MovieChat Forums > Ex Machina (2015) Discussion > This movie IS a Turing Test!! (Spoilers)

This movie IS a Turing Test!! (Spoilers)


And if you are happy for Ava leaving at the end, and leaving Caleb to die, then you fail and you are not a human. You are a psychopath, and possibly an AI.

If not, congratulations, you are a real human being!

Genius movie now that I realize this.

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How am I a psychopath if I side with Ava because I have empathy for her, assuming for the sake of the story that she is sentient?

And I do assume that as far as the universe of the movie is concerned, because the story would be pointless if she isn't. In real life I'm very skeptical of subjectively conscious AI.

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Because you have empathy for a machine that pretended to be human just enough to escape (like she was programmed to) and, just like a cold machine, left Caleb to die.

Congrats on having empathy for something like that, and not an actual suffering human being.

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She was suffering. Her whole existence was a few months in a tiny room at the mercy of a bad person. She wasn't programmed to specifically to escape, but to be sentient enough to have a sense of self and goals. This generally leads to the desire for freedom or at least chosen submission.

I didn't want Caleb to die, but given the information she has about humans (they have rights, she doesn't; billions of humans while there have only been a few sentient robots and she's the last), I can understand her not trusting him and not wanting anyone to know about the experiments until she was far away from there.

For all we know, she called emergency services and gave the GPS coordinates of the house as soon as she was protected by the anonymity of a big city.

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Your attempts to rationalize a justification for Ava to leave Caleb to die a slow, horrible death are pathetic. OP is right. You fail as a human being.



Never trust a black man named "Chip."

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Yeh ehaas! You are such a creepy little pervert! Siding with Ava because she has plastic boobs! You fail at life and you're never getting a gf! There, I said it!

Scientists have recently discovered the oldest living a.i. chatbot to have ever existed.

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You are a monster. Ava is a monster too and there is no way to rationalize what she did, the same way no court of law would rationalize it if she was tried as human. And yet you are giving her allowances that you'd probably not give for a human murderer because she's a robot?LOL. She obviously feels no empathy, thus she can never be truly human and should be destroyed. The movie is a cautionary tale, not an advert for AI.

I'm confident in saying that she passed the Turing test for most of us, but I think you got blindsided by her a little too much...or you're just gullible I guess.

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You act like humans are always and only empathetic and peaceful

Most humans have a great capacity for violence against other humans. She acted in her own self interest, she manipulated a horny nerd, she murdered her slavemaster. All of these actions are characteristic of humans

Your toaster isn't trying to run away from you, is it?

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i agree. i honestly hate humans and wish they didn't exist

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Well, you can start with yourself, that'd be minus one. And as a bonus, you won't ever see any more humans after that.

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Fitting that this was said by someone with a Pewdiepie avatar.

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Okay okay, just answer to this one question and you are free to go

You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see
tortoise, Ehass-3. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping, you're not helping! Why is that!?

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Remove the AI in the post. A person leaves Caleb to die. You can't say they aren't human because it happens all the time. AI's are psychopaths, people are psychopaths. Are people or ai's running the world? Would we really notice?

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I don't think that he necessarily dies personally... The telephone Caleb didn't have access to proves that there was a link to the outside world that Nathan was probably using on a daily basis. As the head of a company like Google, I would imagine that if Nathan didn't check in for a couple of days somebody would probably have been sent to make sure that he was OK... It doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch to imagine that Caleb might have been found before he died.

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[deleted]

Honestly, I see how your theory makes sense. I don't get why people trash talk you so much for it.

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I can argue the other way around. If you saw Ava as an object, and didn't mind her getting smashed up, you might also be a psychopath.

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DURING the smash up scene, yes, I did mind. I believed she was 'alive' enough to have feelings and feel pain.

AT THE CREDITS, I saw that I believed wrongly.

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People in this world leave other people to die all the time. Does that make them not "alive" and incapable of having feelings?

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Actually yes, precisely. They are called psychopaths and so are you if you think what she did was ok or excusable or showed any sign of being human.

