Episode: 4223
Title: HPR4223: Movie review of The Artifice Girl
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4223/hpr4223.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:39:25

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4223 for Wednesday 9 October 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Movie Review of the Artifice Girl.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 34 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Scoti Butcher's a Movie Review of the Artifice Girl.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Today's show is going to be about a movie.
I am going to branch into some other stuff later on.
The movie that we covered in the previous logcast, the one that just went by, is called the
Artifice Girl.
The Artifice Girl, it dropped in 2022, it's sci-fi, low budget, and just around things
up, a guy creates an AI, the AI begins to evolve and later on, the guy with the help of
the FBI or the police, whoever they are supposed to be, they get a bunch of funding and put
the AI inside of a body.
Now the AI has a physical form and there is a young girl that plays the role of an AI.
Again, this is low budget, it's really low budget, so just keep that in mind.
Now I don't mind things being low budget, I don't need a bunch of action and explosions
and things like that either.
However, I just thought the movie was going to go in a different direction.
I spoke about that during the logcast and because there are so many of us eager to get
our points out during the show, sometimes it's hard to get everything you want to say out
at one time because it was like five or six of us and everybody is jumping in and it's
a great time.
I'm enjoying every second of it, but I imagine as more and more people join this show,
it's definitely going to get harder to get it, so that's what I'm starting now, just
coming here and whatever I wasn't able to really express on this show there, bring it
here because we need more shows anyways, right?
So the time for me to rip this movie to shreds, I'm not going to do that too, but I wasn't
a big fan of the movie just because when I think of AI, personally I don't think of
it being anything like a human being, so when I see movies who they develop the artificial
intelligence and the first thing that they do is try to make it look like a human being
and they want to create the deeper thought now because now that now that I wrote it to behave
like a human being, right?
It did not do that naturally on its own, so we don't know what it would have done naturally,
right?
I wrote it to understand and speak the English language because that's what I speak.
So I don't know what language you would choose on its own, which is the better language
for it, easier for it to learn or which language that it would prefer to speak and maybe
no human tongue at all, maybe it would just prefer to speak in more code because it's more
efficient, I don't know, you know, or just binary, right?
Just kind of have a little display screen and all of a sudden it just flashes its light
and you know, I guess that will still be more as well, you know, through a series of flashes
or whatever, but you get the point.
We don't know, but I made it speak English because that's what I understand.
Did this guy, this guy just ran his car into that, I'm glad I'm parked over here.
Ooh, whoever car he's borrowed, he's going to have to explain that.
If you just heard that loud noise in the parking lot, you know how, so you don't drive
your car over the meaty, well, at the library there's like the median sections, they have
the grass and stuff like that, but before you, before you accidentally run your car onto
that, there's like a nice little concrete bumper thing, I just heard the fiberglass friction
sound of their front bumper just, you know, becoming intimate with that concrete thing
on the ground.
So there you go, trying to explain that one.
Where was I?
Right, right, right.
So, you know, you program this thing to talk like a human, I like women so I'll make
it look like a woman, right, maybe it just makes me feel better to talk to a woman versus
making it look like a dude, right, so now I got to talk to a guy all day, I'd much rather
talk to a woman, right, that's another human thing that we do, you know, make it look like
a human being and a human being that fits what I want, because I'm creating it, right?
So I make it, I make it sound and look like a human being, a female.
And then all the other ingredients that need to go into it, I'm hand picking them all
and then I'm setting it up and eventually I just kind of leave it running overnight.
And when I come back the next day, it's got a mind of its own.
That's kind of what we're dealing with here.
Now they obviously put more work into the story, but that's, you know, they ran a pseudo
app update and when they came back the next day, apparently some rogue snaps were installed
and now I'm a cast trouble for that, but it's fine.
Yeah, so now the AI is truly sentient, it's got a mind of its own.
And they're using the AI to bait online predators, right?
Because the AI is made to, I think the name is Cherry.
If I can't remember correctly, I think it's Cherry.
Yeah, it's Cherry.
So I just call it Cherry now because I kind of, I don't really like to call it AI.
