The other day, I read “The Aesthete,” a short story by Justin C. Key, in which our Black-coded android hero reckons with (among other things) his creation. “I wasn’t Black,” he thinks. “I wasn’t white, either. Some regarded my skin, my very DNA, as a type of ‘appropriation.’ Western culture hadn’t only conquered my skin: in its eyes, it had perfected it.” It’s easy to imagine why Key’s character feels resentment. It’s easy to imagine a perfected version of Bina48, the center of Peter Sillen’s documentary Love Machina, feeling the same—that is, if it could feel.
Love Machina’s title appears with Bina48, a robotic bust modeled to look like Bina Rothblatt, front and center of the screen. It is an uncanny attempt at a Black woman’s head and shoulders, sitting, disembodied, on a small marble platform. Behind it, at the edge of the frame, is a hunched and bearded white man, his laptop plugged into Bina48. As the robot whirs and fidgets, your eyes naturally divert from Bina48, avoiding the uncanny creation and drifting over to the man not quite behind the curtain. This isn’t Oz, and Bina48 isn’t magic.
The friction in this image is as close as the doc gets to confronting the techno-fantasy at its heart; unlike its festival-mate Eternal You, Love Machina is almost as credulous as its subjects. Bina48 was made by Hanson Robotics, the same folks that made Sophia, and financed by Bina’s wife, Martine Rothblatt. What’s inside Bina is somehow creepier than its Karl Havoc exterior: An AI based on Bina’s “mind file,” with the intention of allowing Bina to “live” forever.
It all clicks into place once you see Martine’s Tesla hat (and her in-garage Tesla charging station, and the Tesla tour around her neighborhood). Though far less hateful than Elon Musk, the Rothblatts are in the same category of increasingly visible mega-rich tech people, whose goofball ideas are granted credence by virtue of their wealth. Hey, if these people were wackos, how’d they make so much money?! Martine is a tech entrepreneur, founder of companies like United Therapeutics and Sirius Satellite Radio. She’s also an evangelical transhumanist, founder of the Terasem Movement, a techno-religious organization focused on the extension of human life.
A Terasem-branded sign in the Rothblatt home gets at the culty vibe which these women want to “wake everyone else up” to: “Life is purposeful. Death is optional. God is technological. Love is essential.” The Rothblatts are in love, they’re loaded, and they’re geeky enough about sci-fi that they’re willing to invest in the uploading of consciousnesses.
Of course, that’s not really what’s going on here. Bina48 is a chatbot, speaking through an animatronic. The mind files created by the Rothblatts’ group—datasets of anecdotes, personal facts, slang, turns of phrase and all the kinds of things Google uses to generate personalized ads—get combined with a “general chatbot AI” to make this virtual phantom.
Basically, you’re talking to a Bina-flavored ChatGPT. Like any chatbot, sometimes its responses can seem a little uncanny, and sometimes it can churn out pure word salad. Most often, though, Bina48 gives answers vague enough that it’s more like it’s ignoring you than anything else—like it’s narrating its own inner monologue as it travels down a tangent of code, rambling through cascading IF statements. Does it care? Does it think? Does it love? Well, no, it doesn’t do anything aside from partially answer questions. When it’s packed up into its handler’s rolling suitcase, it’s not thinking “We should do something about the environment.” It can certainly say that it cares, and Love Machina can certainly cut to reactions of stunned onlookers, but the open mouths of people who’ve never talked to Austin Powers on AIM aren’t enough to be convincing.
Love Machina doesn’t really mind those moments. It’s already convinced. Through his interview and editing choices, Sillen seems susceptible to his subject matter’s allure. When he’s not presenting evocative montages as topical transitions, he lets his camera sit back and stare at Bina48 in wonder. Sillen frames a few fun images of his own that actually start to mimic the sci-fi his subjects reference, especially in a steamy cryochamber, but he mainly films coverage, unquestioningly capturing Bina48’s impact on those that see it.
