Abstract
Over the past two decades, science communication scholars have devoted considerable attention to the potential impact of nanotechnology. What do we do with an emerging technology that could dramatically transform—or even destroy—the world? How do we communicate its risks and benefits to the public? Yet, while nanotechnology remains largely aspirational, far less attention has been given to another emerging technology—artificial intelligence—that raises similar questions and is rapidly becoming a dominant force in the world. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a speculative fiction trope; AI is now woven into the fabric of daily life, shaping everything from labor and leisure to surveillance and storytelling. That’s why I found it refreshing that in AI in the Movies (2024), Paula Murphy offers a smart, richly researched, and culturally literate account of AI’s cinematic evolution and its influential role in public science communication.
Murphy’s core argument—that fictional portrayals of AI constitute a cultural archive of hopes, anxieties, and ethical calculations—resonates with scholars of science communication who understand entertainment media as an epistemological site. These films, she asserts, are not just metaphors for technological change; they are narrative infrastructures through which audiences cognitively and emotionally work out what AI means, what it might become, and what it reveals about being human. In this way, Murphy’s book sits comfortably alongside science communication scholarship that regards fiction as a consequential space for the public negotiation of science and technology.
One of the most compelling strengths of AI in the Movies is Murphy’s methodical attention to historical contingency as the book tracks the thematic and affective reorientation of AI representations over time. From Cold War technophobia to posthuman companionship, she reveals how the figure of the artificial intelligence transforms in relation to broader technological developments, social ideologies, and media ecologies. Her chronologically structured chapters make this evolution vividly clear, mapping a shift from the Frankensteinian AI monsters of the 1950s to the emotionally nuanced AI entities of the 2010s like Her’s Samantha or Ex Machina’s Ava.
In contrast to more surface-level analyses that simply catalog the presence of robots in film, Murphy foregrounds questions of embodiment, gender, affect, and ethics. The book’s discussion of affective computing is especially timely, revealing how fictional AI characters often anticipate real technological developments. But Murphy moves beyond mere prediction, emphasizing how these imagined technologies are deeply entangled with normative structures of race, gender, and power. The book’s focus on gendered AI bodies—particularly the sexualization and commodification of female-coded machines—brings a critical feminist perspective to the study of science in fiction.
One of the book’s standout contributions is Murphy’s analysis of visual techniques, particularly the AI “point-of-view shot” popularized by HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The book argues that these moments of machinic seeing do not just signal the presence of technology; they invite audiences to inhabit a non-human perspective, raising questions about subjectivity, perception, and control. Such sequences are not just aesthetic flourishes; they dramatize the boundary between human and machine cognition.
Yet, AI in Movies is not without its limitations. While Murphy highlights the role of production cultures and the predominance of male filmmakers in shaping AI narratives, the study would benefit from deeper engagement with the industrial and technological infrastructures that influence these representations. For example, there is little attention to the behind-the-scenes labor of those who mediate scientific knowledge for entertainment or to the mechanisms through which scientific authority is constructed in film. This is not necessarily a flaw—Murphy’s emphasis is cultural rather than institutional—but it does mean that questions about how actual AI researchers influence or respond to cinematic portrayals remain largely unexplored. For scholars in science communication and science and technology studies (STS) that dimension would be particularly valuable.
Moreover, the book’s focus on English-language, feature-length cinema, while justified by scope, risks reproducing the very exclusions it critiques. Murphy acknowledges the lack of racial diversity in AI film, yet there is little sustained discussion of how these exclusions shape the reception and authority of AI science in popular culture. Scholars interested in global perspectives or transmedia science communication may find this framing somewhat narrow.
Still, AI in the Movies is a major contribution to science communication studies. It exemplifies what I have elsewhere described as a shift from transmission to co-creation models of popular science engagement, showing how audiences do not just consume science fiction—they participate in meaning-making processes that can, in turn, shape scientific and technological trajectories.
Overall, I believe that Murphy’s book should be required reading for anyone interested in the cultural life of science. It is analytically rigorous, historically grounded, and attentive to the affective, ethical, and ideological dimensions of how AI is imagined on screen. Like the best work in science communication studies, AI in the Movies reveals how fiction is not a detour from real science, but one of its most powerful and contested communicative modes.