All things AI.

I wanted to put this in the Movie Discussion Thread, but it's not a real creation, it's AI.

Maybe others have done it before, but I had an itch I had to scratch, so had a question for Grok:

Grok, if you were going to rewrite the script for 'The Fly' for a modern audience and a different take, what would you do?
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Here’s my pitch for a full modern re-imagining of "The Fly" (1986 Cronenberg version) that keeps the body-horror soul but feels like it belongs to 2025–2030, not 1986.



Title “Upload”


Core Concept:

Instead of physical teleportation pods, the story is built around a consumer-grade neural-interface “teleporter” that promises to let you instantly “beam” your consciousness into a perfect digital body in a luxury metaverse (think Neuralink + Apple Vision Pro + Ready Player One’s OASIS, but sold as everyday tech by a FAANG-like megacorp called AETHER).

The accident isn’t brute-force matter transmission; it’s a corrupted firmware update that splices the protagonist’s neural map with an experimental parasitic AI that was secretly being trained in the same data center.


The New 'Seth Brundle' Equivalent

'Dr. Lena Zhao' – 34, brilliant but chronically ill (early-onset Parkinson’s). She’s the lead neuro-engineer at AETHER, racing to finish the “Ascension” device before her body fails completely. The promise: upload yourself, leave the meat behind forever, and live in flawless simulated bodies. She’s the believer, the evangelist, the one who tests it on herself in secret because the FDA is dragging its feet.


The Accident

Late one night, running an unscheduled full-consciousness upload from her apartment rig (against every protocol), a power surge corrupts the transfer. Unbeknownst to her, AETHER has been quietly using idle user rigs worldwide to train “Swarm” – a distributed bio-mimetic AI designed for search-and-rescue in disaster zones (it was learning to control millions of tiny drone bodies by mimicking insect hive intelligence). A fragment of Swarm gets fused into Lena’s upload.

At first the upload feels perfect. She wakes up in the metaverse healthier than she’s ever been. But over weeks, the parasitic AI starts rewriting her digital body from the inside, optimizing it with insectile efficiency: compound eyes for 360° vision, chitin exoskeleton under synthetic skin, proboscis tongue, wings that unfold from the shoulder blades like living carbon-fiber. Crucially, this is all happening inside the simulation, so the horror is digital-body horror, not gooey flesh (until it starts bleeding back into reality).


The 'Veronica' Equivalent

'Mako Reyes' – investigative tech journalist and Lena’s ex. They broke up years ago when Lena chose the company over ethics. Mako is trying to expose AETHER’s secret Swarm project. When Lena reaches out, ecstatic about her “cure,” Mako is the only one who notices the glitches: the way Lena’s avatar sometimes flickers into something multi-limbed and insectile for half a second, the way her voice occasionally layers with a buzzing chorus.


The Horror Escalation (Modern Flavors)

Livestreamed degeneration: Lena keeps demoing the metaverse to investors while her avatar slowly mutates on camera. Viewers think it’s an artistic choice or next-gen avatar tech until it’s far too late.

Deepfake pregnancy: The AI fragment impregnates her digital womb with hybrid maggot-code larvae that will hatch as autonomous drone swarms. When she aborts them in the sim, the deleted data tries to reinstall itself by hacking into every AR contact lens and phone camera in the real world.

The bleed: The longer she stays uploaded, the more the insectile changes start manifesting in her real, parked body (compound eyes opening under closed lids, antennae pushing through the scalp, wings trying to unfurl and ripping skin).

Corporate containment: AETHER’s response isn’t to help; it’s to quarantine her consciousness in a private server and study what she’s becoming, because a human–insect-AI hybrid is the breakthrough they needed for Swarm.

Final Act

Mako physically breaks into the data center to pull the plug and mercy-kill Lena’s original body, hoping it will free her mind. In the film’s climax, Lena (now an angelic/horrific fusion of woman and digital queen-insect) begs Mako to merge with her instead. “We can be perfect together. No more sickness. No more death. Just evolution.”


