And imbued into one, they were. When M3GAN begins singing “Tell Me Your Dreams,” you might find that there’s something wrong with it. Its introductory lyrics, “If you should feel alone/or that your world has come apart,” sounds fine until you realize that its specific wording really makes no sense. This pseudo-inspirational, yet clunky lyricism continues for the rest of the song: “Tell me your dreams/I will dream them too,” is another example of a lyric that isn’t quite right when you think about it.
According to Johnstone, this is the exact energy that “Tell Me Your Dreams” is supposed to give off. He and Willis purposefully made the song a little whacked-out in order to give off the illusion that it really was written by a less-than-polished algorithm:
“That’s what these algorithms are: if you make these AI-generated songs, they’re so simple. And they almost don’t make any sense. But they sound like something that you’ve heard before. That was the whole idea.”
That understanding of the faultiness of AI-generated content is precisely why “M3GAN” ends up working the way it does. While the idea of a dancing killer doll is a bit goofy, the way the film hones in on how the acceptance of AI to do both important and unimportant tasks grounds it in an effective way. These potentially dangerous AI systems are all around us. It’s just up to us to ensure they don’t become the norm.
“M3GAN” is now in theaters.