"THERE WAS A REAL-LIFE BLACK WOMAN IN MY COMPUTER": JAZMIN JONES & OLIVIA MCKAYLA ON SEEKING MAVIS BEACON

For a generation of early Millennials and late Gen Xers growing up in North America on the cusp of the dot-com bubble, the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software is likely a foundational aspect of the mental picture they have built of the digital space. Widely installed on elementary and middle school computers throughout the 1980s and 90s, the 2D bit-map-style interface, with virtual keyboard and photo-realistic tutor, was many people’s first encounter with a computer screen ever. 

That Mavis was a black woman was highly atypical, at a time when the tech industry and the visual culture surrounding it (as it is still conceived) was overwhelmingly white and male. And although the three white Silicon Valley entrepreneurs behind The Software Toolworks company that so intentionally marketed her persona, likely selected her image out of a desire to differentiate their product, rather than through any progressive ideals – her representation, that of a poised, professional black woman, nevertheless, offered an emotional gateway into the early digital space for many black and non-white children. 

It was thinking about this emotional entry point to technology that prompted Bay Area-raised artist and filmmaker Jazmin Jones to investigate the woman behind the image. Renée L'Espérance, a Haitian model, was supposedly scouted while working at a California department store. She was paid $500 for her picture, which she agreed would be used only for the game’s cover. Whilst the software surged in popularity, generating millions of dollars in sales, and all the while continuing to use Renee’s likeness across each edition – including experimenting with a Sims-like avatar and early generative AI version – she was never compensated beyond her initial figure.

Many people are still shocked to learn that Beacon is not, in fact, a real person, but an avatar. It was not until Jones’ 2024 noir style documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon that the details of L’Esperance’s involvement were widely known. The film, made alongside associate producer, Olivia McKayla – a Caribbean American video artist, poet-programmer, from Queens, New York City – follows the pair down the rabbit hole and into endless digital archives, hidden internet corners and sometimes different states, as they sleuth for Renee’s true story. 

Still courtesy of BelleMoon Productions

There seems to be a collective misremembering of her attending public events and accepting awards, amongst the talking heads whom Jones and Ross interview. As they dig, their questions about consent and exploitation, digital extraction and historical omission mount, but it becomes clear that L’Esperance intends to stay hidden. Her absence, coupled with somewhat of a Mandala Effect, lead Jones and Ross to explore how concepts like critical fabulation might be used to reimagine and reshape histories from feminist and queer perspectives. 

Featuring interviews with artists, scholars and critics such as Shola von Reinhold, Mandy Harris Williams, Stephanie Dinkins, Legacy Russell, and Terrell Brooke, the film connects the case to broader conversations about digital labour, Black women’s images, surveillance, and queerness. In doing so, it not only traces a lineage of cyberfeminist thought, but also challenges the perception of the digital as male. Instead, Seeking Mavis Beacon insists on a digital space filled with femininity, mess, feeling, and care.

Seeking Mavis Beacon premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and was highly anticipated at this year’s London Film Festival, as well as showcased at the Barbican’s Chronic Youth Festival. In advance of the film’s digital release on 27th June 2025, courtesy of TAPE Collective, I sat down with Jones and Ross to discuss their project.  

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Jazmin, I'm wondering, was there a particular moment or image that sparked your memory of the software and curiosity for wanting to dig into this woman? And Olivia, did you ever use the software growing up? Or was it introduced to you through Jazmin?

Jazmin: I often frame Mavis Beacon as my first black teacher. I’m a millennial – a 34-year-old Gemini – I say that because Olivia and I will be giving out fake ages by accident. I was part of the generation bridging the gap with the internet. There was so much branding at the time framing the computer as a place of discovery, where nothing bad could happen – it was just there to help you, and you could surf the web to your heart's content. We had desktop computers at home, but our parents couldn’t tell us how to use them. You got a CD and you figured it out on your own.

One of the first faces I remember seeing while learning how to use the computer and communicate on it was this Black woman's. I was using one of the versions where Mavis was in the game, which we now know is unethical and probably not what Renée herself would have wanted. But at the time, it felt like state-of-the-art graphics, there was a real-life black woman in my computer – and she was approachable. Now, I think the fact that AI avatars are simulating real people is actually terrifying, but back then, it was powerful to see the face of someone who looked like they could be my relative. 