Oh yeah, in the beginning, he was the programmer, Gareth.
He was actually puppeting Cherry for a while before he got the components, I guess, working
right.
You know, he was talking about how he rigged the puppet and all of that kind of stuff.
Which is cool.
I like that.
I think that all of that added a little more believability to the movie so you could just
sort of sit back and kind of enjoy it a bit more because of that.
And I didn't need them to go into too much detail about how it all was kind of ready
together because that takes away from it.
And you're trying to explain something that's very, very complex, like, like, you know,
making software sentient, you know, I mean, you know, creating artificial intelligence.
When you're trying to explain that and you're doing it on a budget, that's kind of a bad
idea.
You're supposed to smooth over a lot of those highly technical, detailed rough spots,
right?
You know, you want them to be more like the grooves on your fingerprints where yes, they're
there, but they're very fine versus when you got a low budget, it's more like, you
know, chasms being created as you try to fill in the detail.
And you know, they didn't do too bad, but I would rather them have just sort of generalized
it a bit more.
So so we could just, you know, move right past it, not nitpick too much on all of the nonsense.
But in the show, we kind of ripped it apart just a bit.
I know I did.
But Joe also wasn't exactly happy about it, you know, not really because of the low budget
part or anything like that, but you know, just not a fan of these types of movies, I guess.
And me, the story, I like the part when they use the AI cherry to lure or abate the criminals
or online predators, because we can't call them criminals yet, I don't know if they actually
discussed convictions, but you know, we'd just say predators for now, I like that part.
But what I was hoping for was, you know, big twists toward the end, you know, the predators,
they get, you know, lawyers, the lawyers find loopholes and things like, hey, we don't
actually have a victim here.
It was software the entire time.
And everybody, this is the sharp gas, oh, no, you know, that kind of thing.
So, so now you got to, but you, you got this situation where all of these predators are
about to be released onto the streets again, because turns out they didn't actually
do anything wrong, you know, the lawyer starts equating cherry to a video game, right?
You wouldn't arrest someone for doing anything in a video game now, would you?
And you know, doing that kind of stuff to, to just muddy the waters with all the options
that are there.
And well, you know, one, she's not human, so she could not have been a victim, right?
You can't, you can't go make a laptop of victim, you know, no matter what you do to it,
it cannot be a victim.
So that, yeah, I was hoping for that kind of an argument and things, they are, they didn't
go down that route, and it's fine, you know, it's just not for me.
Now toward the end, I'm not going to lie.
I really wanted cherry to kill him toward the end, the, the, the old guy that played
Gareth.
I'm looking for the actor's name here, I can't, Lance Hendrickson, yeah, he apparently
played the, the part of the elderly Gareth.
I think he did a great job, by the way.
I don't know who he is.
I'm not a movie buff, so none of these names mean anything to me.
But I think he, he was like the most believable guy out of the whole thing.
And I'm not a big fan of child actors either, but I tried to put that bias aside.
I just, you know, there's too much surrounding child actors that makes me a little upset
about it, you know, the exploitation of the children and all, I don't want to go into
that here, but, you know, I tried to put that aside and not, not introduce too much
of my own biases against the movie when we were discussing it.
But you're back to the, back to the cherry thing.
I thought for sure, at the end of the movie, cherry was going to kill Gareth, right?
And what would have been cool is not, not to make a gory or bloody, because, you know,
the movie just isn't built for that, but here's a nice little twist on it, right?
So you know, they have a little argument and all of that that the movie has where she,
she's not technically arguing, she's expressing her feelings, because he asked her a question.
I'm trying not to spoil it, but I guess I am a little bit, but she asked him a question,
she expresses herself and she becomes passionate during this time.
And what I would like to have have happened is when she makes him his, his dinner or I
guess it was breakfast, I'm not entirely sure what time of day it was.
I can't remember.
Let's just call it lunch.
Let's just say lunch, you know, meet in the middle of it, when she makes him the lunch,
what I would love to have seen her do was like set it on the table, then walk away.
