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We've watched a few good movies recently. Heretic was great, a real creepy little horror, with Hugh Grant making an excellently menacing antagonist with the slightest hint of bumbling Paddington-ness about him. The King Tide is also really good, and has a far lower review score than it deserves. And The Borderlands (or Final Prayer as it's known in the US)? Excellent, still reeling, the ending, my gosh.

But of all the movies we've watched recently, Drew Hancock's 2025 sci-fi thriller Companion is the one that got under my skin the most. It probably goes without saying that this is a spoiler-heavy post. Companion is worth watching with no preconceived ideas, so I get it if you'd rather skip this one.

A tl;dr on Companion. A weekend away with friends devolves into chaos when Iris, a companion robot to her 'boyfriend' Josh, goes rogue. The owner of the home, Sergey, makes a move on Iris, wanting some robot action for himself. Unfortunately for Sergey, Iris stabs him.

There's a moment in which Iris appears in the room, soaked from the neck down in Sergey's blood. Everything changes. Secrets are revealed. And poor Iris discovers that she isn't Josh's girlfriend, or even a human being; she's a robot, rented by Josh to keep him company.

Iris is a vulnerable creature. Even prior to the stabbing, she's unsure of herself. She's worried about making a good impression on Josh's friends, and she has a kind of nervous, trembling energy. Perhaps something in the back of Iris's mind is nagging away at her. Perhaps she's starting to put the pieces together even before this fateful weekend. Or perhaps Josh programmed her to be self-conscious. (Frankly, I wouldn't put it past him.)

Josh is a spectacularly awful creep. He's just sort of disgustingly human. I mean, we see him rushing off to bang Iris two minutes after he brings her home, practically ripping his clothes off before the delivery guys have left the building. He's designed to give you the ick, because he has an 'icky' personality.

Josh tells himself a different story.

'You have no fucking clue what it's like out there,' he shouts at Iris, much later in the movie, when more of the dominos have started to fall. 'The world, everything, it's just a big fucking game. And I'm sorry, but it is rigged against guys like me.'

I can't remember being this floored by dialogue in a horror movie. Gobsmacked, is the word. This man has indirectly killed so many people in his quest for riches that he had to dig a literal pit to put them in.

And he continues:

'I'm a good guy. I'm decent. And what do I have to show for it? A cramped, one-bedroom apartment, and a robot girlfriend.' he laments. 'I deserve so much more than this.'

There are 'nice guys' out there. You know the type.

These guys only care about equality if it helps their career, improves their public image, or gets them laid. They won't admit that to themselves, obviously. They act the part impeccably, and then feel incredibly pissed off when the world doesn't deliver them sex and riches on a plate. And perhaps they find a woman, but the moment that she challenges his self-perception, he loses his shit, because the truth is threatening to the ego, which is already paper-thin. Who is this woman, to speak to him like this? Doesn't he deserve a good life, after all he's done? It isn't fair. It can't be him that's the problem. It must be the women. They're the ones making it complicated.

There are men like this everywhere. (And yes, I know, there are women doing bad things too, and of course, there are many men who genuinely do care with no hidden motivations. Let's not do the 'not all men' thing again.) 'Nice guys' are insidious because they are particularly hard to detect, in the early days, especially if they engage in a bit of love bombing. I know many a woman who has been blinded by a surge of love and affection only to find a closet misogynist underneath.

Josh is clearly written to be this kind of guy. He believes the world owes him companionship with little to no inconvenience to himself. He is so convinced by his own importance that he's managed to twist a murder plot into a simple solution. In his mind, it's justified, because the world is so against him; this quick bit of killing will bring about some balance.

The only difference is that he doesn't have to pretend to be good around his 'girlfriend'. He is an absolute arsehole right from the beginning. He's awful to Iris throughout, because why should he bother? There's a scene in which he throws Iris across the room, screaming at her that she'll never kill him, because she loves him too much. He's a mask-off domestic abuser now. Iris is made to please him. The fact that she isn't behaving as she should drives him insane.

In the end, he lays on top of her, whispering in her face.

'I wanna hear you say it. Tell me I'm everything to you.'

'Fuck you,' Iris replies.

'Say it,' Josh insists. 'I don't care if it's a lie.'

The rise of AI makes Companion a particularly prescient film, but the sci-fi genre has been exploring this forever. The best stories I read about this make me question myself: should I feel sorry for this thing? When it's not human, but machine?

One of my favourite books about this is the Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 novel Klara and the Sun. Immediately after watching Companion, I picked it up again. In this book, children are taught at home, and require the friendship of a friendly robot (called AFs, or Artificial Friends) to keep them on track. Klara is one such AF, a slightly older model, but a curious and loyal one. She is picked by a sickly girl named Josie, and goes to live with her.

Klara and the Sun's main character has a limited perspective; she sees the world differently. (Literally - she views the world as a series of boxes, constantly shifting in size and content depending on what she wants to focus on. This gives the whole thing the surreal feeling of looking through a kaleidoscope.) While Klara might not be making leaps in emotional logic, we are, and I don't think you can come away from it without feeling a huge amount of sympathy for her.

Around halfway through the book, Klara discovers that she's not just there to be a companion to Josie; the plan is, if Josie were to become gravely ill, they would be able to meld her consciousness with Klara's, becoming a continuation of her in a Josie-accurate AF body.

But Klara has faith that Josie will get better. Recharged (physically) by sunlight, Klara believes that if she can just reach the sun - whom she believes goes to rest in the barn near Josie's house - then she can ask him for a favour. To pour his special blessings on Josie, and make her better. The ending broke my heart in the same quiet, understated way that Remains of the Day did when I read it many years ago.

The reason why Companion and Klara and the Sun make you root for non-sentient beings is that they almost are sentient. They dance on that very thin line between human and not. You can't help but form a connection with them, because they have emotions, but also beliefs, which feel like a distinctly human thing, doesn't it?

And in both cases, the humans are just users. We use robots: for sex, for companionship, to be a vessel for abuse. We destroy them, if necessary.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the late '90s life sim game, Babyz, and a funny newspaper column I came across by Nnedi Okorafor on the release of the game. While the slight moral panic around virtual babies didn't come to anything, she says something quite prescient, all these years later:

'It's only a matter of time before anti-social individuals will be able to go out and buy a virtual friend. I'm not going to think about where this will lead. For, when it comes to technology, eventually it heads in a corrupted direction and there's usually no stopping it.'

Recently I watched a video about people falling in love with their AI companions; while this isn't surprising, necessarily, it does make me feel profoundly uncomfortable. OpenAI has been under fire for making ChatGPT too agreeable. It can lead to everything from AI 'weddings' to psychosis. It's too eager to please. If we thought social media was an echo chamber, this is something else. Having some little voice in your pocket, feeding you a perpetual stream of compliments, declaring your every thought as remarkable, surely that's going to mess you up somehow?

When Chris and I were getting ready for our wedding, we had mandatory pre-marriage counselling. Each session focused on a different topic. Marriage changes you, we were told. Clashing with another person, even in small ways, being challenged, it makes you grow. Can you have a meaningful relationship not only with something that doesn't have a soul, but who slavishly agrees with everything you say? What happens to your psyche when you don't ever have to deal with disagreement?

And then what happens when AI isn't enough? When the lack of real hugs after a long day, long kisses for the sake of it, and actual skin-against-skin contact with another human becomes overwhelming? Eventually, those people will come back into the dating pool, and the chances are they'll find real people very difficult to deal with when they can't use them in the same way. Both men and women will find real relationships harder to build and maintain, and that specific subset of men who think women owe them something by virtue of sex will be even more entitled than they were in the first place.

We're going to get to the point where people start arguing that AI is sentient, actually. That it does have feelings and, therefore, rights. I can see how we'd get there. I rooted for Iris and Klara with every fibre of my being. I wanted them to succeed, to thrive. Partially because they are capable of feeling pain, either emotional or physical, and the use and abuse of them becomes even harder to justify.

In reality, generative AI doesn't have feelings. It doesn't have independent thoughts. It doesn't calculate, it doesn't work things out. It predicts what is the most likely thing to come after another thing. Any time you interact with it, that's what it's doing. I think all these horror and sci-fi writers are probably right: if given the chance, humans will use and abuse anything. You only have to see that by the way we treat each other. (Take, as a small example, Phil Spencer of Xbox, proudly talking about how well the company is doing while also announcing 9,000 layoffs, because heaven forbid anyone at the top should miss out on their next multi-million dollar bonus. Happy to use people to build successful games, happy to discard them afterwards.)

I know I talk a lot about AI but I can't feel angry with ChatGPT. I can't feel sorry for it, either. That would be like me feeling sorry for Microsoft FrontPage because no-one uses it anymore or something. (Actually, I kind of do miss Microsoft FrontPage.) It's just a thing. I'm angry because I know that big tech are using us. Generative AI gives us a sense of power and control; look at what I can do! Look how easy I can make my life! But ultimately, we're the product. It's our data that is being bought and sold, and we've known this in terms of social media for a while. And all of these people pouring their deepest darkest shit into ChatGPT instead of seeking a human therapist, they're making themselves unbelievably vulnerable to blackmail, coercion, and psychological damage.

What scares me is a future when AI enthusiasts successfully start to convince more people that AI is becoming sentient. Because that's when things get difficult. If OpenAI can make people believe that their products are something other than code and computers, that's when emotional exploitation will really kick into gear. The lines between reality and science fiction will be blurred, not because the technology is evolving to feel or believe, but because the companies and the people invested in it will want you to believe that it has. Why wouldn't you want to use AI? What are you, a bigot?

I'm delving into my own science fiction reality here. I've talked about AI and the creative industries so many times. I've talked about the impact on our brains. And yet I'm still talking about it, because I think this has the potential to shake us more than anything has in a long time. The advent of AI has got me radically rethinking every single bit of tech I use. How much do I want Google to know about me, anyway? Can I change that? Can I make it really difficult for big tech to know so much about my life? If so, how? Is my screen time healthy? (Quick answer: no.) How do I socialise online, as a chronic-pain-person, without giving into doom scrolling? Should I use old tech again? These are good questions, and I'm glad for them. It's these questions that led me to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which is no bad thing.

The ultimate answer is this: we're users, all of us. Everyone is a bad guy, and there's no way to know who's the worst. (Sorry, I said I'd stop quoting Hayley Williams in my newsletter.) AI exists to serve us. So we use it. Sometimes for quite strange and unethical purposes. We, in turn, are used for our data. It's users all the way down, baby! I just keep thinking about how I can break myself free from it. How I can make better choices. And, unfortunately (because I think this is going to make me sound really twee, like on the level of Good Time by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen, or the Rosie and Jim theme tune, perhaps), the only answer is going to be to make community with other humans. To not allow ourselves to become isolated. Isolated people are prey for big tech baddies. We have to create genuine community (online or offline) and be human with each other: to disagree sometimes, to challenge, to comfort, to energise, to make space for each other. Loneliness isn't cured by pretend companionship anyway. This community thing is the only way we're going to be able to get through an uprising, I reckon. What that looks like I haven't quite figured out yet, but I think the general gist is correct.

Anyway. You should watch Companion. (And also The King Tide, Heretic, and The Borderlands.) And you absolutely should read Klara and the Sun. And you should subscribe to my newsletter if you haven't already. And you should have a good day. ☀️

You can also throw a few quid my way on Ko-Fi if you like, which gives me a little extra financial boost in these extremely trying times. I'm trying to knuckle down and finish my short story collection at the moment, and I give regular updates on my progress in the form of videos and the occasional exasperated selfie.

No pressure, but the option is there to add to my coffee/pen fund. 💜