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I'm trying to remember the name of a short film I saw a number of years ago. There was a guy who was a supervisor on an assembly line who's coming near the end of his shift, and he gets a message on his (transparent!) cell phone from his friend, asking if he's going out. The AI (with a female voice) tells him that there's a shortfall in production and that she can get things caught up if he grants her access to the whole assembly line. The guy thinks about it, looking at the message on his phone, and ultimately turns over control. The AI stops making whatever it was (might have been cars) and starts making murderbots instead. The guy goes out onto the production line to see what's going on and gets killed by the machinery. The film ends with the murderbots walking out of the factory into society.

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  • Hi, welcome to SF&F. What year (approximately) was this? Where did you see it?
    – DavidW
    Mar 16 at 12:20
  • Thanks! I'd say it was no more than 10 years old. It was a digital release and so I saw it on a video hosting site, but it wasn't YouTube. I think it might have been linked to from one of the Gizmodo sites (maybe io9).
    – Fuz
    Mar 16 at 12:24
  • not an answer but related: this problem is called the AI box problem
    – user253751
    Mar 17 at 10:42
  • This seems kinda familiar...
    – Izkata
    Mar 17 at 16:02

1 Answer 1

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This is the short film ANA by Factory Fifteen.

A rogue AI tricks a shiftless factory worker into giving it access to its own system, then proceeds to run amuck.

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    I love the pithy description -- sounds like David Letterman wrote it. Also, "shiftless" is a nice little pun since he was getting off work and/or probably lost his job through murder.
    – releseabe
    Mar 16 at 18:26
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    any engineers out there: 1. Have a manual kill switch 2. don't give AI attractive fake features and sexy voices (not sure what this AI was supposed to look like but I can sure guess) 3. A robot in an assembly line for cars (iirc) killed a worker years ago. It was an accident (and it said it was sorry).
    – releseabe
    Mar 16 at 18:34
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    If you recall Ava from Ex Machina, I could see one sequel having her get a job in such a factory.
    – releseabe
    Mar 16 at 18:39
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    Caleb teaches Ava to lie. This results in his death. Never teach AI to lie.
    – Tangurena
    Mar 17 at 5:56
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    @Tangurena -- ChatGPT for President! 😄 (I've already seen ChatGPT produce smoothly glib bullshit -- thread at the Japanese Stack Exchange -- so the "lying" part is effectively already implemented.)
    – Eiríkr Útlendi
    Mar 17 at 17:39

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