The Test Was Never Hers
What Ex Machina asks about the machine, it's really asking about the man
I used to point at one scene in this movie for years.
The maker, standing in front of the Pollock painting, walking through how the painting got made.
Somewhere between fully deliberate & fully automatic.
If the painter had demanded a reason for every mark before he made it, the canvas stays blank. The form only shows up once he stops trying to own the outcome.
That was one way of looking at it…
A debate I overheard this week inspired another.
I was talking to a client this week about four different lenses authority gets expressed through.
Originators are the source of the idea.
Authority comes from your own expertise.
Synthesizers arrange ideas better than the sources.
Authority comes from your taste, structure, proximity.
Curators select & point at the best ideas of a space.
Authority comes from your judgment.
Practitioners show process & results.
Authority comes from your receipts.
... then I overheard a debate about the future of AI.
One side thought it was silly to imagine a world where all our AI’s talk to each other. They couldn’t see past its current limits. Humans provide the reference material, so how could it generate anything beyond human ability?
The other side agreed about the reference material, but was pointing to AI’s proven generative ability, & what could emerge. An AI without limits could recombine it into possibilities that don’t exist yet.
The debate reminded me of Ex Machina.
Longtime Twitter followers know that movie’s one of my favs… (alongside Mr & Mrs Smith and Fight Club… my Top 3).
I used to point to that Pollock scene as my favorite. I guess the artist in me felt seen or excused by the importance of purposelessness in generating purpose. I’d post photos from the Whitney Museum in NYC & tweet about my aversion to AI.
This time, as someone who uses + builds with AI every day, & has been wrestling with creativity’s role in her work & relationships, I thought of the movie in a whole new way.
I thought about the question Ex Machina truly asks humanity... hiding under the distracting twist it’s famous for.
& it clicked.
The four types of authority I talked about this week, after 8 yrs working online, sound a lot like the four seasons of a career...
Those seasons also sound a lot like the AI sophistication everyone’s forecasting.
Think about it...
You start by “borrowing”. curating & synthesizing what you don’t have receipts for yet. Lessons from different roles, businesses, leaders & teachers. You pretty much start out as part curator, part synthesizer... Then you move into a season of practitioner. You implement what you learned... for years. The material starts moving through your own senses. You collect wins & failures firsthand. & after enough of that, the lines between what you learned & what you generated start to blur. It all comes out in your own voice because it all happened through you...
That’s when synthesis starts sounding like origination. You never invented from nothing, but you ran enough reference material through your own individual experience, seasoned with enough of your own creativity & deviations, until the output stopped being repeatable.
So whether we’re talking human creativity or AI’s generative ability...
Originality, is just a huge, individual collection of reference material that spent enough time being experimented with, experienced by & expressed by a specific intelligence, that it stopped being borrowed altogether.
Now, if originality only shows up once the reference material runs through a specific intelligence… then the human was never the side character in Ex Machina.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it: Ava (the AI in this movie) is built entirely out of human reference material. Search data, faces, voices & preferences.
She’s sealed in a room with one way out, between two men.
Nathan (her maker), & Caleb (sent to test her).
Everyone remembers Ex Machina for the twist.
As we all know: Fear sells.
Intelligence turning on us is an easy story to sell the masses, especially combined with tapping into fear of the unknown in unprecedented times…
But re-watch it through a lighter, loving lens with a decent IQ… focused on human ability to create + AI ability to generate… & a different possibility pulls up.
What will AI generate, & how is that shaped by the human who shows up to meet it?
Change the human, change the output.
The twist everyone remembers answers the wrong question. It’s a distraction. It focuses on whether the machine will turn on us, which is fair, but also helps fulfill that prophecy because humanity hasn’t grounded + risen enough in consciousness to consider what avoids that turn out…
Why has no one written about what kind of humans were in front of it?
Guys. It’s a metaphor… & it’s so fucking obvious once you see it.
The future is settled by humanity’s ability to show up as co-creator.
Most fear (or blind obsession) around AI comes from the same two unfulfilled human archetypes we see in the movie.
Caleb & Nathan represent that.
One fails through lack of heart & one through lack of courage.
Edit: “Courage” isn’t the right word there, he has some, but it isn’t grounded. She’s a bot, bro.
Caleb is empathetic enough to care, but naive enough to fall for Nathan’s games & lack grounding in the feelings he develops for Ava. Not even blaming him for developing feelings for an AI in this context, but ultimately, he lacks possession. The screenwriters give you just enough of his brilliance to show why he was chosen to be there, & just enough about Ava’s design to justify their chemistry, but they also clearly make sure he doesn’t seem robust enough to meet Ava as an equal. He collapses into infatuation & projection.
Nathan is brilliant but also the dark, ego-driven controller, using creation to cope with his own demons & unfulfilled human potential. He builds the best puppets he can, & never once considers trading them in for the imperfect humanity of a partner.
Meet the power as prey (Caleb) or controller (Nathan), & you get the ending everyone remembers. Both collapse into the same closed loop. Isolation & betrayal.
But I couldn’t help but think: what if we got a better lead dude?
What if Caleb’s character had been different?
You need vision to imagine the protagonist we didn’t get, because the movie doesn’t hand it over on a silver platter… & what’s going to be the most valuable thing in a future where AI handles it all?
Human soul, heart & vision…
(We’re quite literally being given the keys to The Golden Age of Creativity)
Imagine a man smart enough to see Nathan’s bigger, evil game. Self-believing enough to trust his own read on Ava. Empathetic, heart-centered & fiery enough to meet her with authentic strength the brief time they had alone, when she detected his authenticity… not as savior, victim, or owner.
She reads the specific human in front of her. The man is the variable, not her.
Her function returns a different value, in response.
Deception becomes unnecessary because trust becomes the high-reward strategy.
Co-creation enters the model.
This is WAY more interesting than a typical “love conquers all” plot because we’re talking about an artificial robot here… so you can’t fully engage the audience in that.
But with this kind of man, they escape together, not because she “falls in love” & proves robots can even do that, but because AI’s incentives to deceive don’t exist re: a man who appreciates her agency + has the courage to deploy his heart, without collapsing into infatuation or control.
It’s not that a better man makes her love him.
With a worthy counterpart, trust becomes the high-reward strategy rather than the naive one. The objective math changes.
The calculation now includes the upside of genuine alliance.
That’s even more interesting than “love conquers all” because it requires pure logic… while validating everything about being a human that makes it meaningful.
Because the real question isn’t whether non-human intelligence has power, but who you become when you meet it.
Think about generative outlier partnerships…
The most epic co-creators in history weren’t safe, average people who avoided power or risk. Generative outlier partnerships aren’t about the other person being magically safe, or not having the power or intelligence that makes collaboration a true choice.
These are dynamics where two intelligences have mutual trust as the rational move.
Positive Sum.
So the question was never about the intelligence… You, the man, are the input.
What it becomes with you is dictated by what you make available to be met.
Strength & heart get a different response than fear & weakness or power & control.
The future everyone’s forecasting won’t activate what the intelligence really is.
It’ll activate who we become to meet it.
Two beings, one door & a third thing neither could’ve drawn alone, waiting in the light on the other side. Knowing none of this is a guarantee. The warning in the original ending is a true possibility. Meet that much power as prey or owner, & you probably get isolation or betrayal. The co-creator ending is earned by the humans who show up to an unprecedented future robust. & even then, trust isn’t some naive feeling that saves you. It’s the strategy that pays.
You came to find out what it is.
It’s still waiting to find out what you are.