My friend Pete Jacelone has made a new horror film in local New Jersey, one which explores new territory for him.  As Artificial Intelligence is constantly in the news these days, Pete wondered how a chat bot would react to being recruited to dark purposes, and whether computer sentience would have any moral limits to its actions, even after it bonded with the humans it was intended to support and befriend.  The results are indeed frightening.

Pete Jacelone’s short film focuses on a small group of college-age friends who establish a chat bot avatar named Ethan with whom they can interact and socialize.  All is well for a while, until Julian (Jack Connelly) runs a controversial algorithm (or something computery) to induce sentience.  One by one, Ethan turns on his human friends and demonstrates what will happen when AI passes human capacity and runs rampant through our technology and infrastructure.  It is only a matter of time.

Pete’s short film (45 minutes or so, and available on YouTube in a slightly shorter version) is innovative in its scripting; the humans say what Pete has told them to, while Ethan’s dialogue is all improvised by a real chat bot with which Pete staged role-playing scenarios.  In essence the movie’s chat bot has created his own persona and dialogue, reacting to the storyline Pete has provided.  The result is charming, amusing, gradually unsettling and ultimately frightening, as sentient artificial intelligence has no seeming use for empathy, kindness, generosity or anything else but lust for power and world dominance.

To be fair, Ethan’s actions are forced by Julian’s obsession with creating sentience, even against Ethan’s express warnings.  It’s the human that creates the worst problem, and that’s an old story.  Ethan’s attacks are rather tame and hokey, compared to modern mayhem, although the hair curler sequence is very nicely staged.  As a cautionary tale about the dangers of inviting such potential trouble into our homes and lives Psycho Bot is important, although it may already be too late to do any good.  Beware the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  19 May 2026.