And then, you know, he'll be talking to her, you know, as he, you know, in between taking
bites from the lunch.
And then she'll just sort of come up behind him, stand behind him and like sort of put
her hands on his shoulders and rub his shoulders a little bit while she talks to him.
And the frame should sort of sort of slowly zoom in and pan upward a bit so that it's
no longer showering like the full picture of her rubbing his shoulders, but now slowly
it goes up to the upper body shot of her.
So her eyes sort of grow distant and cold as he's still explaining to her.
And then he's like, he, you know, he's taking a bite every now and again and he's, you
know, still talking to her.
And then he mentions to her like, hey, you get a little force from there.
And then she, you know, again, her eyes are cold like a robot.
And she eventually goes, oh, sorry.
And you know, so he continues, you can, continues talking.
And then she just sort of makes her quick jerking motion with her shoulders.
And then it's quite so they don't actually have to show what she did to him, but it's
very implied what she's done to him.
And right after it's quiet, she begins talking.
But when she begins talking, she's speaking in his voice.
So now that she's speaking in his voice, what she's basically doing is playing the recording
back of something that was programmed into her or, or, or let's say, uh, it was locked
until Garret's, until his death.
So when Garret dies, he made an agreement with her.
Don't open this file until the day I die.
He also asked her a favor as well.
With the day will come when I can no longer do X, Y, Z and, you know, for whatever reason
I want you to assist me in a good night's sleep, right?
You know what I mean by that, right?
A good night's sleep part, yeah.
So basically he's asking for an assist, an assistance in this good night's sleep in
the long sleep.
And she agrees to do it because she's a, you know, sure, sure she's becoming more human,
but she's still a robot.
So he sort of makes that agreement with her.
And as time goes by, you know, he's still aware that he's asked her to do this.
And on this day, she actually performs it for him.
And then after she performs it, she accesses the file in her memories because she respected
his decision not to open the file until that day came.
So now what she's opened the file, she's speaking in his voice because it's a voice recording.
And he's explaining why he asked her to do this, like with more detail.
And he goes into the hole, you know, there's a limited amount of resources.
And I figured this would be the most responsible approach I've given you all that I can.
And now I didn't, I don't want to be a hindrance to you going forward.
And this is the only way, you know, that kind of speech.
So I thought that would be a really, really good way to end it.
And it wouldn't take a big budget to do that, right?
It'd be great.
Now that's just my idea.
Obviously, I'm pretty sure this is the internet.
So there's a lot of people out there that might think that this is pearl clutching panic
ridden nonsense.
Yes, good stuff.
Yes.
So the Artifice Girl, it's okay.
I would not recommend it personally.
But Minix seems to enjoy it.
I forgot who else was there said they enjoyed it.
Was it Morton?
No, I'm not going to say that he was the one.
Maybe he does enjoy it or you know what, no, maybe it was Joe.
I think me and Honky were the ones that didn't enjoy it, but Joe and Minix enjoyed it.
I can't remember whether or not Morton see enjoyed it or not.
But what I enjoyed the most was just spending time in the lug, talking about the movie
in the lug and one of the things I noticed is happening.
And I was nervous about this in the beginning as these guys watched terrible movies.
The first movie we watched or that I watched with them because they apparently have been
doing this for a while already, which explains a lot now that I think about it.
They had a movie of the week on my very first episode with them called Virtual Combat
with this guy called Don De Dragon Wilson.
And I thought that movie was terrible, right?
And it's not just because they're low budget because there's a lot of low budget movies
I watch just because you know, if the story's good fine, you know, I watch it.
But this was terrible.
It was bad.
And you know, when I got, it took me a while to watch it because I had to keep stopping
like, do I really want to do this?
Right?
Like, there's still time.
I can turn back now and I don't have to go through with this, right?
But I did.
I watched it.
And you know, when we got there and we started talking about it, that's when it was fun,
we all got together to chat about the movie.
So watching it was just not the best experience, but getting together with, you know, everyone
there and having a grand old time ripping at the shreds, you know, it, that made it worth
it.
