Companion and our Obsession with Robot Sentience
Warning: Spoilers for Companion ahead. I strongly recommend watching it first.
In 2016, The Sun posted the following tweet:
This tweet quickly turned into a widely referenced meme over the last 9 years. At the turn of the year, many of us wondered: where are the sex robots? Well, Companion says they’re here. In a way, I guess The Sun was right.
Companion grapples with the idea of artificially creating life—one that dates to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and has its cyberpunk counterpart in films like Terminator (1984), Blade Runner (1982, 2017), I, Robot (2004). Unlike these, however, it does so at a time when the idea of the titular “companion” robots is not so distant. With the rapid advancement of AI, there has come widespread fear of its consequences such as stealing jobs and causing unemployment. Simultaneously, there has been much anxiety surrounding the improvement of generative AI, particularly in image and video generation, as it has already been abused for making deepfake images and videos. While government regulations on this new technology seem years away, a world with humanoid robots appears more and more likely by the day. The dystopia is imminent.
Companion isn’t a film about the ethics of making these robots, however. We are instead dropped into the life of Iris (Sophie Thatcher), a seemingly normal woman whose life is flipped upside down when she goes on a cabin trip with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) and his friends. Her realization that she’s never been human forces her to grapple with her identity—she’s been programmed to love Josh, but does she actually love him? Can she overcome her programming to become her own person?
Underlying these questions remains the question of morality—not about the creation of AI robots, but rather the robots made to satiate human (mostly sexual) desires. Josh’s friend Kat tells Iris that she makes her feel “replaceable,” particularly as someone in a relationship where she isn’t viewed as a human being anyway. Through this trope of robot sentience, the film tackles the commodification of women (and men, but mostly women). For men who don’t view their partners as human beings anyway, why not be with an actual object? The point of the film is not to question robot sentience, but rather to reflect how AI can be used to perpetuate misogyny, allowing men to get away with abusing and objectifying women because “they’re not real anyway.” By projecting their worst fantasies onto these companion robots, this world’s men are excused for their dehumanizing worldview in a way that maintains the status quo and, in the long run, fails to protect women.
It’s not difficult to imagine the world Companion presents—in many ways, it surrounds us today. The development of deepfake porn, body pillows, and other technologies made to replicate the sexual experience are all aimed at giving men sexual gratification without the hindrance of having to recognize a woman’s autonomy. These are all only one step away from becoming a full-fledged companion robot, allowing men to not just bypass consent, but to even manufacture it. Iris, programmed to consent to Josh, physically cannot say no. The central argument of the film, therefore, is not that making “living” robots is wrong—it doesn’t actually comment on that. Instead, it presents the world as it is, arguing that artificially satisfying sadistic and misogynistic fantasies will fail to protect women in the long run. It warns us to rip these fantasies out, root and stem.
Compared to other dystopian AI films, Companion is a breath of fresh air. It refuses to grapple with the obsessions of its predecessors; to the cries of “but she’s a robot!” we get a resounding “so what?” And really, so what? Why does it matter? DNA is just biological code, so what’s the difference between our instinct and her programming? She acts like she has feelings, so let her have feelings. And if the line between human and machine is so thin, maybe the question isn’t if she is real, but instead why so many men would rather love something that isn’t.