AI in popular media, and what it tells us about the real world
If you have ever wondered whether fictional AI could really happen, this site is for you
If you have ever watched a film or TV show about artificial intelligence and wondered, “How much of that could really happen?”, this site is for you.
Fiction gives us a practical doorway into real AI
I write about AI in popular media because fiction gives us a surprisingly useful way to think about real technology. Movies and television exaggerate, simplify, dramatise, and sometimes get things wrong.
But they also reveal what we hope AI might become, what we fear it could do, and what we often misunderstand about how it works. My aim is to help you enjoy those stories more deeply while also using them as a doorway into clearer, more practical thinking about AI in the real world.
My interest in AI began with science fiction
My own interest in AI began with science fiction. As a teenager in the 1960s, I was captivated by a Doctor Who story featuring the Mechanoids, robots preparing a planet for human settlement.
One scene, in which a character speaks to a robot in something that sounded like a programming language, sent me looking for books on computing. That curiosity led me to FORTRAN, ALGOL, punch cards, teletypes, and a PDP-10 at the University of Queensland.
I have watched AI move from imagination to implementation
That early spark turned into more than five decades of watching AI move from imagination to implementation. I worked with data and statistical computing long before today’s AI boom, using systems such as SPSS on university mainframes and minicomputers.
Because memory was scarce, every dataset had to be handled with care. That experience taught me to respect the hidden structure in data: patterns, clusters, dimensions, and latent variables that are not obvious on the surface but can change how we understand a problem.
What I bring to the way I write about AI
- More than five decades of perspective on AI’s movement from speculative fiction to real-world systems.
- Long experience with data and statistical computing, including SPSS, university mainframes, minicomputers, and the careful handling of scarce memory.
- Forty years as a chemical pathologist, interpreting complex blood test patterns for other doctors.
- Practical experience with expert-system approaches in the laboratory, including both their promise and their limits.
Clinical interpretation taught me how to turn complexity into useful guidance
For forty years, I worked as a chemical pathologist. A large part of that work involved interpreting blood test results for other doctors: turning complex patterns into short, useful comments that helped guide clinical decisions.
In practice, that meant recognising signals, weighing uncertainty, understanding the reader’s level of expertise, and choosing words that would be helpful rather than merely technically correct.
Prompting feels familiar because I spent decades giving structure, context, and direction
That is one reason I find today’s generative AI so fascinating. Much of what now gets called prompting is, in another context, something I had already spent decades doing: giving enough structure, context, and direction to produce a better answer.
I also built and used rule-based expert-system approaches in the laboratory, which gave me a practical view of both the promise and the limits of systems that try to encode expertise.
I am interested in what AI stories help us notice
So when I write about AI in a movie, a television episode, or a cultural moment, I am not only asking whether the fiction is accurate. I am asking what it helps us notice.
What assumptions does it make about intelligence, agency, emotion, risk, or control? Where does it illuminate real AI, and where does it lead us astray?
You do not need a technical background to follow along
My goal is to help you become a more confident viewer, reader, and user of AI. You do not need a technical background to follow along.
You only need curiosity, a willingness to question the story being told, and an interest in what today’s AI systems can and cannot do.
Explore the posts and subscribe for future reflections
If that sounds useful, I invite you to explore the posts on the site and subscribe for future reflections on AI in popular media, and what it tells us about the real world.
Disclosure: nigelbrown.ai is owned and operated by Media Export Pty Ltd. The opinions expressed here are our own and are provided for entertainment and informational purposes only. nigelbrown.ai is not intended to give you one-stop advice on artificial intelligence, technology, media, or anything else; please do your own research before relying on anything you read online.