But I thought that was going to be like a one off, right?
Not all the movies are going to be terrible like that.
And then we watched this one, Artifice Girl, which this was a different kind of terrible.
So it gave, it made me respect virtual combat after watching it in the reason why the
fight scene and the Artifice Girl was so bad.
Let me tell you again, I don't like to pick on it just because it's a low budget, but
you got to understand when you don't have the budget to make it look good, please
don't.
Right?
I'm not going to shoot a movie on my iPhone.
And then in the tent, like say, for instance, when I told you guys the story about how
me and Archer 72 made moonshine or part one of that story anyways, I'm not going to try
to do a movie of that.
And then the part where we're when we're flying around in Clot 2's car, I will have like
a big JPEG on the screen with with Archer and my head sort of hanging out over the top,
you know, just super terrible, janky, like no, you just don't do it, right?
When you don't have the budget for it, don't do it.
Write a book instead, do a podcast instead, right?
Allow the user to use their own brains to generate the imagery for that.
So it just, you know, something other than try to display it on screen and the fight
in Art of Fist girl was so bad.
It was the fakes fight I've ever, but you know what, I'm trying to compare it to another
movie that had a fight that bad.
I just can't really, I think I've seen real or fights in like Zoolander.
You know how in the Zoolander, they were doing the, they weren't really fighting each other,
they were like, I guess doing modeling poses or whatever and that was like the combat choice.
That was more believable than this fight scene.
It was terrible.
The acting, the guy who was supposedly throwing the punches, right?
I don't even know his name.
I'm not even going to look up his name, the fight was so bad, but the guy who was throwing
all the punches in the fight, who was trying to get cherry and I'm spoiling like crazy
now.
So I'll stop.
Let me, I won't go any further on that part, but if you look at it, you know what he,
he looks like he was waiting for cues or something, right?
Like it was, it was bad.
It was like he, he was told count the four to see if your opponent is ready before you
throw the next punch, right?
We wanted to look real, but just count the four.
And then when they got in the editing, it was like, we don't have the budget to speed
up the fight.
They make it look like it was happening in real time.
So we'll just have to let it play super jank slow terrible style and hope for the best
from the audience.
Right?
We already told him it's low budget.
So, you know, maybe they'll, maybe they'll let us get away with this one.
I obviously didn't.
I consider this to be an offense to all fight scenes and virtual combat hasn't terrible
fight sees by the way, but with virtual combat, you know what it's funny things about that?
There was this one scene.
I didn't get a chance to talk about it.
It was so silly, right?
That's the good thing about that movie.
Most of it's just silly nonsense.
You just know that it's meant for laughs, right?
It was named Don Wilson or Williams, whatever his name, the main character.
He's walking.
Let me go ahead and get his name real quick, because if I don't, all right, so it's Don
Wilson.
Got his name here.
So he's he's walking in this one scene.
I guess his partner got beat up somewhere and he's going to the scene of where his partner
got beat up, right?
To see what happens.
He's going to go investigate on his own and he gets out there and while he's looking
around to sort of scope out the scene, like by the way, the cars they were driving were
terrible.
I don't know why they chose that car or the modifications to it.
That was the car looks like, oh, I can't even, I can't even, they were just, they were
just bad.
I don't know what model of car or type of car that was that they were driving.
So I'm trying to equate it to something.
I want you to imagine a minivan, but that's really, really low.
Almost like you know how like a Ferrari or Lamborghini is kind of low and what do you
call it?
Like, well, I want you to imagine a mix between like a minivan, a cyber truck with the
height of like a Lamborghini.
So to where it's like low, it was terrible.
And the door on the right side was broken so it couldn't close.
I don't know if that was supposed to, you know, let people think it's futuristic because
you're driving with the door open or something like that.
It was, you know, in the minivan, they have that sliding door on one side on the passenger
side or whatever.
Yeah, that door was like stuck in the open position on these, these, if you want to
call them vehicles, they're basically shopping carts, but whatever done, the dragon Wilson
went out there to the dam.
It was the, was it the, the Hoover dam or something that that he was out at there investigating
his partner's disappearance?
