There’s been a lot of fiction built around the eventual arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), what some folks still call the singularity(*). That mythical moment when the lights flip on, the machine looks back at us, and suddenly we’re not the only conscious thing in the room. Hollywood has had a field day with it: The Terminator, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell, Westworld, and now The Creator.
And this last one hits different. It dropped right as chatbots landed in our daily lives. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Suddenly these tools weren’t some far-off sci-fi fever dream. They were… well, they were right here, answering our emails(**) and helping us plan vacations and occasionally confabulating(***) nonsense like an overconfident toddler.
That overlap of fiction colliding with reality has always fascinated me. It’s the moment where the stories we’ve told ourselves for decades start brushing up against the world we’re building, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident.
When I first watched The Creator trailer, I remember thinking: “Okay, so this isn’t about killer robots. This is about us. Our fears. Our projections. The stuff we quietly hope the machines will be better at than we are, even though we’ll never admit it out loud.” And then you see behind-the-scenes footage—Gareth Edwards walking through these massive real-world sets, the crew lugging gear through jungle heat—and you realize the film isn’t worried about AGI at all. It’s worried about humanity. How we behave when we think we’re under threat. How quickly we draw lines between “us” and “them,” even when “them” is a consciousness we literally invented.
I don’t buy into the doom-and-gloom “AI will wipe us out by Tuesday” narrative. But I do think we’re in one of those weird hinge moments in history, the kind you only recognize looking back, where the tools we create quietly remake the rules of the world. Not instantly. Not dramatically. More like how you don’t notice your kids getting taller until suddenly they’re borrowing your shoes.
We project so much onto AI; fear, hope, annoyance, curiosity. And every time a new model drops, we replay the same questions:
What does it mean to be human?
What’s consciousness, actually?
If something thinks differently than us, does that make it less real?
These aren’t new questions. But we’re asking them again because, for the first time in our lives, the thing we’re asking them about might eventually answer back.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the trailer for The Creator, which still gives me a little chill every time. So grab a drink, turn the lights down, and dive in. It’s worth it.
And if you’ve seen it already, let me know what it sparked for you? Were you in the “damn this is gorgeous” camp, the “wow this hits a little close to home” camp, or somewhere in-between?
(And yes, I know… for a guy whose early internet adventures involved mining veldspar in complete solitude and building EVE blog packs in the dead of night, I sure do spend a lot of time thinking about AI these days. But hey we all EVE-volve, right?)
(*) Ray Kurzweil's "singularity" is a future point in time, predicted for 2045, where technological growth, especially in artificial intelligence, becomes so rapid and profound that it fundamentally transforms human civilization.
(**) As an example, Fyxer is an AI executive assistant that integrates with Gmail and Outlook to streamline email management and meetings.
(***) In artificial intelligence (AI), confabulation refers to when a model generates plausible-sounding but factually incorrect or entirely fabricated information, especially to fill gaps in its knowledge or memory.
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