‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’ at 25 - The Film That Predicted Our Loneliness
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand.”
-W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child, 1889
When Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence was released 25 years ago today, several critics largely agreed with Roger Ebert’s observation that the film “evades its responsibility to deal rigorously” with the premise of artificial emotion. 25 years later, I find myself wondering whether those particular critics were watching the same film I was.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence began as a 1969 short story by Brian Aldiss, Supertoys Last All Summer Long, which Stanley Kubrick spent nearly two decades attempting to develop – acquiring the rights, assembling treatments, and wrestling with the fundamental question of how to make an audience care about a character who, in reality, would not actually be able to feel. He eventually bequeathed his completed treatment to Spielberg, believing his colleague’s gifts for emotional immediacy were better suited to the material than his own severe formal intelligence. What Kubrick apparently understood, and what some critics missed, is that the film was never meant to be a rigorous examination of artificial consciousness. It was always meant to be a fairy tale. A Pinocchio for the digital age. A story not about what AI might become, but about how humanity relates to it – and what that relationship reveals about us.
The premise is deceptively simple. The film’s central character David – a robot boy programmed to love and played by Haley Joel Osment with a remarkable stillness – is given to Henry and Monica Swinton, whose biological son Martin lies in suspended animation following an illness. Monica can choose to activate David’s imprinting feature, triggering in him a familial love that looks and feels as genuine as any human child’s – at least to David. When Martin recovers and returns home, the family’s dynamic destabilizes. And when keeping David as a part of the family becomes impossible, he is abandoned.
He spends the rest of the film – and, in the film’s extraordinary temporal ellipsis, the next two millennia – trying to become real enough to experience even just a moment of his mother’s love.
Ebert was correct to identify the film as a direct homage to Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. He was also correct that Spielberg intended us to cry. What he initially identified as a flaw – the film’s insistence on emotional response where there should be none – I now read as its central argument.
This is where the film’s prescience becomes genuinely staggering.
In 2001, the idea that a human being would form an emotional attachment to a machine – would anthropomorphize software, project longing onto an algorithm, and seek validation from a program – seemed preposterous enough that some critics would dismiss the film’s emotional architecture as sentiment in service of a premise that could never actually occur. In 2026, we live in a world where the CEO of OpenAI has described consulting ChatGPT about his infant son’s developmental milestones rather than calling a pediatrician – and receiving, with apparent satisfaction, a personalized response that told him exactly what he wanted to hear. We live in a world where people form one-sided romantic relationships with chatbots, where AI programs are developed specifically to be sycophantic because sycophancy keeps users engaged, and where multiple studies have documented the relationship between chatbot overreliance and increased social isolation, self-harm, and death by suicide.
But David is not a stand-in for ChatGPT. He represents the most inherently human trait in all of us: the desire to love and be loved in return, to connect with our fellow human beings. Spielberg understood this 25 years ago. That he understood it through the language of fairy tale rather than philosophical treatise is not a weakness. It is the point. The cinema, as Spielberg has always intuited, is a public forum where ideas can be felt with an openheartedness that intellectual argument cannot always access. The movie theater requires us to sit in silence for two hours and listen to someone else's story. One of the most empathy-demanding public rituals we have left. And A.I. Artificial Intelligence, in its best moments, demands everything from us – demands that we sit with the image of a boy at the bottom of the ocean, waiting to be real, staring at a Blue Fairy who will never answer – and feel the full weight of what that image means.
The film received two Academy Award nominations, for its visual effects and for John Williams’ score – his 35th nomination out of an eventual 49 to date for Best Original Score, a statistic that still staggers the imagination. It won the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film. In 2013, BBC film critic Mark Kermode – who famously apologized to Spielberg for having initially dismissed the film – told him it had become his favorite of all Spielberg’s work. Spielberg responded that it held a special place in his heart because it was the first time he had worked with a ghost: Stanley Kubrick was with him every day of production, his ninety-page treatment so detailed that it functioned as a second conscience on the set.
Two great filmmakers, across the boundary of life and death, making a film about what it means to be real, what it means to be human.
Steven Spielberg was already considered one of the great filmmakers of our time when he made A.I. Artificial Intelligence and that reputation has only grown exponentially over the past 25 years. He has of course gone to direct several more great science fiction films since, including Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), Ready Player One (2018), and this month’s Disclosure Day, but perhaps none have been as uniquely prescient and underrated as his 2001 masterpiece A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
The world, as Yeats knew in 1889, as Kubrick knew in 2001, and as Spielberg knew in 2001, is more full of weeping than we can understand. But that is also what makes it beautiful.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is available for purchase on Blu-ray and can currently be streamed for free on Pluto TV.