Ex Machina: Could “superintelligence” challenge the concept of ​​creativity as a uniquely human activity?

In the greater than a decade since its release in 2015, the film “Ex Machina,” written and directed by Alex Garland, has proven to be an insightful precursor to contemporary concerns surrounding the social and cultural implications of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and what’s now commonly known as “superintelligence.”

Through the central character Ava (a sophisticated humanoid played by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander), the film explored the implications of an AI gaining human-level intelligence and subsequently assuming superintelligence.

It was the arrival of superintelligence in AI systems arguedwould imply a level of consciousness and “brain” performance that will quickly challenge the concept that creativity is an exclusively human activity. Expecting and fearing such an consequence, Ava's inventor, technology entrepreneur Nathan (Oscar Isaac), hires Caleb (Domhnall Gleason), a programmer, to perform such a project Turing test on it (a method to judge whether AI can think).

In a series of events that depict her evolving self-awareness and self-awareness, Ava expresses her creativity and potential awareness particularly through a Series of complex drawingsincluding a landscape painting of her surroundings and a portrait of Caleb. Caleb is convinced that she has indeed achieved consciousness and sees Ava's creativity and ingenuity as a transparent sign that she has not only passed the Turing Test, but has also achieved a type of superintelligence.

It is precisely this vision of the upcoming arrival of superintelligence that’s at the center of each the film and the broader debates about whether AI-powered innovation models will displace, if not in time replace, human creativity.

The concept that AI will actually achieve levels of creative considering and innovation has turn out to be central recently unprecedented investments from corporations – including OpenAI, Scale AI, Anthropic, Anduril and Meta (the owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta AI) – who appear to have few reservations about the opportunity of superintelligence becoming a reality.

But what form will creativity absorb AI and can a breakthrough in the way in which machines “think” really enable them to be creative?

Not only a machine

In what’s now considered a turning point for AI, a now infamous game of “machines” arguably demonstrated a demonstrable level of machine creativity Go.

The focus is on a player's ability to beat territories on a game board. Go is widely considered one of the complex strategy games ever invented. In March 2016, Lee Sedol, the 18-time Go world champion, lost convincingly to DeepMind's AlphaGo in a five-game match.

AlphaGo stunned Sedol within the second game of that game when it executed what has since been called “Train 37Move 37 was a counterintuitive move that was originally considered a bug in this system. It deviated so completely from standard game patterns that it was seen by many – programmers, commentators and gamers alike – as clear evidence of a machine's creative intuition.

As Sedol magnanimously remarked after the sport: “I assumed AlphaGo was based on probability calculations and was only a machine. But after I saw this move, I modified my mind. AlphaGo is actually creative.”

For any warnings about and concerns concerning the future impact of AI on the creative industries Authorship, labor, commercialization and cultural valueIt is significant to notice the extent to which human creativity is increasingly supported by developments in AI.

If we glance again at Ava's drawings in Ex Machina, they don't just illustrate that ubiquitous presence of neural networks but additionally the methods by which AI-powered image production models learn to predict patterns from input data or data sets.

In a key scene within the film, we learn that Ava's neural networks were programmed using information – data sets – that Nathan illegally collected from Blue Book, the Google-like company he founded and owns. Specifically, Ava's drawings reflect the datasets she was trained on.

When we use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), an AI that creates text, images, videos and other content to create images, we do the identical thing Leverage It enables the generation of content based on the datasets used to coach machine models of image production.

GenAI is widely utilized in programs reminiscent of Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, all of which enjoy a large consumer base. It powers each Ava's neural networks and future models of human creativity.

In a current one report It was observed by the Royal Institute of British Architects that the proportion of architectural firms using AI of their designs was 59% in 2025, in comparison with 41% in 2024. This increase in the usage of AI led the report's authors to query whether AI could replace the role of architect within the not too distant future.

Complementing these debates, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development published an expanded one in June 2025 Research work It explained in additional detail the extent to which GenAI is frequently used to extend human creativity through the usage of neural networks and autonomous systems.

Autonomously considering machines

However, it is that this very term “autonomous” that’s causing controversy over AGI and superintelligence, nowhere more so than when considering the widespread use of AI in self-driving vehicles, robots, unmanned drones and automatic weapons systems. Elon Musk, an early investor in DeepMind (the corporate behind AlphaGo), recently announced that Tesla's long-term success lies in humanoid robots or autonomous Optimus bots.

Meanwhile, autonomous weapons systems are already providing something of great concern to each governments and international organizations the means for the eventual automation of war. These developments foreshadow the specter unmanned aircraft systems which might independently discover, goal and kill an “enemy” without requiring much human intervention.

It's this vision of 1 autonomous superintelligence We operate independently of human control or oversight, which has long plagued our often fraught relationship with advanced technologies.

By the tip of the film, Ava has achieved a level of autonomous agency that means the presence of AGI, if not a conscious level of decision-making or superintelligence. We watch in horror as she kills her creator Nathan and imprisons her sympathetic ally Caleb.

If AI-powered superintelligence becomes a reality, it couldn’t only trigger a radical rethinking of how we understand human creativity, but more importantly, trigger an existential crisis within the meaning, if not the long run, of humanity.