Mother London produces the latest TED film - with a wild and wonderful projection of the future of A.I.
TED of TED Talks fame has launched a series of original films, commissioned to help bring TED’s theme of 2018, The Age of Amazement to life. Mother London, naturally, rose to the theme-exploring challenge, with an exceptionally created, laugh-out-loud short film, AI Therapy.
The colour-saturated, opulently decorative film explores a world where, after 100 years of progress, AI bots have finally become too human for their own good. A far cry from the silver-hued, highly technical projections normally associated with artificial intelligence and robots, this short, directed by Chris Vernon and Emerald Fennell, is a hyper-real, weird and wonderful vision into the potential problems the future of AI might hold.
“As soon as we were contacted by TED we had our top strategists and creatives coming up with insights and stories that dramatised the weird and wonderful times we are living in,” comments Ana Balarin, partner at Mother. “There were dozens of very exciting concepts, some that extrapolated the medium of film, but the idea of exploring the emotionally flawed side of artificial intelligence kept coming back to the table.”
The film, written by James Ross-Edwards, follows a highly comical and sassy Rebecca Front as a therapist specialising in helping AI’s with their ‘problems’, featuring a session with character Archie, a third generation AI who feels lost after many a trip to far-flung places to ‘find himself’. The result as you might imagine is a hilarious, laugh a minute film with a slick and smart concept tearing down the pretentious nature of the spoiled hipster 100-years-on from the first AI bots who – after the magnificent work of their predecessors – have little to offer to the planet.
“[The last set of] robots have refrozen the Arctic so what can they do except worry about their hair and interior design?” Comment directors, Chris Vernon and Emerald Fennell of the AI bots featured. “The most important thing is that people laugh [at the film]. It’s also reassuring to imagine an A.I. future that isn’t a scorched apocalyptic hellscape, where things are actually going pretty well.” Adding swiftly, “Unless you’re a rich, third-generation AI and your toe-ring business isn’t thriving.” Pure gold.