Dangerous Terms of Agreement

Dangerous Terms of Agreement

Bruce Von Stiers

Destiny has a video channel called At Home With Destiny. She prepares food dishes from everyday ingredients you'd have around your kitchen. After finishing filming a segment on creating a casserole dish, she checks the footage. Only to discover that the footage has been altered. Without her knowledge and consent.

But before she checks the footage, she listens to a podcast that is going on about the seemingly dangerous things that are going on with AI.

This is the first part of a short sci-fi film titled F.U.A.I. Those initials stand for Fully Unimpeded Artificial Intelligence. The film is a bit over six and a half minutes in length.

Destiny learns that, without realizing it, she had agreed to the newest terms of service to a system upgrade. That allowed A.I. to do whatever it wanted with her likeness and intellectual property.

I can't tell you what happens after that, because it'd spoil things. But the ending fits well with the story.

Noelle Urbano is Destiny. She was in films such as Once Upon A Main Street and co-starred in another AI themed short film, Face Swap.

During a scene in the film, Destiny talks to her mother on the phone. The mother was voiced by Traci N. Wise.

The two podcast hosts that Destiny listens to are voiced by Dakota West and Christopher Able. West starred in the short films Jimmy and The Writer and the Love Story. Able co-starred in episodes of the podcast The Runaway-The lost Tapes.

The film was written and directed by Jennifer Lynn Warren. She is well known for her role as Borquita LaLaurie on American Horror Story. She also appeared in films like Black Mass and Cannibal Corpse Killers

It was produced by Pruitt Taylor Vince. As an actor, he has over a hundred screen credits including recurring roles on shows such as The Blacklist, Stranger Things and Heroes Reborn. He also directed several episodes of the sci-fi limited series, Infamous.

The director of photography was John Paul Defazio. His screen credits include the films Los Angeles, The Darkness of the Road, Crime Story and Murder and Cocktails.

Listed as associate producers were Dan Michal Jedrejczyk and Willie Lawton. Jedrejczyk has helped produce horror films such as Sorority Babes, Bakemono and Macabre Mountain. Lawton has been a colorist on films such as Red Rocker and was a dailies colorist for Oppenheimer and Murder On The Orient Express.

A song used in the film, Late To The Party, was by Mark S. Anderson.

For me, the film seems to have two main points. The first is that AI is something to really be concerned about. I can relate as I believe that in the wrong hands AI could become very dangerous. Not that in the future we'll have to contend with the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica. But AI could possibly, and probably already does, control more of our lives than we'd like it to.

The second point is about not reading terms of service put forth by companies. I used to review a lot of software programs and the terms of service for those products were somewhat nightmarish. Now there are terms of service for just about everything. And the fact that most people can't be bothered to read terms of service agreements is disconcerting. I know I've been guilty of it myself, and I know better.

Warren has stated her fear that “AI is a tool for the wealthy to become even more so, while leaving artists and skilled workers with no way of building wealth themselves.” And “how much longer films are going to be made by filmmakers and not computers.”

F.U.A.I. is an excellent sci-fi drama. The film gets the point across about the dangers of AI and not paying attention to term of service agreements without being preachy. It is just that the premise is more than a bit scary. Urbano does a fantastic job as a cheerful, then distraught then angry content provider.

F.U.A.I. will be featured at the Oh Scares International Film Festival in November. It is also under consideration for inclusion in the upcoming Santa Clarita International Film Festival.

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