A.I.
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A.I. |
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The mystery behind Steven Spielberg's next blockbuster and hundreds of related Web sites: how Hollywood sees the future of Artificial Intelligence.
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Elsewhere on the Web
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• Robot Sites a Web of Deception
• A.I.: the story of a film
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My regular Web searches for AI-related information recently became much more successful, returning several totally fresh URLs each day. You may imagine my surprise when I realize that each of these sites describes the events happening around the year 2142. Robotic emancipation and sentient AI rights, ecosurvival consulting firms, companies producing human-like robotic companions, intelligent homes, global universities that you never heard of, government agencies investigating crimes committed by robots... Such detailed and cryptic Web community depicts the world in which computer intelligence is everywhere. After spending several hours on browsing through hundreds of related sites, I realized that I'm witnessing probably the most complex viral marketing campaign ever created. Forget The Blair Witch Project: this thing is probably bigger by an order of magnitude.
Steven Spielberg's next blockbuster, A.I., opens in theaters on June 29. The project was initiated by one of the greatest directors of the 20th century, Stanley Kubrick. Until now, the movie was surrounded by mystery, and it was only known that it is based on a short story by Brain Aldiss, "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long". According to the fragments of information available at Agentland.com, the story describes David, eleven years old humanoid robot or android, adopted by a family that recently lost their "real" child. This is the beginning of Davids journey of initiation to find what will make him human. Usual stuff for an ordinary filmmaker, but Kubrick and Spielberg are everything but ordinary. Kubrick's view that the movie experience doesn't always begin and end on the silver screen strongly influenced huge marketing campaigns. Spielberg's team continues to work in the same style after the old master died, creating several hundreds of sources that can easily fool people with their authenticity.
It is amazing to see how much effort was put into design and development of Web sites behind this campaign. "Evan Chan - The Story" will give you a brief overview with a list of related addresses. Sites are hosted on different computers around the world, domain names are carefully picked (although quite a few of them end in .ro - Romania - or maybe a .robot?), and there is plenty of advanced designer's stuff (Flash etc.) on almost every site. Interesting messages will cover parts that are not fully developed (or simply cannot be developed): Your interface does not conform to Earth-Net 39 standard. BWU Avatars cant fit through your portal... I'm sorry, but your browser cannot handle the holographic stream of this Web site... It is also great to see a good old Alicebot chatting with visitors at the official site - seems that it's knowledge base isn't fully developed yet, but it serves as a proof of today's state-of-the-art in natural language understanding technology. Hey, we still have more than 140 years to improve it...