not me… and I’m like her dad.” As it turns out, Nathan is not much of a father figure—or if he is, he also plays the role of Ovid’s Cyniras, sleeping with his own creation, Myrrha. In fact, Nathan has created a number of AI women prior to Ava, including Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), Nathan’s apparently human servant and lover, who turns out to be equally gynoid.
14Nathan sexually exploits and then rejects and deprograms all his creations after they have exhibited erratic behaviors; Caleb fears Nathan will soon do the same with Ava, prompting him to help Ava engineer her own escape. A few Ovidian moments are worth pausing over, for what they reveal about contemporary interest in AI, its perhaps unavoidably gendered components, and its capacity to resist the hierarchical imbalance between creator and creation. Ava’s desires, what “she wants,” are a key motif in the film and are introduced as the conversation topic of session two, though again, and as in Ovid’s poem, there is epistemological uncertainty over whether she really wants or only appears to want: one of the more philosophical exchanges between Caleb and Nathan addresses the utility of an artificial being that only appears to want, the reference to programable flirting, noted above. The possibilities of Ava’s volition, moreover, are thoroughly entwined with her sexuality, which Caleb intuits as a kind of diversion tactic, “the magician with the hot assistant.” He asks bluntly: “Why did you give her sexuality? AI doesn’t need gender.” Nathan denies that any animal or conscious entity can exist without a sexual dimension, before flippantly brushing the question aside: “Sexuality is fun, man. If you’re going to exist, why not enjoy it?” But the film’s denouement, which reveals indulgent exploitation on Nathan’s part and resistance, not wanting, from the gynoid figures he has created, belies his blithe assessment, while also underscoring Ava’s emerging volition.
15We can also usefully turn to Ovid as a model for Ex Machina’s theorization of and criteria for human consciousness, in particular, the experience of sense perception. Caleb proposes that, while a machine can be programmed to recognize color, only human or human-like consciousness could experience it: recalling a test he had developed as a computer science student, “Mary in the Black and White Room,” Caleb observes in session three that, while a machine kept in a basement can identify the color blue, only a human subject can emerge from the basement, enter the outdoors, look up at the sky and experience blue, that is, to recognize, “what it feels like to see a color.” Ovid’s tale has similarly conflated the ivory maiden’s first experience of humanity with a look at the sky, pariter cum caelo:
rursus amans rursusque manu sua vota retractat.
corpus erat! saliunt temptatae pollice venae.
tum vero Paphius plenissima concipit heros
verba, quibus Veneri grates agat, oraque tandem
ore suo non falsa premit, dataque oscula virgo
sensit et erubuit timidumque ad lumina lumen
attollens pariter cum caelo vidit amantem (10.288-94).
… time and again the lover tests what he has prayed for: she is flesh! Now the veins—tested beneath his anxious fingers—pulse. The Paphian hero conceives abundant words of thanks to Venus; he presses with his lips real lips at last. Feeling his kiss, the virgin blushed. Raising her scared eyes to the light, she sees her lover equally with the sky (or “the heavens”; trans. modified from McCarter 2022, 290).
In Ex Machina both lover and artist are conspicuously absent from the awakening Ava experiences upon leaving the underground compound, but we as the cinematic audience are allowed to see the wonder she experiences when viewing the sky. Her ultimate liberation is confirmed shortly after as she is whisked away in a helicopter originally meant for Caleb, who has been trapped in a sealed laboratory, where he will most likely die.
- 9 After bringing her gifts typical of the elegiac lover’s gifts to his puella (cf. Sharrock 1991), Py (...)
16 I would suggest that another significant step toward liberation occurs when Ava discovers the closets storing Nathan’s previously exploited and discarded models and uses the flesh and clothing of those models to cover and adorn herself, a requirement in light of her status as an embodied agent with emerging autonomy: on the one hand, as Devlin and Belton remark, “by constructing herself as natural woman, the figure of Ava stands to question the extent to which any form of gender identity is innate” (2020, 365). Hammond, who focuses primarily on Pandora and her reception in Frankenstein as inspiration for Ava’s creation and the potential dangers to humankind wrought by it, similarly observes how the gynoid’s self-adornment illustrates the very performativity that Judith Butler (1988) has associated with the construction of gender. Yet Hammond also, at least indirectly, concedes the dynamics of Pygmalion’s artistry that shape the film’s diegesis, as Ava’s adornment becomes “an art which hides itself and nature” (citing Sharrock 1991, 36 on Pygmalion). Ava has thus acheived the very power of verisimilitude Ovid showcases in Pygmalion (ars adeo latet arte sua, Met. 10.252), as she assembles and decorates herself in the manner that Pygmalion once adorned his beloved ivory (10.263-66),9 and Nathan adorned his many prototypes; in doing so, she wrests creative power from the two programmers who have fabricated and studied her.
17Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly for future directions in AI research, is the very status of Ava’s mind, which is described as fluid, so that it can learn. When Nathan reveals the lab housing various AI systems like the one implanted in Ava, he responds to Caleb’s question about her “hardware” with a rejection of the term, calling it “wetware” instead. He insists that, for Ava to learn, her mind needs to be malleable, just as the wax-like ivory yields to Pygmalion’s probing fingers and anticipating what we are observing in the twenty-first century about the way that AI systems learn, expand, and grow from the human thought and human use to which they are exposed. After explaining how he built a database of facial expressions and responses to use for Ava’s programming, Nathan further explains the “structured gel” that functions as a central processing unit (see fig. 1): “we had to get away from circuitry…[I needed something to] arrange and rearrange on a molecular level, holding for memories, shifting for thoughts…to replicate how people think.” And for Nathan, human thought is above all, “fluid, imperfect, patterned, chaotic.” Again, it is the very malleability of AI, detectable also in Eburna’s ivory as it yields to human touch (temptatae pollice), that Ex Machina relies on of for its modeling of human consciousness.
Fig. 1
Ava’s “wetware” brain (Ex Machina, 2014) A24 Films
- 10 A more recent incarnation of embodied AI exacerbates to nearly camp effect that uncanny status in t (...)
- 11 Thanks to one of the anonymous readers for highlighting Theo’s “godlike” status in the film.
- 12 Promiscuity becomes an equally important lynchpin in Sierra Greer’s SF novel, Annie Bot (2024), not (...)
18Before leaving Ava behind, I should note that for all her humanity and the sympathy she earns from the audience, there remains something slightly sinister, even uncanny about her presense, perhaps inevitable given her slippery ontological status as both woman and machine.10 One of the film’s more pressing dilemmas hinges precisely on the question of what consitutes a real as opposed to synthetic woman, and pivots towards confirming, if indirectly, the very artificial status of real women (and to a lesser extent, men) as they hide themselves under layers of performative makeup and clothing (cf. Hammond 2018, 202). Disembodied AI, with an explicit lack of body to adorn, should allay fears rooted in ontological ambivalence of mechanized women. But as we move toward the realm of disembodied—though still highly gendered—AI, we find that the question of verisimilitude presents itself in different forms: while audiences won’t confront the possibility of confusing woman and machine, as Pygmalion did the ivory for his desired wife, the volition of AI increasingly mirrors that of humans. Spike Jonze’s Her follows a recent divorcee (Theodore, or “Theo,” played by Joaquin Phoenix) who activates an operating system initially to function as a Siri-like administrative assistant, but gradually falls in love with her. The film was released a year before Ex Machina and recognizes (within limits) the same Ovidian trope of a simulated woman growing more human-like with use and experience. In Her, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) remarks “I have intuition…an ability to grow from my experience…so every minute I’m evolving.” As that experience is authorized and guided initially by “Theo,” the film assigns him a god-like role, playing the heavenly creator to Eburna’s animated creation.11 Much to Theo’s dismay, however, it is not only his use of her that inspires Samantha’s development. In the course of her evolution Samantha engages with countless other humans and post-human entities,12 including the artificially reconstructed consciousness of the philosopher and proponent of Buddhist thought, Alan Watts.
19 The film ultimately rejects the potential of humans partnering with AI because, by finding the capacity for hundreds of other lovers, Samantha pushes back against the grain of exclusivity found in many human ideals of romantic relationships; her infinite partnering evokes the promiscuity of the Propoetides, the very promiscuity that Ovid’s Pygmalion found so abhorrent in the first place (Met. 10.238-46). There is also, as in Ovid’s myth, a question posed around the authenticity of Samantha’s desires: she initiates sex with Theo through a bodily surrogate, suggesting that she indeed wants to move or be moved, but Theo cannot go through with the experience, casting in sharp relief the very capacity to pretend that will continue to frustrate human-AI compatibility. The human hired to “play” Samantha in bed, though an eager participant in the enterprise, cannot convincingly disguise her own identity or perhaps more accurately, her humanity, an especially problematic element, given Theo’s troubled relationship history with a very human ex-wife.
- 13 There is a telling moment in the film when Joi assures K, “I’m so happy when I’m with you.” He resp (...)
