About the Stories We Tell About Artificial Companions

This publication explores films and television stories about artificial intelligence, robots, holograms, virtual companions, and relationships between humans and nonhuman characters. Its subject includes the intimate as well as the spectacular: a voice heard through a speaker, a machine occupying a family home, a synthetic person entering a workplace, or a digital presence becoming part of someone's private life. The central interest is how screen stories imagine emotional relationships with entities that do not share ordinary human bodies, histories, or limitations.

The intended audience includes cinephiles, film-club members, students of cinema and television, science fiction viewers, and readers interested in the cultural questions raised by artificial relationships. These subjects invite discussion across genres, languages, and decades. A silent-era mechanical figure, a domestic computer from the 1980s, and a contemporary conversational intelligence can all illuminate different assumptions about intimacy, identity, labor, memory, and human attachment.

The editorial approach is explanatory and grounded in what appears on screen. Articles examine composition, editing, sound, production design, acting, narrative structure, and the choices that shape an audience's understanding of artificial characters. The publication uses AI writing tools as part of its editorial work, with an emphasis on clear language, identifiable cinematic details, careful distinctions between fictional possibilities and real technological capabilities, and interpretations that readers can question and discuss.

What you will find here

Cue Mark publishes 6 entries, among them Reel Log: Her (2013) and Five Beats in a Relationship With a Voice, Double Bill: Electric Dreams (1984) and Her (2013), Two Eras of Loving an Invisible Other, Reel Log: Blade Runner 2049 and Five Stages of a Hologram in a Small Apartment.

How the entries are made

Entries are written by the Cue Mark editors with the help of AI writing tools and are meant as general information. They are not professional, legal, medical or financial advice, and details can change, so check primary sources before you act on anything.

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