Hot Spot was written five years ago, one year before the launch of ChatGPT. The delay isn’t notable in itself; there are movies that take decades to make it from script to screen. What’s interesting about Robert Bolesto’s screenplay for this ambitious, but flawed, sci-fi film by Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska is that it anticipates a world where every human thought and feeling is monitored by, filtered through, and outsourced to artificial intelligence.
In the world of the film, the sentient AI who controls every aspect of life is called “the Head.” Characters can communicate with each other telepathically through the neural network, which also means that the Head is listening to everything everyone says. (The Head’s control is so absolute that a character is admonished to put some clothes on after the machine registers a drop in her skin temperature.) Citizens of this unnamed near-future society are also required to connect to the Head in order to eat, drink, and obtain access to energy, making the Head the de facto dictator of an AI-powered totalitarian state.