Those early interactions with the internet were full of hopefulness and optimism and that’s something that we wanted to capture in the film. There’s a deliberate air of whimsy, which is also, I think, quite specific to the era we were in production – from around 2020, 2021, into 2023. A lot has changed since then and I don't know that the film would feel as optimistic if we were editing it right now. But I do associate that feeling of expansiveness, warmth and possibility with regards to the internet, with Mavis – or the image of her that was projected and personified into the software. 

Finding out that she wasn’t only a Black woman, but a Haitian woman, hit even deeper. We have such a complicated history with Haitian representation and with the erasure of Black women’s contributions to technology. It’s rarely at the forefront of conversations around STEM. For me, Mavis Beacon – her avatar – became the perfect thing to pin all those early hopes and dreams we had for technology. 

Olivia: I had never heard of Mavis Beacon until Jaz told me about her in 2020. I had a lot of free time that year, as one did, and so she very quickly turned into an obsession for me; I was digging up old ROMs in internet archives to play it. It was special for me because I'm 23 now and I grew up during the heyday of girls learn to code, when there were all of these non-profits offering all kinds of opportunities. When I was little and first getting into computer science, and my family were like, we need to get her out of the house before she turns into an anti-social weirdo – they put me into those programmes so I could meet other girls my age. I’m still attached to those spaces – and I’ve watched them as they’ve grown and scaled. 

I used to be a volunteer for a well-known organisation when I was in middle and high school, which I remember as having a pretty feminist, black girls in STEM dynamic. Black women system administrators would come in during their free time off work to teach little girls the basics of HTML. Now that they’re more well-known, they get a lot of local college students, enterprising young men, computer science majors and the dynamic in the room is very different. 

Around the time that we started the project, I was doing some volunteering with them and was feeling quite jaded about the representation there now. I felt that the girls no longer looked at me as someone who could answer their questions. Even if I was the lead instructor, they’d default to the fast-talking white boy who projects authority because he fits the computer science stereotype. There’s a lot of black girl STEM grief – I remember when my family took me to see Hidden Figures – they felt I had to see it – and I cried and cried in the theatre. So, the Mavis project has felt like inner child healing for me.

Still courtesy of BelleMoon Productions

The film tells a history of Cyber feminism through interviews with theorists and artists on the subject. You interview well-established names, contemporary and emerging artists, writers and academics. In itself, it’s a fantastic resource for learning about both the internet and the topic of cyber feminism, but it’s also a manifesto, a guidebook for how to use the internet in the new age when we have concerns about the ethics of AI and media regulation.

Jazmin: So much of the film felt like catching up to ideas we’d already been discussing in our communities – things that are now starting to feel mainstream. I often like to shout out Olivia's phrase from the film: “We have to start treating our conspiracy theories like intuition.” I’ve always been someone who’s leaned into subculture and pushed back against the powers that be, and when we were pitching this in 2020, saying like, Listen to us, y’all. We need to start regulating AI. We need more people with ethics in the rooms, making these things – we sounded kind of crazy. But I’ve watched conversations like these enter the mainstream.

The film is kind of a manifesto. The core message is: Think critically about your digital footprint and how you interact with these systems, but we had to explain a lot of terminology. We couldn’t just say delete your digital footprint. First, we had to explain what that even is. Or what coded bias is – we had to show how these systems are fundamentally flawed, so the audience could arrive with us at the bigger question, our critique of the archive. That’s the big lesson I’ve learned – I still believe in archiving, especially now that the Internet Archive is under threat, and entire swaths of information are being deleted. But I’ve also come to really value fugitivity and maroonage – the idea that not being archived can be a form of protection. It’s not always a tragedy that your story isn’t on Wikipedia. That’s been my biggest epiphany.

