Opening of A.I. Screened At M.I.T. Described Completely Here... Along With Jeanine Salla's Biz Card!

Hey folks, Harry here.... so excited about getting this I wanted to share faster than I could type... hehehe.... Anyways... if someone can translate SANSKRIT, or is that KANNADA, its hard for me to tell at this resolution, Scan down and see what you can see.... I think that's what that is... Anyway... This is pretty cool, especially since the event just ended an hour or so ago and we already have the update with scans up.... I think that's pretty damn good! Enjoy.... GOD I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THIS ONE!!!

Hi, Harry,

Long time reader; first time poster here. (Actually, there's two of us here. Call us Toasty and XLAT.)

Warner Bros. and the MIT AI Lab CLICK HERE jointly presented a "media event" at MIT this afternoon. (A lecture hall full of people, perhaps 1/4-1/3 journalists, attended.)

Kathleen Kennedy, an A.I. producer, and Haley Joel Osment joined Rodney Brooks, Cynthia Breazeal, and Sherry Turkle of MIT and Ray Kurzweil in a presentation and Q&A of both the movie and the current state of A.I. research.

The really great thing was that they showed a clip, the intro of the movie, it seems. It's the first time footage has been shown to the public. (No cameras were allowed.) Speilberg couldn't be there, but they played a videotaped intro he gave, where he basically said that he hopes the movie will spark discussion about the issues raise.

Here's a summary of the clip:

[Minor spoiler warning for opening scene]

There was an opening narration over a shot of crashing waves, then some brief shots of humanoid outlines. The main scene was of William Hurt's character giving a talk in what appeared to be a classroom of some sort, to a number of students. There was a woman there who was what they called a "mecha". He stabbed her in the hand, and she felt the pain, but when asked how she felt about what he just did to her, she said, "But you did that to my hand." He asked her to strip, and she was about to, until he told her to stop.

He then clicked some button in her mouth, and her face opened up, Men-in-Black-style, to reveal a robotic skeleton. He pulled a little module from her forhead, presumably the CPU, and talked about how he proposed that they build robots with emotions (a bit hokey, I know), and basically spoke that bit that's in the 2nd trailer, except extended. (Several references to "mechas" were cut for the trailer.) Hurt's character said that he wanted to build a robot that could experience "love", and one character said that tons of lover mechas already get shipped... Another character: "Yeah, and you're their best customer!" :)

Hurt's character went on to talk about how he's talking about real love, not sexuality, and that there was going to be a great market for this because parents who can't have kids want a child who loves them.

One student then raised the question of: If the robot child loves the parents, what obligation do the parents then have? Must they love the child back?

The final shot was of everyone in the class murmuring to each other, discussing this, while the aforementioned mecha put on some lipstick and looked at her nails or something. [/spoiler warning]

During the Q & A session Kathleen Kennedy repeated what's been said before, that Kubrick and Spielberg worked together for many years on the ideas for this movie, and that, at one point, Kubrick had suggested that Spielberg direct it since it was "closer to his sensibilities".

One person asked how working with Jeanine Salla was, and Kathleen Kennedy said she had worked "mainly on special effects". Haley Joel Osment said that he didn't get a chance to work with her much "because she worked in post-production".

Kennedy at one point said that Spielberg pretty much wrote the screenplay alone (after his discussions with Kubrick and the reading the treatment that had been written), and that it was a personal project for him.

[minor spoiler warning]

Haley Joel Osment said that the way his character is protrayed is that his actions in the beginning of the film aren't mechanical, per se, but were more deliberate. He wouldn't slouch in a chair, etc. But then, toward the end of the film, he became more "human" in action. One interesting note is that his character does not ever blink during the film. [/spoiler warning]

There were some other general questions about how it was to work on this film, etc., whose answers I don't recall.

Later, someone asked about the relationship between Evan Chan and Jeanine, and Kennedy just said that she did know Jeanine attended Evan's funeral.

Finally, Kennedy left some of Jeanine's business cards for us to pick up. We've scanned it in for you all to enjoy. [Harry, it's attached.]

One note: The two sides seem to be mostly identical, except one side is in another language (Sanskrit? Arabic?), but there's an extra line at the very bottom of the non-English side. Can anyone translate the card, especially that last line?

- Toasty & XLAT