Ai film en · MD A Prediction That Moved From Fiction to Reality

The character, played by Haley Joel Osment, is a robot with emotions programmed to love. The film is based on Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," and the idea was first developed by Stanley Kubrick as far back as the 1970s.

Kubrick worked on the project for more than twenty years, but at the time computer graphics lacked the visual effects needed to bring a convincing robot child to the screen. After Kubrick died in 1999, his close friend Steven Spielberg took up the project.

Made on a budget of 100 million dollars, the film earned more than 236 million dollars. Spielberg himself was both its screenwriter and director. In the 2000s the film was seen as science fiction. Today, many of the events it depicts have become part of the daily news.

A brief summary of the plot

The story is set in the 22nd century, when global warming has melted the glaciers, coastal cities lie underwater, and the government keeps birth rates under strict control. In these conditions, a new kind of robot capable of feeling, called "mechas," is introduced to the public. David, created by the company Cybertronics, is one of the first androids programmed to love his owners. He is placed with the Swinton family as a trial, to take the place of their seriously ill son.

In time, the family's real son, Martin, recovers, and a rivalry begins between the two boys, the robot and the real child. One day Martin's friends threaten David with a knife and accidentally trigger his self-protection program. His parents, afraid that David could be dangerous, decide to give him up.

But Monica, David's "mother," leaves him in the forest instead of having him destroyed. Inspired by the story of Pinocchio that was read to him, David sets out to find the Blue Fairy, who he believes can turn him into a real boy. On his journey he comes across a cruel show in which old robots are destroyed in front of an audience.

When he reaches flooded Manhattan and meets the engineer who created him, he learns that he is not unique and that thousands of copies like him have been made. The film ends two thousand years in the future, in an age when humanity has completely vanished, with a scene in which highly advanced robots recreate one last day for David with his mother.

A twenty-five-year-old prediction: the living robot

At the center of the film is the "emotion" program of the robot boy David: once activated, the robot comes to feel as humans do. By 2026, similar technology is already a reality, though not as a separate "program" but through large language models (LLMs).

This is why, between 2022 and 2025, demand for AI companion apps grew sevenfold. For example, the monthly active users of apps such as Character.AI have reached tens of millions, and more than half of them are young people under twenty-four.

Some users have gone even further, holding symbolic wedding ceremonies with their AI "companions" and inviting friends to attend.

According to research by scientists at Harvard Business School, talking with an AI companion helps reduce loneliness to a degree close to talking with another person. Just as Monica comes to accept David as her son in the film, people today are gradually becoming inclined to treat the machine as something that "feels."

The "fairy tale" has become reality: should we fear AI?

In the film, David was not only able to communicate but was a physical character who could hug, cry, and express feelings. The Yonbo X1 family robot from X-Origin AI and TCL's AiMe robot for children, both shown at CES 2026, were created along these lines.

These robots are not yet as sophisticated as David, but they clearly show artificial intelligence stepping off the screen and "coming to life" in physical form in the real world. Just as David had a "friend" in the robot teddy bear Teddy, today's "smart toy" companions are what people imagined several decades ago, now made real.

The warning in the film

"A.I." is not just a film; it also carries warnings. When Monica, having taken David into her home, is forced to give him up, David's inner anguish and his reaction are real: even though he is programmed for it, his emotional turn and his thoughts are just like those of a human being.

Today the same problem is entering the legal arena. In November 2025, the state of New York passed a law requiring chatbots to remind users every three hours that they are not human.

What did the critics say?

When the film was released, it sparked debate among many critics. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds a score of 6.6, with 73 percent of critics giving it a positive review. The well-known film critic Roger Ebert called the film "technically perfect" but found its ending "overly sentimental."

In one of his reviews he remarked, jokingly, that the film "does not have a smart ending." Even so, in 2011 Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list. The gap between the film's technical achievements and its emotional ending actually fits today's debates about artificial intelligence quite well: we marvel at the capabilities and achievements of technology, yet we worry about the harm it could bring.

Did the prediction come true?

Although "A.I." depicts a future two hundred years away, its central questions, whether a machine can have feelings and, if so, how we should treat it, have become practical matters in just twenty-five years. True, we do not yet have general artificial intelligence at David's level, but trends in emotional attachment, physical embodiment, and legal regulation are turning some of the film's predictions into reality faster than expected.

However "real" we judge the technology to be, how we use it and how we limit it remains entirely a human choice.

Author: Maftuna Baxt