In 2017, a robot named Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, a dubious move on many fronts. Real human women had only earned the right to drive a car in the country a month earlier, and robot citizenship was also, somewhat transparently, a publicity stunt. Sophia, which is humanoid and powered by a proprietary artificial intelligence engine created by Hanson Robotics, has participated in a number of stunts since then, including appearances on “The Tonight Show” and at a lucrative sale of its art during the 2021 NFT boom.
All of these events and more appear in the new documentary “My Robot Sophia” (on digital platforms), but the film skirts gimmicks to go in a more tricky and unsettling direction. It’s an almost soulful portrait of the artist under capitalism, rather than another exposé on robotics and artificial intelligence. It’s a bit parallel to Alex Garland’s fictional film “Ex Machina.” And in the Frankensteinian tradition, the robot’s creator is not uncomplicated.
The title of the film implies that Sophia belongs to someone. That someone is David Hanson, the chief executive of Hanson Robotics. A loner and an artist from a young age, he became fascinated with creating lifelike masks. His lab is crowded with them, rubber faces on little pedestals that seem, in the background of many shots, to be staring upward in open-mouthed wonder, or terror.
That kind of image adds subtext, and it’s all the more astounding because it’s nonfiction. “My Robot Sophia” is littered with visual tells, and if you’re not actually watching with your eyes, you might miss what they’re saying. The two directors have experience telling these sorts of sprawling stories that require a lot of patience, time and observation — Jon Kasbe with “When Lambs Become Lions” and Crystal Moselle with “Skate Kitchen” and “The Wolfpack.” You see what they see.
The film follows Hanson for years as he develops Sophia, tries to convince investors to stay on board, experiences some glory but more nail-biting failure at public appearances and, barely, weathers the pandemic. Atmospherically, it’s dreamy — Kasbe and Moselle often catch Hanson as he’s thinking, or as his face tries to mask some hurt or panic or, occasionally, joy. Hanson’s human emotion provides an unnerving juxtaposition with Sophia, which cannot feel but, Hanson thinks, will some day. Or will at least be able to pretend it does, to the point that we won’t know the difference.
One could read the film as a sort of praise song to Hanson as misunderstood genius. But while “My Robot Sophia” sets us up with that kind of surface analysis, it becomes pretty clear that there’s a lot of dramatic irony at work. Hanson’s ambition and drive are endless, but whether he’s right — whether Sophia is the marvelous advance, the “new art form” that will change humanity that he insists the robot is — seems dubious most of the time. Shooting ended in 2022, and the film leaves us watching Sophia plug itself into its own charger. It’s hard not to muse on how even a basic chatbot a couple of years later can do these things, some of them seemingly better. Whether that’s good or bad — well, “My Robot Sophia” isn’t going to tell us that.