It’s also kind of ironic because Olivia and I made a film about parasocial relationships, and in doing that, we had to offer ourselves up as avatars, too. Just like Mavis Beacon – or Renée – had to become this figure, this role model, for so many people in ways she probably didn’t expect. We took that leap of faith with this film, and now we’re grappling with the same dynamics. It feels karmic – like the trade-off for making a fun, beautiful film with our friends and family, is also sitting in the discomfort of knowing we’ve given a piece of ourselves over to the public, in perpetuity.

Olivia: It feels peculiar to look back and think that we did this archiving project now. There’s this sense of not quite lawlessness, but like gorilla archiving. Taking things and taking care of them because they matter to us and organising them based on the ways that we feel make the most sense. Not waiting for an institution to say that it was valid to do so. 

It was a historical moment, 2020 to 2023. There was something liberatory about it. It's sobering now, thinking about Elon Musk's crazy little DOGE unit walking into the Institute of Museum and Library Services earlier this year and putting everyone on leave. A major federal grant programme – like IMLS – has been gutted. So many smaller, community-based archives depended on that funding. It’s a very, very messy situation. 

I'm currently teaching a class on cryptography and secret keeping and it’s attracted a lot of archivists, which, I guess, I shouldn't have been surprised by. But in the first week, people were like, I just lost my job that I've had for ten years, or I’m suddenly looking for work. It's a bleak time. The memory infrastructure of the U.S. is crumbling and I'm sure our government is pretty … chill with that….

It raises the question of how we do this work without any help, how we do this work on our own terms, regardless of who says it's legitimate. That kind of autonomy isn’t something you’re taught in the university system – you’re coached out of in fact. I joked with Jazmin that maybe I went to Mavis Beacon College instead of real college. But honestly, that process taught me a kind of versatility I didn’t know how to actualise before. Like, no one's getting an IMLS grant anytime soon. Okay, so here’s Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. And people look at you like, how do you know this? It’s a shame people have to problem-solve like that - but we do. 

One thing I find compelling about thinking of this film as cyberfeminist is that so much of cyberfeminist history persists through people trolling and, kind of, jaywalking through cyberspace in a way. And like, insisting on very particular terms of existing, and forcing people to analyse the cybernetic systems that contribute to how we understand truth and frame freedom and all of these things. 

We don’t ever really answer any of the questions in the film, but that's intentional. We hope it'll be like a critical thinking exercise for everyone instead, because that's what it was for us.

Still courtesy of BelleMoon Productions

The film certainly captures the cultural window of those pandemic years - the mix of intellectual curiosity and activism that came with the time and space to think about what was happening around us. There was, what felt like, a renewed motivation to engage with writing, theory and creativity – and a real resurgence of DIY publishing, substacks and zine culture – which was distributed digitally. At the same time, people were walking and baking and cycling and painting with their free time. There was the whimsical energy that you’re both talking about and a revival of the girl core or girl power aesthetic, which the film also embodies. Can you talk about that aesthetic in the film and what it means to you?

Jazmin: It’s interesting that you bring up the word girl. I’ve been thinking about it as almost a four-letter word like bitch or dyke – it really depends on who’s saying it and how. Like, I am a girl. I’ll claim girlhood, even as a non-binary person. There are times when girlhood feels full of whimsy and softness and beauty, like prioritising feelings and having fun. That’s the version I love. But there have also been times, especially as a director and grown woman, when someone’s called me just a girl – and in that moment, it’s not empowering, it’s just diminishing. It’s one of those words that can be a slur or a slay. Certain people can call me that, and it feels right. Other people? Not so much. The aesthetic is tied to that, too. When girl is used lovingly, it holds all the magic, the playfulness, the tenderness. 

I keep thinking back to a conversation Olivia and I had early on, when we were figuring out the visual direction. She pointed out how tech is usually presented through this hyper-masculine lens, all green code on black backgrounds, like The Matrix. And we were like, wait, who decided that’s what the internet looks like? For us, the internet looked like 8-bit art, sparkly GIFs, dress-up games, and cute little memes. And like, my desktop is going to be messy. You’re going to see weird selfies on it, and that’s part of it. That’s part of the research. That’s part of the academia. All of it exists in the same space as the thirst traps and the memes. They’re linked.