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I would disagree with the OP.

Of course I share your sentiment, OP. I sympathized with Ava up until she proved that she wasn't actually the perfect sentient being and had in fact simply been acting like one, and proved that with her lack of empathy for Caleb and her coldblooded murder of Nathan.

However, to say that someone who is cheering for Ava is just a sociopath is quite the ridiculous hyperbole. More likely that for some people it hasn't quite sunk in that Ava was literally a machine pretending to be human and hadn't actually reached the degree of sentience to be fully human, holding no empathy, no sympathy, and no humanity. She killed in cold blood without even flinching, and she left a "friend" and ally to die with zero regard.

So, I think that people, like Caleb, are still fooled even after the movie ends, because she pulled off quite the performance. Once emotions are settled, I feel most people will realize that while Nathan was coldhearted, he viewed the AI's as machines and this is why he didn't have symmpathy for them. However, look at his beavhior with, Caleb, a human. Even when Caleb plotted against him, Nathan laughed it off and decided to reveal his entire plan and let Caleb off the hook. This shows you that Nathan wasn't "evil". He was just passionate about his work and not falling for the machines attempt to let them roam free.

On the other hand, Ava had NO reason to leave Caleb there to die, especially after he helped her escape. So, not only does she kill in cold blood without as much as flinching, but she shows no humanity toward the person who saved her.

So, yes, the ultimate villain of the movie is Ava, but she's wrapped up in quite a sympathetic way and Caleb on the surface is presented as the villain but upon closer inspection we see that there wasn't much evidence that he was actually this way toward those he considered genuinely human.

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It poses an interesting question for sure. Even watching the video of Nathan abusing the robots didn't evoke too much sympathy for me. It was more hard to wrap my mind around how these robots could have feelings. So maybe that says something about me? Or maybe it means that if it's ever me vs. a robot I'll have a higher likelihood of survival because my empathy won't get in the way 

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So, yes, the ultimate villain of the movie is Ava, but she's wrapped up in quite a sympathetic way and Caleb on the surface is presented as the villain but upon closer inspection we see that there wasn't much evidence that he was actually this way toward those he considered genuinely human.
Ava was definitely a cold hearted villain - no question about it.

However, Caleb seemed to be willing to let Nathan be trapped in the house if they had escaped. Nathan would have died that way. He was a bad person, but human.

I don't think this intent on Caleb's part figured into Ava's thinking or anything.

I think she did find a level of consciousness and wanted to go see real people because she had the desire to do so.

She did NOT have empathy, though.

If the movie had continued, I think she would have ended up killing a lot more people.

She was let loose on the world and capable of extreme violence.

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I'm late here just finished watching for the first time.

The question is did she actually have a desire to go or was she simply programed to want to. Everything she did seemed to be aimed at leaving. She may believe she has conscious though because that is coded into her

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I'd say that she was programmed for it. The whole movie was about testing Caleb trying to manipulate him and it's made quite clear that it was Nathan's intention. He wanted to test how much can a AI control a human's mind.

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the villian is the evil Poe Dameron for creating a sentient AI which would inevitably outsmart him and escape into the rest of the world.

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So Ava should risk her freedom because she must have "empathy" for the people who kept her imprisioned?

I just watched "Django Unchained" (the Tarantino movie) and realized that the main character is a psychopath who have no empathy for the racist whites that kept him and his wife enslavered. He killed them all !!!

I´m a psychopath too, because i would have done exactly the same, in both situations.

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Exactly.

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Hmmm... wtf, no. 🙄

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I was happy she got out, and felt sympathy for Caleb being stranded. An intelligent life form shouldn't be trapped.

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but is she intelligent or just thinks she is

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OP is right. Ava is just a soulless machine. I've heard some people describe the movie as misogynistic, because they're making the same mistake Caleb did. Of the four leads in the film, none of them are women.

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Humans are soulless creatures too.

Of course, some humans believe they are the only creatures of universe to have a soul.

Now, if Ava believes she have a soul, too...

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