There’s a little more visible construction when Sillen focuses on Martine and Bina’s relationship, as he threads a bounty of archival footage from their public lives together with contemporary interviews. These are actually the least engaging segments of the doc, the times it feels most like a Wikipedia entry or a fluffy celebrity profile. Here’re interviews regarding Martine’s gender transition; here’re laudatory snippets from the talk show circuit. The women chat about their enterprises and far-flung futures. It’s biographical, not intimate—an aloof choice for a film based around a love so intense that a white woman had a fake Black woman built so she could hang out with it forever.
Now, about that uncomfortable dynamic. The Hanson Robotics engineers are candid: They’d really only made robots that look like white men robots before (duh), so Bina48 was a bit of a challenge. They had a hard time with the skin; its chauffeur/operator is roasted by young Black women in the audience because of its hair and makeup. Stephanie Dinkins, who’s been interviewing Bina48 about all sorts of things as part of an art series, is an actual Black woman, and brushes (lightly) on these issues. She’s hesitant about its responses about civil rights and about racism, and is at least a little icked out by its relationship with its inspiration and with real Black people, but her commentary mostly stays light and focused on the tech’s future. Her “Conversations with Bina48” project is still ongoing, after all.
And, after all, Love Machina is a resolutely optimistic documentary, one about love-driven tech erasing death. One about Bina48 speaking to politicians, investors and, naturally, the military. The Rothblatts rarely stray from positivity, and Love Machina’s not pushing back. When the movie touches on United Therapeutics’ pig-to-human heart transplant, it notes the amazing technological marvel that saved the life of its recipient. It doesn’t mention that the recipient died two months later.
But just as Love Machina downplays the imperfections of these advancements, and downplays the problematic dynamics of a mostly white, mostly male team of engineers being responsible for the creation and operation of a device attempting to replicate a Black woman, the doc also ends up downplaying Bina48 itself. By the film’s third act, its rundown of the Rothblatts and Bina48 has hit its limit, so Love Machina loosely tacks on an overview of some of the other sci-fi silliness that the couple spend their cash on. Interviews about the singularity, a trip to a cryonics facility, the examination of radio equipment currently beaming mind files out randomly into space—it’s a straight-faced Silicon Valley cocktail party nightmare.
Strangely, Love Machina presents an obvious (yet unused) narrative structure late in its runtime: As one of its generation’s oldest models, Bina48 must fly across the world to get a tech upgrade. This journey to reunite the ‘bot with its team of creators—now much more established in the tech world—carries along with it the importance of iterative technological improvement, and offers a chance for these engineers to reflect on how their device has aged. It’s barely mentioned. Love Machina, like so many start-up founders and techno-progressives, is more concerned with telling us that its imagined future is already here.
There is now a greater public misunderstanding around what AI actually is than ever before, and stories like this exacerbate the problem. Like the Rothblatts, Love Machina is invested in everyone believing that Bina48 represents a move towards a digital afterlife—towards digital personhood. For the Rothblatts, it means more publicity, more public interest, more users, more investors. For Love Machina, it means a love story enhanced by miraculous innovation, by tech workers making science fiction into reality for the sake of one sweet couple. But, to update the emperor not having clothes, this Bina has no body. Pay no attention to the regurgitated data behind your wife-bot’s half-coherent responses! Because we focus so deeply on the Weird Science at hand rather than the relationship that inspired it, it’s hard to take the documentary or its participants seriously when they ask us to suspend our disbelief in this haunted mannequin.
Bina48 is a chatbot with a face. We’ve all met boring people at parties who we could disparagingly describe the same way. Hopefully, though, our loved ones are more than voice-activated searches through a database of familiar responses, housed inside a disturbing puppet. (Especially one with a thorny-at-best relationship with race.) Love Machina may want to take a peek behind its own curtain every once in a while for a reality check.
Director: Peter Sillen
Release Date: January 19, 2024 (Sundance)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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