The virus bullcrap

Watched this movie yesterday and started hating it more and more as it progressed.

Amongst the multitude of plot holes, the ‘use virus to destroy an AI’ was the one that annoyed me the most. So I went to IMdB and found several trying to explain the plot hole with the ‘Max wrote the networking code’.

Let’s start there: For that to make sense, the code had to remain unchanged. Highly unlikely, but even if that part of the code still was in the AI, that wouldn’t be enough to infect the whole AI system: A virus has to be written in a way that it can infect the whole AI, not just the networking code (and knowing the networking code is no guarantee that you could write a virus for that particular code, and with limited opportunities to test the code on the type of system you are trying to infect).

But OK, for arguments sake, let’s assume that the virus really could infect the whole AI, for the virus to spread, the highly evolved AI would have to be to stupid to have any security measures in place: No firewall, no antivirus, no attempt at testing or containing (sandboxing) code being imported to the AI etc. And this AI was originally a person that had the foresight to build a Farady cage around his home.

So now we have an highly intelligent AI that is that can be infected by an virus code because it consist of old code and is protected by no security measures. But how do you get virus into the AI system? You inject it into a person. What?

Think about it: How do you infect a human with a computer code? You have to infect the human: Just having the code (in whatever form) will not carry the infection to the AI any more than carrying the complete description of a virus DNA-sequence on you will infect anyone. You can have a file containing a computer virus transferred to your computer without anything happening: It’s not until that file is executed that your computer becomes infected.

For that jump from injected code to infection to be made, the highly intelligent AI would have to ‘import’ Evelyn, find the code in her (code that has no place in Evelyn, does nothing in her and has no ‘connection’ to other parts of her) and then execute it.


Sorry for the rant but I’m getting sick and tired of the let’s-take-down-any-computer-system-with-a-virus resolution that have become really tiresome omnipotent solution to all things computer-related in movies.