An artificial intelligence researcher analyzes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odysseyfor accurate AI depictions. The 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Daniel Richter is based on a short story by sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. The movie follows Dr. Dave Bowman (Dullea) and other astronauts as they embark on a mysterious mission. As time goes on, their ship’s computer system, HAL, begins to exhibit increasingly strange behavior.
Sasha Luccioni is an AI researcher at Hugging Face, a global startup that works on responsible AI. In a recent video for Insider, Luccioni rated Kubrick’s 1968 film for AI accuracy. Overall, she gave it a 2/10. One of the scenes Luccioni analyzed was the lip-reading scene. While there are applications of AI that do lip-reading, they are more often for assistance than surveillance, according to the AI researcher. Additionally, for the lip-reading to be successful, the person speaking must be fully facing the camera with an unobscured face. Luccioni explained:
Because they're speaking from the side, it would be really hard to use any of the techniques that we currently have for lip-reading because you don't really see them speaking at the camera.
Luccioni also inspected the scene at the end of the film where HAL’s discs get unplugged, an outdated AI practice. “It's not implausible as much as very old-fashioned,” said Luccioni. Luccioni also discussed HAL’s level of self awareness in the same scene. She said HAL could indeed be aware of its drives being unplugged, but beyond that, the scene gets more outlandish. Luccioni explained:
HAL can definitely be aware of its drives being unplugged, like the physical absence of a drive that was connected before that's being disconnected now. So that's definitely a form of awareness, it's a form of interpreting physical knowledge and acting upon that, but whether an AI will be able to associate a disc being unplugged to death or not existing anymore, that's really more like the metaphysical property that is a little bit less clear to me.
I would rate this [movie] like a two because
we're not there yet in terms of lip-reading and we're definitely not there yet in terms of self-awareness.
What Luccioni’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Analysis Means
The Movie Didn't Accurately Predict 2001's Technological Advancements
Luccioni’s AI expert analysis sheds new light on 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the film debuted in 1968, viewers didn’t know how accurate or inaccurate the film would be to the year 2001. Now that it is 23 years past 2001, it is clear how inaccurate the film really was. Even today, in 2024, AI doesn’t have the ability to do highly accurate profile lip-readings or understand that, when its discs are removed, it will cease to exist.
At the time of its release, the movie was a creative perspective on a future that maybe seemed possible. Now, it can be viewed as an amusing look at how imaginative the creatives of the 1960s could be. Though some elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey's AI are relevant today, the movie was still pretty off-base when it came to its predictions.
Our Take On Luccioni’s AI Analysis Of 2001: A Space Odyssey
There's No Telling What The Future Will Bring
The 1968 film is based on a short story by sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, which was written in 1948. The likelihood the AI aspects of the short story or film were going to be highly accurate to the year 2001 was incredibly low, though the beginning of the film is considered accurate by some experts. Luccioni’s 2/10 rating for AI accuracy feels appropriate and unsurprising. However, Luccioni made one comment about her rating that stood out to us: “We’re not there yet.” 2001: A Space Odysseyisn’t accurate for the year 2024, but perhaps it will be in the future.
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