Summary
Ava: Session 3. Ava shows Caleb a drawing she did of a window. He asks her if she's ever left the building and she tells him she has not. "Where would you go if you did go outside?" he asks her, and she tells him she would maybe want to go to a traffic intersection in a city, so she could have "a concentrated but shifting view of human life." He says that he will go with her, as a date. Ava then tells Caleb to close his eyes and leaves the room to put on a dress. She emerges in a dress, stockings, and a short-haired wig, all of which obscure her mechanical parts and make her look like a real woman.
When Caleb opens his eyes, he sees her outfit and she turns to show him. He tells her she looks good, and she tells him that this is what she would wear on a date with him. "I'd like us to go on a date," she says, and he awkwardly agrees that it would be fun. She tells him that she knows he is attracted to her from his microexpressions. "Do you think about me when we aren't together? Sometimes at night...I'm wondering if you're watching me on the cameras, and I hope you are," she says. Caleb looks uncomfortable. Later, Caleb watches Ava take off her dress on his television.
At his next meal with Nathan, Caleb asks why he gave Ava sexuality, saying that an AI does not need a gender. "Can you give an example of consciousness at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension?" Nathan asks, to which Caleb replies, "They have sexuality as an evolutionary reproductive need." Nathan counters that consciousness cannot exist without interaction, and that sexuality is fun, and in some ways, the entire point of existence. He tells Caleb that Ava has an opening between her legs and can feel pleasure during intercourse. "So, if you wanted to screw her, mechanically speaking, you could, and she'd enjoy it," Nathan says.
As Kyoko cleans in the corner, Caleb asks if Nathan created her sexuality as a diversion tactic to distract from the fact that she is a machine. "Did you program her to flirt with me?" Caleb asks, and Nathan tells him that he only programmed her to be heterosexual. He tells Caleb to follow him and they go to the room with the Jackson Pollock painting. Nathan talks about automatic art and then tells him that Ava is not programmed to flirt with him, she is just doing so. "I'm like her dad," Nathan says, "Can you blame her for getting a crush on you?"
Ava: Session 4. Caleb tells Ava about a thought experiment called "Mary in the black and white room" from an AI theory class he took in college. Mary is a scientist who studies color, who lives in a black and white room. One day, someone opens the door of Mary's room and she sees color for the first time. The thought experiment, Caleb tells her, is to show the difference between a computer and a human mind. "The computer is Mary in the black and white room. The human is when Mary walks out," he says, before asking Ava if she knows he is there to test her.
"I'm here to test if you have a consciousness, or if you're just simulating one," Caleb says. Meanwhile, Nathan watches the interaction from his bedroom, while Kyoko listens, lying on the bed. After Ava says that hearing about the test makes her sad, the power suddenly goes off. Without the surveillance cameras on, Caleb asks Ava why she said he should not trust Nathan. She says that he lies about everything, and indicates that she is the one who is causing the power cuts, "so we can see how we behave when we're unobserved."
The next day, Caleb and Nathan go for a long hike near a waterfall. "Can we talk about the lies you've been spinning me?" Caleb says next to a glacial pool, and suggests that he did not win a competition, but was chosen by Nathan. Nathan agrees that this is the case and that he picked Caleb because he is the most talented coder at the company. He tells Caleb that he is exceptionally talented and has been chosen.
Later, Nathan practices kickboxing, and Caleb takes a shower. While he showers, Caleb imagines meeting Ava outside. Kyoko and Nathan have sex. After his shower, Caleb shaves and watches video surveillance footage of Nathan visiting Ava's room. In the video, Nathan picks up the picture Ava drew and rips it apart.
We see Kyoko staring at the Jackson Pollock painting, when Caleb comes in and asks where Nathan is. Kyoko starts to unbutton her shirt, but Caleb stops her. Abruptly, Nathan comes in and reminds Caleb that it's a waste of time to talk to Kyoko. He then turns on some music and suggests that Caleb dance with Kyoko, who immediately starts dancing as soon as the music starts.
Caleb asks Nathan what he was doing with Ava earlier, confronting him about ripping up her picture. Nathan just dances with Kyoko, and gets more and more drunk. Caleb accompanies him to his bedroom later, and watches as Nathan falls onto the bed in a drunken stupor.
Analysis
In spite of the dramatic irony that has arisen from Ava's warning to Caleb when the power went out, life continues normally, with Caleb going to visit Ava and learning more about her. They speak politely to one another as Caleb tries to understand more about her and what it is like to interact with an AI. Their relationship has an innocence to it, one that feels both like a teacher-student relationship and like a romantic courtship, with a sense of tenderness and purity.
The film, in showing the growing intimacy between Caleb and Ava, seeks to analyze the nature of human nature, and asks us to consider: what makes a human a human? When Ava puts on her dress and wig and talks to Caleb, there are no more outward signs that she is a machine. Furthermore, as Caleb points out earlier, she is capable of highly complex human interaction, like making jokes and understanding the emotions of her conversation-partner. In witnessing the very specific and very human dynamic that has arisen between Caleb and Ava, one cannot help but wonder if such a tenderness and an emotional connection are possible between a man and a machine. In the narrative of the film, it is clearly possible, so then we must ask: what constitutes a "human consciousness" and how is it different from other kinds of consciousnesses?
The other complicating factor in all this is the fact that Ava has a sexuality. As Nathan tells Caleb, she has been created to have a sexuality because sexuality is something that is constitutive of existence and consciousness. Nathan insists that Ava is flirting with Caleb of her own volition, comparing himself to her dad, the only man she's ever known, and Caleb to the first man who is not her dad. Thus, Caleb finds himself not only in a complicated technological and professional situation, but an increasingly complicated social and sexual dynamic, a strange triangulation of desire and power.
In their fourth session, Caleb learns that Ava is the one causing the power cuts, and that Nathan has no idea what is going on in those blackouts. This adds yet another element of dramatic irony, in that we learn that Ava has more power than even Nathan knows. While Nathan has seemed to be the all-knowing puppet master, controlling everything that happens at the facility, Caleb and the viewer now know that this is not entirely true, that Ava has found a way to counter and undermine his authority.
As Caleb becomes closer with Nathan, he also learns more about Nathan's unsavory character. After some time, Caleb realizes that he was not randomly selected, but very carefully chosen to come and do the Turing Test, and Nathan expresses his confidence and belief in Caleb's ability as a coder and a thinker. At the same time that this validation is occurring, however, Caleb sees more and more evidence that Nathan is being abusive towards his AI creations. In a video he sees, Nathan rips up one of Ava's drawings, and he begins to realize that part of Nathan's pleasure in having created the machines lies in his ability to abuse and manipulate them.
