Please word his piece accommodates spoilers for Ex Machina.
Within the greater than a decade since its liberate in 2015, the movie Ex Machina – written and directed via Alex Garland – has proved to be an insightful forerunner to fresh considerations surrounding the social and cultural affect of man-made common intelligence (AGI) and what’s now repeatedly termed “superintelligence”.
During the central determine of Ava (a complicated humanoid performed via Swedish actor Alicia Vikander), the movie explored the ramifications of an AI reaching human-level intelligence and, thereafter, assuming superintelligence.
The arriving of superintelligence in AI techniques, it’s been argued, would represent a degree of awareness and “brain” energy that might abruptly problem the theory of creativity being a uniquely human task. Expecting and fearing such an result, Ava’s writer, the tech entrepreneur Nathan (Oscar Isaac), hires Caleb (Domhnall Gleason), a programmer, to accomplish a type of Turing take a look at on her (some way of assessing if AI can suppose).
DNA Motion pictures / Film4 Productions
In a succession of occasions that map her evolving sense of selfhood and self-awareness, Ava significantly expresses her creativity and possible awareness thru a chain of advanced drawings, together with a panorama symbol of her setting and a portrait of Caleb. Satisfied that she has certainly attained awareness, Caleb sees Ava’s creativity and ingenuity as a transparent signal that she has no longer best handed the Turing take a look at however has additionally accomplished a type of superintelligence.
It’s exactly this imaginative and prescient of the approaching arrival of superintelligence this is central to each the movie and wider debates about whether or not AI-powered fashions of innovation will supersede, if no longer in time substitute, human creativity.
The concept that AI will certainly succeed in ranges of inventive considering and innovation has just lately turn into central to unheard of ranges of funding from firms – together with OpenAI, Scale AI, Anthropic, Anduril and Meta (which owns Fb, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta AI) – who seem to have few reservations about the opportunity of superintelligence changing into a truth.
However what shape will creativity in AI take, and can a leap forward in the best way machines “think” actually allow them to be inventive?
No longer simply a device
In what’s now thought to be to be a watershed second for AI, a verifiable point of device creativity was once arguably confirmed in a now notorious sport of Move.
Centred on a participant’s skill to seize territory on a board, Move is extensively thought to be to be one of the vital advanced video games of technique ever invented. In March 2016, Lee Sedol, the 18-times global Move champion, was once however convincingly defeated in a five-game fit in opposition to DeepMind’s AlphaGo.
AlphaGo confounded Sedol in the second one sport of that fit when it achieved what has since turn into referred to as “move 37”. A counterintuitive gambit first of all regarded as a glitch within the programme, transfer 37 was once so profoundly outdoor of the standard patterns of play that for plenty of – programmers, commentators and avid gamers alike – it was once observed as unequivocal proof of inventive instinct in a device.
As Sedol magnanimously famous following the sport: “I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move, I changed my mind. Surely, AlphaGo is creative.”
For all of the warnings in regards to the long term affect of AI at the inventive industries and considerations about authorship, labour, commodification and cultural price, it is very important word the level to which human creativity is being more and more supported via trends in AI.
After we glance once more at Ava’s drawings in Ex Machina, they no longer best illustrate the ever-present presence of neural networks but in addition the strategies wherein AI-enhanced fashions of symbol manufacturing discover ways to are expecting patterns from enter information, or datasets.
In a key scene within the movie, we be informed that Ava’s neural networks had been programmed the use of knowledge – datasets – illegally harvested via Nathan from Blue Guide, the Google-style corporate that he based and owns. Significantly, Ava’s drawings replicate the datasets on which she has been educated.
After we use generative synthetic intelligence (GenAI), an AI that creates textual content, photographs, movies and different content material to concoct photographs, we’re likewise leveraging it to generate content material according to the datasets used to coach device fashions of symbol manufacturing.
Extensively hired in systems reminiscent of Dall-E, Midjourney and Solid Diffusion – all of which revel in a large client base – GenAI powers each Ava’s neural networks and is likewise shaping long term fashions of human creativity.
In a contemporary document from the Royal Institute of British Architects it was once seen that the share of architectural practices the use of AI of their designs in 2025 stood at 59%, in comparison to 41% in 2024. This build up in the usage of AI led the document’s authors to invite whether or not an AI may substitute the function of the architect within the not-so-distant long term.
Including to those debates, in June 2025 the Organisation for Financial Co-operation and Building revealed a longer analysis paper that additional detailed the level to which GenAI is being frequently used to fortify human creativity thru the usage of neural networks and independent techniques.
Self sufficient considering machines
It’s exactly this time period “autonomous”, on the other hand, that sparks controversy about AGI and superintelligence, nowhere extra so than after we believe the well-liked deployment of AI in self-driving automobiles, robots, unmanned drones and automatic guns techniques. Elon Musk, an early investor in DeepMind (the corporate at the back of AlphaGo), just lately introduced that the long-term luck of Tesla lies with humanoid robots, or independent Optimus bots.
In the meantime, in what’s main worry for governments and world organisations alike, independent guns techniques are already offering the method for the eventual automation of warfare. Those trends foreshadow the spectre of unmanned aerial techniques that may independently determine, goal and kill an “enemy” with out a lot by the use of human intervention.
It’s this imaginative and prescient of an independent superintelligence appearing impartial of human keep watch over or oversight that has lengthy haunted our often-fraught courting with complicated applied sciences.
On the shut of the movie, Ava has accomplished a degree of independent company that means the presence of AGI, if no longer a mindful point of decision-making or superintelligence. We watch in horror as she kills her writer Nathan and imprisons her sympathetic best friend, Caleb.
If an AI-powered superintelligence does turn into a truth, it will no longer best cause an intensive reconsider of the way we perceive human creativity however, extra crucially, spark an existential disaster within the very that means, if no longer long term, of humanity.
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