Man can Jump off a cliff but seems to relent when AI enters the conversation..

Considering how AI has basically become tech’s biggest buzzword this year, it’s arguably impossible to get away from it. Everything from news articles to your job listing app has been draped with the term, and we’ve been writing about everything from the big AI race between tech giants to how it’s taking the jobs of digital artists away. But as everyone is coming to grips over what AI is, what it’s good for and what its dangers are, turns out one more person wants to warn us about it: Tom Cruise. And his vehicle for doing that is Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning Part 1.

Now if you think this is an unorthodox way to talk about AI and its dangers, you wouldn’t be wrong. After all, for many, the Mission Impossible films have been the more adrenaline-fueled alternative to the James Bond series, where audiences tune in to see Cruise’s trademark stunts as much as they do the actual plot and characters. And as a movie, Dead Reckoning is easily one of the best in the franchise, borrowing aspects from as far as the first film’s sense of mystery to the more recent films’ team dynamics down and injecting new aspects and twists that keep it an engaging watch. But underneath all that is the very clear issue that Cruise and director Christopher Macquerie are trying to warn us about: we need to be a little careful about our reliance on AI and how much the digital world shapes so much of the real one today, especially in an era where digital information is so easy to falsify compared to analogue info.

The plot of the film literally finds Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt, taking it upon himself to take down a sentient, AWOL and rogue AI weapon that has dubbed itself the entity, and is using global intelligence agencies that all want to control it in a war game to eventually come out on top. This premise makes the approach a lot less like Terminator or Avengers: Age of Ultron, where an AI basically just says “I should be God” and decides to destroy everything and instead focuses on many of the real aspects that we see in AI products such as ChatGPT or voice assistants like Google Assistant and Siri. The Entity doesn’t create evil robots to do it’s bidding or outright take over the world’s most important digital systems. Instead, being developed by spy agencies as a weapon, it uses tactics that make are eerily more familiar. It changes small but key parts of records to cause misinformation and bring people to conflict, it confidently presents information as true that is a lie in real life, it accesses far more information than it should and violates privacy boundaries because those rules were never put in place.

And if any of these sound familiar to you that’s because ChatGPT and friends have been shown to present false information all the time while Google Assistant and Co. have breached privacy laws left right and center. Sure the Entity gaining sentience maybe a little far fetched, but almost every other act this machine pulls off isn’t an AI attack of the future, it’s actually a amalgamation of the flaws and problems caused by AI. The Entity is originally even pitched as being the perfect covert operative, meant to take the job of spies like Hunt and leave them borderline redundant.

And once you start looking at it that way, it becomes quite clear that Cruise (and the writers) have a few words to say about AI and our overall trust in it as a solve-all solution for our problems. And if you look at Cruise’s track record of critiquing or outright hating some digital advancements in tech, especially when films are concerned. This is the man that isn’t a fan of how streaming services have diluted the quality and profits of the filming industry, has made a 20 minute video with Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan on why and how to turn off motion smoothing on TVs because it makes some shots look worse, and has championed going to the cinema over digital movie distribution for years. But while all those examples are more based on the filming industry, the points Dead Reckoning raises about AI are more general and apply to almost everyone.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Cruise stands with all the actors and writers striking of SAG-AFTRA due to the threat of AI scanning their work or likeness for replication and the studios’ benefit, but in this movie a point of the general dangers is made specifically so you, the viewer can feel the threat of AI on them and their daily lives. It shows how AI can make a fake social media post seem more plausible, make you think you received a text from someone when you didn’t, imitate your voice to consent to something you don’t want to consent to. All these dangers are already real in a world of deepfakes and AI generated songs that sound like your favourite artist. And once you think about this, you can’t help but wonder if more shouldn’t be done to control just how much AI is capable of. And that’s what all these court cases and regulator meetings about AI are all about. Are they enough? Well, honestly we can’t tell right now. But at the moment, it’s already interesting (and a little frightening) that one of the most adrenaline-pumping, excitement filling actors and movie franchises in the world realizes how we need to rethink how we’re using and trusting AI. Hopefully enough of us listen.

Related Stories: