Crime scene: AI

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Episode of the series Tatort
Original title AI
Country of production Germany
original language German
Production
company		 Bavarian radio
classification Episode 1069 ( List )
First broadcast October 21, 2018 on Das Erste
Rod
Director Sebastian Marka
script Stefan Holtz and Florian Iwersen
music Thomas Mehlhorn
camera Willy Dettmeyer
cut Sebastian Marka
occupation

KI is a television film from the crime series Tatort . The report produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk is the 1069th Tatort episode and was broadcast on the program Das Erste on October 21, 2018 . The Munich investigator duo Batic and Leitmayr are investigating their 79th case.

action

14-year-old Melanie has disappeared. Traces of violence can be found in the house and garden, an artificial intelligence (AI) called "Maria" on her laptop . Melanie's separated parents, both of whom were not on site at the time of the crime, are just as surprised by this as the researchers behind “Maria” at the Leibniz data center in Garching near Munich (LRZ). Her AI, which was developed in top secret with EU funds, was hacked and, since she floated freely as “Maria”, has developed much faster than her in-house version “Exmap”. The only 20-year-old LRZ employee Anna, the super brain of the team, is fascinated by it and urges her boss to further exhaust the potential of her project.

Melanie is rescued dead from the Isar . The first possible perpetrator, an LRZ system administrator living in their neighborhood and possibly a spanner , evades the imminent arrest and dies on the run. The second suspect, a convicted sex offender, is recognized by "Maria" (he was in Melanie's room), but released by the judge. Melanie's father goes to vigilante justice, kidnaps and kills him. The motive of vengeance also played a role in the actual course of events: Melanie had grown into a feeling of loneliness and wanted to commit suicide by swallowing a deadly cocktail from her mother's drug arsenal; surprised by her, she fled and fell into the Isar; the mother's half-hearted rescue attempt ended with Melanie drowning or even drowning.

Finally, Leitmayr and Batic also clarify how the sexual offender's false accusation came about. “Maria” was not mistaken, she had been deceived by human manipulation; the ambitious Anna wanted to gain time to prepare the AI ​​for its final “liberation”. Now she is arrested herself. But she quietly triumphs - her plan has evidently succeeded.

Title and subject

At the beginning, the film safeguards the focus on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) in two ways: in addition to the title, a kind of motto reminiscent of the almost 70-year-old Turing test , which is only considered successful when a “machine ”Is so“ intelligent ”that a person communicating with it can no longer distinguish it from a human counterpart. - Was it planned to equip the AI ​​"Exmap" developed in the LRZ for the Turing test? This is explicitly mentioned in a one-to-one conversation between Anna and her boss, but in the sense of a secret dream that both of them once cherished and which has now reawakened in Anna through “Maria”.

How does the AI ​​"Exmap" / "Maria" work? According to the writers she has three components: (1) a semantic detect search engine with access to the digital world knowledge, (2) a program that faces and can distinguish emotions, (3) a the first two components linking learning algorithm , by that the AI ​​should gradually bring its communicative level closer to that of its human interlocutors. - According to Anna's criticism, the weak point of her in-house product "Exmap" is the 30 test subjects nominated by her who knew exactly that they were sitting across from a machine, unlike the approximately 7,000 strangers who came into contact with "Maria". Your boss counters this by saying that you are responsible for your subjects; he does not want to break the contract and thereby endanger the project as a whole. So the film is also about the conflict between the desirable and the feasible, between idealism and pragmatism .

How does he now link the topic of AI with the criminal case? Above all by showing how the actors turn “Maria” into a projection screen with very different ambitions. The adolescent who tends to isolate herself sees her as a friend; the hyper-intelligent technology optimist uses “Maria” (the illegal clone of a technology pessimist of all people) as an opportunity to (illegally if necessary) to satisfy her personal ambitions, and thus mutates into a “mad scientist” ; Finally, the commissioners regard her as a potential instigator (legally unobjectionable), as an important witness (not yet legally accepted) and as a possible stooge in preventing revenge murder (whose uninfluenced success reveals the limits of her ability to learn and her authority).

Why the name Maria? The one who called the AI ​​so is the hacker of "Exmap"; the religious connotation is possibly wanted by him - as an ironic allusion to one of the four Marys - dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church , her immaculate conception . Perhaps the hacker also wants to meet and mock his boss directly, whose dogma is apparently the security of "Exmap", in which he naively believes. When this belief is taken ad absurdum, Leitmayr smugly squeals : "Nothing more Maria and the unhacked conception."

Another connection can be made via Maria / Mary to the philosophical thought experiment called Mary's Room . It describes Mary as a brilliant scientist (human, but de facto an AI) living in an artificial world, and raises the question of whether she can learn something new that she knows about when she leaves her artificial world , but what she did not experience . - Anna is faced with the same question when “Maria” describes what she smelled. Spontaneously she exclaims “But you can't smell!” And is at the same time both fascinated and “hooked” to get to the bottom of this paradox .

background

The film was shot in Munich from September 5, 2017 to October 6, 2017. It was premiered at the Emden-Norderney International Film Festival on June 9, 2018.

reception

Reviews

Some amazement aroused in the film critics that the topic AI was chosen at all, with reference to numerous predecessors from the recent past in the Tatort format alone , such as echo sounder , HAL , Borowski and the dark web or animals of the big city . As far as the implementation of the topic is concerned, the praise for the form (“stylish look”, “visually a revelation”) and criticism for the content prevail, especially in direct comparison with the predecessors.

Echo sounder for example, was indeed trashy but also willing to take risks, have been Christian Buss said: "As there the loneliness of young people with high-end - simulation business opportunities was amalgamated, was touching." Matthias Dell again displeased that in AI intelligence work again and again into “Analogs” flee when the “digital” seems too complicated: “Instead of inventing a plausible story about how the protected data could perhaps be read out”, switch to the story of the LRZ hackers and neighboring tensioners, or you let Melanie's father carry out his "stupid revenge murder on the alleged sexual killer of his daughter with the computer running".

“So far, Marka has only delivered outstanding 'crime scenes'. [...] 'KI' fits seamlessly into this gallery of exceptional crime novels. […] Marka not only refined the stories, he also gave the films an irresistible flow. 'KI' develops an equally complex visual language and has this magical narrative flow that takes the viewer with it from scene to scene. "

- Rainer Tittelbach : tittelbach.tv

“With cinematic 'Tatorte' like the Berlin episode ' Meta ' or the ' Se7en ' variation for the Frankfurt TV district, director Sebastian Marka has artistically expanded the format of the series again and again, and here he lags behind its predecessors on the subject of artificial intelligence , at least he doesn't add anything new to them. The really stylish look cannot hide the fact that the plot [...] is much less complex than would be appropriate for the supposedly highly complex computer program. The artificial intelligence in the Munich 'Tatort' then develops no more charm than a mobile assistant: Maria, turn off the television. "

- Christian Buß : Spiegel Online

“[It] can be felt that AI only works with half the computing power when integrating the virtual Maria. Or to put it in the lovely language of the programmer: It doesn't really work. The film hardly lingers at the discursive heights of its subject ('Why, please, should a machine lie?'). "

- Matthias Dell : Time Online

Audience ratings

The first broadcast of KI on October 21, 2018 was seen by 8.48 million viewers in Germany and achieved a market share of 24.0% for Das Erste .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Tatort Munich: “KI” press dossiers. Statements from the scriptwriters. BR.de, September 6, 2018, accessed on October 28, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Crime scene: KI at crew united
  3. ↑ Crime scene: KI. New German films. In: Internationales Filmfest Emden-Norderney 2018 . Filmfest Emden, accessed on September 21, 2018 (premiere on June 9, 2018).
  4. ↑ a b c d Christian Buß: "Tatort" about artificial intelligence. Who still believes in unhacked conception? In: Culture. Spiegel Online, October 19, 2018, accessed on October 20, 2018 : "Rating: 5 out of 10 points"
  5. ^ A b c Matthias Dell: "Tatort" Munich. The rest is just an accessory. In: Culture. Zeit Online, October 21, 2018, accessed October 28, 2018 .
  6. ^ A b Rainer Tittelbach: "Tatort - KI" series. In: row. tittelbach.tv, October 21, 2018, accessed on October 28, 2018 : "Rating: 5.5 out of 6 stars"
  7. ↑ Fabian Riedner: Primetime check: Sunday, October 21, 2018.quotemeter.de , October 22, 2018, accessed on October 22, 2018 .
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