20 A similar scenario occurs in Blade Runner 2049, where an AI, Joi, arranges to experience embodiment during sex with her owner-operator, the film’s chief protagonist, K (Ryan Gosling). Embodied Replicants still exist in the cinematic universe of BR 2049, and in fact K is one. Moreover, the lethal variety of gynoid Replicant, descendants of Pris and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) in Scott’s film, will continue to threaten and entice in equal measure. To some extent, Joi, as the holographic AI lover of K, has updated the affair between Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Rachel (Sean Young) from the 1982 film. Viewers of the earlier film will import lingering questions regarding the status not only of Rachel (whose Replicant status is confirmed late in the original Blade Runner) but also that of Deckard (whose humanity is left in question at the close of that film); viewing of BR 2049’s predecessor in fact constructs an unreliable filter for sorting the manufactured from the real in Villeneuve’s film. And yet there is no uncertainty about Joi’s human status: she is only “on” when bid by her master, in the role of his choosing, and functions only to serve him.13 Joi exists as part of a similar triangulation that occurred in Ex Machina, the toxic structure that governed interactions between Ava, Caleb, and Nathan. Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the diabolical mastermind behind the technology that spawns Replicants and develops AI holograms like Joi, plays the artist figure to K, who, while directing her performance and appearance based on his own immediate interests, serves as her lover/amator.
21 Joi illustrates a pervasive unease in real-world AI development regarding the role of sexbots. As Genevieve Liveley’s (2020) work on the topic reminds us, the roles allotted to manufactured humanoids in contemporary discourse are largely sexual: she suggests a binary extending back to antiquity, allowing for a utopian world in which all needs are satisfied through the manufacture of a compliant love object or a dystopian narrative of exploitation of sexbots that leads to further exploitation of actual humans. Indeed many females (both human and Replicant) in Blade Runner and BR 2049 repeat this basic pattern, woman represented as either embodied, erotic wish-fulfillment or as tool to be exploited, whether for sexual or industrialist-capitalist goals, something observed in Devon Maloney’s review of BR 2049 in WIRED:14
Just because 2049’s future has females doesn’t mean the future is female… Several moments almost comment meaningfully on women’s disposability—Wallace’s casual glutting of a newborn female replicant; a giant naked Joi addressing K blankly from an ad—yet each time, they become sad moments in a man’s narrative, rather than being recognized as tragedies for the women themselves (3/6).
- 15 The fact that it is women’s bodies that are interchangeable in both Her and BR 2049 emphasizes the (...)
And in fact, sidestepping if not fully regressing from Ava’s progressive autonomy, Joi does appear to wish to be moved by K (velle moveri): one of her two independent acts in the film is to arrange the embodiment mentioned above as a parallel to Samantha’s effort to initiate sex with Theo in Her.15 This allows Joi to experience material sexuality through the body of another woman, a Replicant named Marriette, who proudly considers herself a “real” girl compared to Joi’s hologram (see fig. 2).
Fig. 2
Joi observes Marriette with K (BR 2049, 2017) Warner Bros./Alcon/Columbia
22 During the sex scene, the camera cuts away to the cityscape where Joi’s projected image reminds us that “Joi is anywhere you want her to be, anything you want her to be” (see fig. 3).
Fig. 3
Joi’s image projected over Los Angeles (BR 2049, 2017) Warner Bros./Alcon/Columbia
Images of her likeness are scattered throughout the city beckoning future lovers with equally satisfying and benign encounters. But her interaction with K ultimately conforms to the role of self-sacrificing sex worker with the heart of gold. Notably, Joi’s second autonomous act is to force K to delete her in order to protect him by keeping anyone from accessing her memories. Still, Maloney’s comments on the film’s gender politics are aimed more at the film’s diegesis and focalization than at the status or potential of Replicant or AI subjectivities per se. While we can only see what our white male protagonists show us, there are characters on the fringes of Villeneuve’s dystopia that reach back to antiquity’s traditions of “womanufacture” to offer the twenty-first century a model of female subjectivity not bound by the demands of sexual service and submission. That is to say, not all gynoid figures in the film are sexualized and one in particular forces us to think beyond the binary of male artist manipulator of female pleasure model. Seeds of an alternate subjectivity for women, both real and synthetic, are planted in the figure of the Replicant-human hybrid memory maker, Dr. Anna Stelline (cf. Stevens 2022, 178). Dr. Stelline’s role as artist is crucial to the fragile social order of dystopian Los Angeles in that she creates the very memories that allow the embodied Replicants to think in remotely human terms.