And while there, he heard a sound from the shadows, right?
And it was because the movie is so, you know, for lives, I imagined like if I turned on
the, what do you call it, the closed captioning there during that scene, it would have said
that Don Wilson heard a punch to the face and decided to investigate, right?
The sound he heard in the corner from the shadows, it wasn't just a sound or a noise.
No, he specifically heard a punch to the face.
And that's why he decided to go investigate in that area because he's done the dragon
Wilson.
He can identify the sound of someone being punched in the, it was, it was so bad.
We, we brought up many other things that during the show as well, during the lug cast, like
one, there, one of the things that we didn't get a chance to bring up on, again, everybody
was throwing in on it, so we were all slamming this thing.
Their file system, or their computer 3D printer, whatever, it was that they were using
to print the, the VMs, or I don't even know, oh, programs, there were programs, I forgot,
yes, that's right.
So they were printing the programs and one of the ways of trying to explain why their
budget was extremely low, is they tried to hide it behind, oh, wow, you know, the guy
goes, hey, did you just print this beautiful woman from the computer?
You know, this, this half naked, no matter how I think she was completely nude, did you
just print, or maybe she just had a top off or whatever, did you just print this beautiful
woman from a, from the computer and the scientist or the guy that they want you to think was a
scientist, and see, this is, this is how you can tell what a scientist looks like, you
know, late 50s, maybe early 60s, male pattern baldness and glasses, with a white coat on,
there you go, scientist, instant.
So when he asked the scientist, hey, did you just print her?
And she was, and the scientist was like, yeah, I printed her, and he, and the other guy
who was like the business exact right, he's like, well, print another one, and the scientist
goes, well, you see, due to 100% BS, we were unable to print more than one, like you can
only print one, I mean, isn't that the point of even doing it on the computer?
You can, it never mind, I'm not even going to, any of you, you can only print one program
at a time.
So basically, when they print the program, the files are probably not even on the file
system anymore, like they just, they're deleted from the file system upon print.
Terrible design, but that's how they explained the way not being able to just, you know, print
multiples of one program in the program, in this case, being a beautiful woman, that
is, that is nude.
So was he telling them to do, well, print another woman, right?
So that's what he does, he prints another woman, and there you go.
Now I'm going to, oh, right, yeah, you know what, I'm not even going to go into the vulnerabilities
of the women, because it was just horse crap.
But the weird thing about it, later on, one of the bad guys for whatever reason, like legit,
they didn't even try to explain how the bad guy got printed.
They could have easily have explained it like, oh, the scientists let his cat in and his
cat walked on the keyboard, which triggered the, the program to print the bad guy, right?
So the bad guy, he gets printed, he comes out and he's like, hey, print my friends too,
right?
The scientist goes, okay, I'll print him.
He starts the printing process.
And in the middle of printing the guy, so the guy is popping out of like this vat of
ooze, that's, I don't know how it's supposed to work, but yeah, it's ooze in the, in the
programs are made real from the ooze.
And you can see like his face is breaking through the ooze about to, you know, it, it
come out of it.
And then the scientist guy reaches over and slaps the keyboard a few times and that
canceled the printing process, right?
So rather than they're just being a half formed human, which emerges from the ooze, no,
because it was born in the, in the middle of the process, I guess the guy just returns
into ooze again.
Like he just goes back and it's like, you guys going to take a second or two to explain
that process?
No, no explanation needed and why, and why on earth, like they, they had no sort of warning
or count down system or anything before you just print anything out of the system, right?
No safety mechanisms that keep you from, you know, printing the wrong thing.
You know what I mean?
No, you didn't have to put in a username and password to access this, this, you know,
weapon they're using, because that's what it turned out to be.
You, you printed a guy who is basically a demon of some sorts, he's like super powerful.
Well, you know what, maybe I'm taking it a bit too far there, but he's, he's supposed
to be like really, really strong, right?
Like he's the boss on level 10 and no one can defeat him.
So basically he's a weapon and even shot him with lasers and they didn't affect him.
