Abstract :
[en] In cinema and television, and especially in Hollywood productions, artificial intelligences usually demonstrate their abilities and peculiarities through their language: they communicate with humans and other computers, and in doing so they generally make use of a human-sounding voice. This voice becomes the central expression of their specific subjectivity, which often resembles that of humans, but can also prove to be radically different in some respects. The impression that we are dealing with an autonomous personality arises in particular when the voice of the computer appears as an ‘inner’ or ‘internal’ voice that influences or imitates the intimate soliloquies of humans.
The essay explores the question of how this use of artificial inner voices has changed in the course of film history, and which concepts of artificial and human intelligence, subjectivity, and (gendered) identity are associated with manifestations of the voice. In particular, I am interested in describing the threats to humanity which, according to most fiction films, are posed by artificial intelligences. Representations of the voice have undergone a profound transformation in recent decades. The cinema of the 1960s to 1980s imagined AI in the context of totalitarian regimes, with the artificial intelligence developing the psychotic personality of a panoptical, authoritarian, and paranoid ruler. In more recent films, however, we find an amalgamation of artificial and human subjectivity that leads to technology taking over the human internal voice and thus to a radical alienation of humans from themselves. The voice, and especially the internal voice, therefore becomes not only a site for negotiating the relationship between human and non-human agents, but also an instrument of subtle manipulation and deformation of humanness itself.
