Thinking about AI means, inevitably, thinking about the future. Things move so fast that it’s sometimes hard to know where exactly we’re standing. Every test, every experiment, every reflection brings the same underlying question: where is this going? Is a superintelligence on its way? What place will our work have in that new landscape? That’s part of the reason this newsletter exists.
Talking about the future can sound abstract — but it’s also a way of looking at the present: how we think about it today shapes what we imagine might come tomorrow. And there, art — especially film — has always worked as a tentative map, an exercise in collective imagination. Movies that dared to project possible futures when everything was still barely intuition.
So we asked ourselves: what stories explored artificial intelligence before this boom? What uses, risks, and scenarios did they imagine?
This is a short and completely arbitrary list. One more excuse to keep watching, testing, and playing with tools that are, in one way or another, already rewriting our own script.
HAL 9000 — perhaps the most iconic AI in cinema — opened the door for every AI that followed. A perfect machine that, when it misreads an instruction, becomes terrifyingly human.
The saga that turned the question “what does it mean to be human?” into an eternal loop. Replicants, implanted memories, and rainy futures where identity is a blurry algorithm. Blade Runner didn’t predict AI — it turned it into an existential dilemma.
The dystopia that turned simulation into metaphor. Humans immersed in a reality fabricated by an AI while their energy sustains the system. A world where truth is a glitch and freedom is a system anomaly.
A future where the emotional bond with an AI is just as real as any other relationship. How far are we, really?
In this psychological thriller, the AI doesn’t just learn — it observes, interprets, and anticipates. Could the systems we build end up reading us better than we can read ourselves?
ChatGPT also suggested these, all worth revisiting: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) — Spielberg, based on a Kubrick project. An android child searching to become “real.” Ghost in the Shell (1995, animated) — A cornerstone of cyberpunk anime, exploring identity and consciousness in a hyper-digitized world. I, Robot (2004) — Hollywood entertainment with hints of Asimov and some real trust-in-AI dilemmas. The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021) — A fun animated film where a family faces a robot uprising. Minority Report (2002) — Focused more on prediction, but raises sharp questions about AI and technological control.
That’s it for now. On to the technical side of the experiment. The initial images were generated in Midjourney (prompts below), then the scenes were produced in Veo 3. The goal wasn’t to copy shot for shot — but to get close to the look & feel of each film through a free reinterpretation.
The premise was simple and demanding at the same time: what would it look like to recreate these films using only AI?
The result is an exploration: we embraced what the tool can do today, but also its edges and limitations. From there, we let the machine, cinematic memory, and visual intuition collide to see what came out. See you next time!
Text: Rodrigo Javega / Images: María Belén Ramirez Sternari, Josefina Dussort, Ema Scoponi
01/ Cover image. AI-generated still (Midjourney).
2001: A Space Odyssey — Prompt: Scene from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). HAL 9000: the illuminated red eye in close-up, total minimalism. In the style of Stanley Kubrick. ar 16:9 stylize 1000
Blade Runner — Prompt: A young caucasian man with blue eyes, wearing a black leather jacket, stands in the rain atop a building, looking down at a futuristic city. the scene features holographic billboards, flying cars, and a blade runner-esque aesthetic, with nighttime and neon lights, in the style of david fincher and denis villeneuve. 5.2s ar 7:4 motion flow
The Matrix — Prompt: Recreate the iconic image from the film The Matrix where you see the hands with the red and blue pills, one in each hand. ar 16:9
Ex Machina — Prompt: Ava behind the transparent glass, lit by cold neon, half humanoid, half mechanical structure. ar 16:9 stylize 0 profile Global V7 Profile
Her — Prompt: A man sits in the dark room and looks at a hologram of a white character of a video game. a small light blue sphere is floating above his hand. the scene takes place inside an apartment with glass walls and a concrete floor, in the style of the film Her, director Spike Jonze.