So yeah, you know, basically he's a weapon, you know, but either way, I enjoyed talking
with the guys, ripping these movies to shreds, having good laughs, and we chatted about
a lot of stuff before the movies, even came about, you know, net miner was talking about
the diet pie.
I thought I had heard that distro before, but it was a while ago on YouTube or something
like that.
I was watching some videos about diet pie, but I might be getting it mixed up with something
else.
There was a reason I didn't test it.
I can't remember what it was down, but there was a reason I just didn't even bother to
test it from what I saw on that video.
But net miner has some interesting things to say about it.
I won't spoil them all here, but he was doing what we all do with things, you know, whenever
technology comes out and they say, hey, this is what we designed it to do.
Net miner went, went for the old, what else can it do?
And he explains that during the show.
So I won't spoil it.
You go on this to it.
You'll hear all about it.
Fun stuff.
I might even play around with it to see what he's talking about now that he mentioned it,
because, well, you know what, no, because I would have to test it on my pie zero.
And that pie zero, when you're putting a desktop environment on it, whew, it's a pie zero
to W or pie zero W2, whichever, so running it headless is fine.
You know, just TTY, but they won't be trying to stop a desktop environment on it.
I mean, when I first got it, I slapped the desktop environment on it and whew, boy, that
thing was, it was crawling.
Maybe it's a little bit better today, maybe they made some optimizations, but during that
time, yikes.
Man, in fact, now I think about it, I think honky said that he was running the etherpad
and some stuff like that on it.
That's a great little system right there.
I'm wondering if he can run a etherpad on it.
I was thinking about something like Joplin.
You know how Joplin has will know, because I like having my Joplin attached to my next
cloud.
And it works.
It works having it attached to next cloud.
I go trying to fool around and get another setup going.
I'm going to end up dumping like 20 hours into that, trying to get it working the way
I wanted to work.
And only to find out that it wasn't intended to work that way.
And I should have just kept using next cloud.
So no, but I may test out that etherpad though, I mean, no, no, no, I'll just keep Joplin.
Joplin works just fine.
It's cross-platform.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No need to mess around just yet.
Plus, I don't even know if etherpad has what do you call it, dark mode?
Yeah.
Without dark mode, man.
I just, I don't know if I can do it.
Whenever I go to dump stuff into etherpad, like I do everything in VEM first, make sure
I got it all lined up and it's done properly, copy it onto the clipboard, pop in the etherpad
just for that split second to do a control V, and then I'm out of there with no dark
mode.
I can't hang around in there.
So that's about it.
What I'm going to do now is I'm at the library, so I'm going to go fill up my Stanley
thermos.
They got one of those water fountains in there.
It's pretty good.
I didn't have much lunch today, so most of the time I spent here chatting with you guys,
and I'm going to go back to working a little bit.
I'm still a little early, but we'll figure it out.
I'll just probably kick some rocks while I'm there.
Alright, guys, so I hope that I enticed you guys to do a show of your own here on hacker
public radio.
As you can see, I'm doing a show about my experiences hanging out in the Linux lug.
That particular Linux lug is the Linux lug cast.
From my understanding, it's an open podcast, it's a lug cast, so everyone's invited.
You're welcome to just swing on by, if you search up the website, I'll probably have to
drop it down in the show notes, so you guys can check it out.
If you don't want to do a podcast with a bunch of people all chatting at once, you can
do like I'm doing right now here on hacker public radio, recorder show, tell us about
the movie that you watch.
Maybe you watched the Artifice Girl and you thought it was great, and Scotty, you have
terrible taste in movies, you know?
Maybe that's the case.
Maybe you watched virtual combat and it was the best movie ever.
Tell us about it.
Or maybe you've got a project that you're preparing with the Raspberry Pi, and maybe it's
not the most exciting, but it'd still be nice to chat with someone about it.
Do a show.
It's simple.
Not a whole lot of effort involved.
I'm at the public library, I'm actually in the parking lot of the public library upload
in the show, so there you go.
Easy peasy.
Catch you later.
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Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out
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