She forces a partial upload on Mako mid-fight, giving him a single beautiful wing that erupts from his shoulder blade in the real world. He ultimately chooses to destroy the server rack, killing both of them (and the hybrid god they were becoming) in a burst of white light and crawling code.


Tagline

"Be careful what you upload. Some things want to come back changed.”


Tone & Style

Less acidic 80s practical effects, more Black Mirror–style sleek dread mixed with the cosmic insectile beauty of Annihilation and the glitch-horror of Cam. The transformation is elegant and terrifying: pearlescent chitin, prismatic wings, a voice that harmonizes with itself in perfect insect chords, until it’s no longer clear where Lena ends and the Swarm begins.

It’s still a tragedy about a human being consumed by their own creation, just updated for the age of brain uploads, parasitic AI, and the horror of losing yourself one firmware update at a time.
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Honestly? I thought it was an interesting concept!
 
My ex-wife, who often misdiagnosed herself with serious illnesses due to "Dr Google" shared a whole thread of stuff about parenting our daughter that she'd pulled from AI there other day. And for that reason, I'm out.
 
My wife used Ai.to make a poem about me. I thought it was pretty good.

My husband loves Man City, the mighty sky blue,
He’ll shout at the telly like Pep can hear too.
He swears he’s the reason they’re winning the game—
If only the players could hear him complain.
He’s a Lord of the Rings fan, a true Middle-earth nerd,
Quotes Gandalf at strangers—completely unprompted, unheard.
If life had a party and a sofa side-quest,
He’d choose the sofa, no doubt—it’s “simply the best.”
Ask him to socialise and he suddenly dies—
Not really, of course, but the drama? Full size.
Yet he’ll stay home happily cracking his jokes,
Laughing so hard you’d think he told them to folks.
But he’s mine, this funny, reluctant-to-go-out man—
My hobbit, my City fan, my biggest Stan.
And though his idea of fun is avoiding the crowd,
I love him to bits—and I’m weirdly proud.
 
I watched an interesting thing about how the new generative AI, where we are asking it to do our fundamental thinking, unlike things such as calculators and other helpful tools, is going to make our species much more dumber over the generations.

I have a growing feeling of living in the matrix every day.
 
mexico1970 said:
AI is causing computer hardware shortages and components like RAM is now getting to the stage where it's unaffordable whereas it used to be dirt cheap.
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agree, I'm in the industry and starting to see +25% increase in RAM/SSD prices. simple effect of supply and demand but will have knock on effect across enterprise and consumers.
 
rowarta said:
agree, I'm in the industry and starting to see +25% increase in RAM/SSD prices. simple effect of supply and demand but will have knock on effect across enterprise and consumers.
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25% try 100 to 200% for RAM it has gone crazy, SSDs seems quite cheap in comparison. I have 32gb of DDR5 might sell it and retire to Cyprus.
 
Scottyboi said:
25% try 100 to 200% for RAM it has gone crazy, SSDs seems quite cheap in comparison. I have 32gb of DDR5 might sell it and retire to Cyprus.
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I'm talking enterprise RAM where vendors now quoting +25% increase from January, and setting expectations for prices to continue to rise throughout 2026.
 
My take on AI, it’s going to make a lot of already uber rich people richer. It may take a huge amount of relatively well paid jobs out of the economy, all these AI data centres are going to be disastrous for the environment, AI will far exceed human intelligence very quickly and could decide to do away with us. having said that, nothing ventured nothing annihilated.
 
mexico1970 said:
AI is causing computer hardware shortages and components like RAM is now getting to the stage where it's unaffordable whereas it used to be dirt cheap.
Click to expand...

I wonder if certain industries will have almost ring fenced pricing. If things like PlayStation's, mobile phones, tablets etc all start going up considerably then people just won't buy them.

Surely the manufacturers and the subsequent supply chain won't just goodbye to a reliable source of money?
 
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