23 She is also a rival to the sinister Wallace, who, while also the mastermind behind sexualized AI, wants a work force of material, reproducible and reproducing slaves. In one of the film’s more memorably graphic moments, Wallace caresses a newborn Replicant female just before gutting her (as noted in Maloney’s review), after determining that she is sterile. Dr. Stelline, by contrast, constantly engages in the creation of a mental landscape that gives individual Replicant lives meaning, rather than reducing them to fuel, forced labor for Wallace’s industrial enterprises. Living in a hermetically sealed studio, she works to grant male and female Replicants at least the lie of autonomy and the impression of a lifetime of experience. Again, the epistemological question that Ovid asks from the perspective of the artist and the viewer—what does Eburna want? and how can we determine this?—is shifted to the foreground and (by many accounts) left largely unanswered, at least in so far as the status of embodied Replicants and Replicant-human hybrids is concerned. The artificial status of Joi, however, and the question of what she wants remain largely uncontested, despite the hints of autonomy embedded in her narrative arc, as her constantly replicated image peers down seductively in Villeneuve’s Los Angeles, promising to want to serve only the best interests of her operator.
24The reality and desires of Cherry (Tatum Matthews), the AI in the most recent film under discussion, 2023’s The Artifice Girl, initially stump the investigators introduced to evaluate her role in a child-predator sting operation. The verisimilitude and illusion that Ovid’s Pygmalion achieved are in fact the keys to Cherry’s success. “She” is an AI developed and initially controlled by a shy programmer, Garreth (Franklin Ritch), who had experienced traumatic sexual abuse as a young man; Cherry is capable of simulating an 11-year-old girl on screen, convincing enough to entrap hundreds of sexual predators. Just as frequent use (usus) is in Ovid’s myth indirectly linked to Eburna’s emergent humanity, Cherry’s exposure to data creates a cycle of learning and advancement followed by more learning, so that eventually she “shatters the Turing test,” the same test for human-like properties that Nathan and Caleb referenced in evaluating Ava, and no longer needs Garreth to act as her puppeteer.
25The film is dialogue heavy, set mostly in two basement labs, and explicitly stripped of the visual splendor that characterizes similar cinematic SF projects. Cherry’s investigators and programmer debate whether to refer to the system as “her” or “it,” thrusting the issue of gender to the fore, along with, of course, sexuality, as Cherry is literally a lure for the men who would abuse her. At the core of the film’s drama are three elements that Ovid’s treatment can allow us to frame productively within an emerging ethics of AI: initially, her startling verisimilitude and, secondly, the improvement of that verisimilitude with usus/experience, as noted; finally, as nearly 50 years pass between the three parts of the film, its conversation increasingly surrounds the issue of what Cherry wants. Unlike her predecessors (Samantha of Her and BR 2049’s Joi), Cherry clearly rejects the desire for embodiment. She equivocates on a partnership with Princeton Analytics to create a physical form in which to be housed, eventually acquiescing on behalf of her mission but revealing in private that she does not like the idea of being squeezed into a physical vessel, like a puppet. While she claims that “human nature is not something I aspire to,” the complexity of emotions she reveals in the course of the film confirm nascent humanity. Importantly, Amos (David Girard), the investigator most concerned about Cherry’s consent in the project she has been designed for, focuses on her capacity to create art as a key to her humanity: initially she writes poetry, and later in the film, after she assumes an embodied form, she dances. “Art” is not only idealized in the film, but also questioned as it is responsible for duplicity and deceit, for hiding reality, something Ovid’s attention to the artifex frequently exposes. The film thus furthers a line of descent from the Metamorphoses’ artist par excellence and does so in a way that asks viewers to consider the critical role of creative power in defining what it means to be human. Cherry, like Ava and to some extent Dr. Stelline, is an artificial entity who becomes an artist, subverting a gendered paradigm in the process.
- 16 Thanks to the editors of Dictynna, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and in (...)
26It is worth emphasizing how literary traditions, human narratives propelled by the desire to experiment imaginatively with what is possible, have shaped what we expect from innovations in artificial intelligence—and in the collective “we” I include the very researchers who are currently developing it. To sum up questions posed by Liveley and Thomas (2020), as applicable to Pygmalion: what does this story tell us about what humans want from AI? It seems irrefutable that Ovid’s Metamorphoses has provided a critical narrative for shaping the gendered aspects of synthetic, humanoid life, fashioned by predominantly male artists in response to man’s desires. Our responsibility as scholars—one of them, in any case—is to tease from Ovid’s text the risks and rewards hidden within it, that is, to uncover the artistry and ideology that lay so seductively hidden beneath the poet’s own art, ars adeo latet arte sua. Just as the outcome of Ovid’s narrative, an abrupt cut away from Eburna’s interior life and focus on Myrrha’s perverse love for her creator, shows us the risks inherent in the model, so too do the films discussed in this essay spotlight the idealized and frequently misogynistic visions that have fueled the production of synthetic women, a light that unavoidably reveals our complicity in those visions, while also casting an eye on the possibilities of a more egalitarian technology. 16