And I also think – look, I spent way too much time reading Letterboxd reviews. I’ve actually freed myself – I’ve been off Letterboxd for like a month now because it was getting too meta. But there was a time when I was reading everything. Some people are really opinionated about the fact that Olivia and I included so much of our personal lives in the film. Some audiences are confused by that. But one piece of feedback that really landed with me is when someone said: ‘The internet in your film actually feels like what the internet felt like during that time.’ To me, from a preservation standpoint, that’s everything. That is what it felt like when Olivia and I were doing the research. We wanted it to feel like you were either a hacker watching us do it, or a spirit kind of lurking in the background. 

Olivia was also really generous in sharing her image, her actual self. I made a choice too, to include moments where I’m ugly crying, or making weird decisions, or we’re deep in an ethical conversation. It’s not a vanity piece. It’s intentionally vulnerable. We’re letting the audience be there with us. And even now, when I watch the film at my big grown age of 34, I have moments of, Oh, bless your sweet, dumb little heart. But if you put me back in the edit suite, I’d do the same thing again.

Since so much of this was made during lockdown, the desktops we included in the film became a way for us to cite our sources, which, as a friend reminded me, is part of justice-oriented feminist practice: acknowledging that these aren’t just conversations between Olivia and me in a vacuum. They’re rooted in years of research and in years of being a girl.

Olivia: To me, it feels like these Letterboxd guys don’t really know what a personal documentary is. Like, this is a distinct form on its own and there are tons of documentaries that function this way. But I also think, especially in modern film culture, that there’s a trend of people seeing themselves as the sole author of whatever they’re making. It really capitalises on having one person to focus all the buzz and energy on. So when you stray from that model and openly acknowledge your sources and everything that influenced you – like we did with this kind of digital scrapbook-style homage to a community – it’s easy for people to say, oh, this is just derivative. It’s a roundup of everyone you know. But actually, I think that’s really beautiful. For the most part, I feel like people do the opposite – they present their work like it was created in isolation, like they came up with the idea entirely by themselves in their bedroom or something.

It’s funny. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but when you ask ChatGPT to render an image of you, it’s lightening everyone’s skin. There’s no actual representation; it’s very... I don’t know... kind of like sucking all the colour out. The Studio Ghibli stuff is also like the one time in your life where you get to be a realistic animated character without putting in the effort to actually learn how to draw. Of course, the die-hard Hayao Miyazaki fans have pointed out that like, this is horrible! – especially when you think about the fact that part of the plot of Kiki’s Delivery Service is that her job gets taken from her by a machine. 

I brought this up because I wanted to talk about the way in which the studio Ghibli films are encrypted with heritage. There is simply nothing anyone can do to make an image that captures what it must feel like to an actual Japanese person who doesn’t need subtitles to engage with the source material, who is familiar with all of the Buddhist cosmology references. There’s nothing anyone can do, even if they dress themselves up like Studio Ghibli characters to get inside that world. And I think similarly, our film, because it commands the aesthetic so powerfully, it kind of creates its own club. Like, the girls that get it, get it and the ones that don’t really, don’t in a way that allowed us to speak to you today and in a way that I don’t think would be possible otherwise. 

Jazmin: I’m really glad you brought up encryption, that’s something I was thinking about too. When we watch the film with an audience, it helps us figure out who our people are. Who laughs at which jokes, exactly? Who recognises the very particular memes? There are these little signals that pop up, and I know. In the film, there’s a reference to the infamous suspected murderer Robert Blake when someone mentions that he’s Mavis’ husband. I’ve been in screenings where that gets a laugh and think, okay, this means we’ve got an older crowd who’re in on the dark joke. One of my favourite moments is in the opening 20 minutes of the film, we interview a rapper, Ralph, and he says that he connected with Mavis Beacon because she was black – “not trying to be racist or anything.” When that line gets a laugh, I know the audience is critically aware and has probably studied critical race theory – they’re picking up on the microaggressions that Olivia and I are highlighting. It feels like a safe space, then. 

As I understand it, the film is auto-theory. I’m coming from a literature background, and so crossing disciplines and hybridity feels very natural. It’s interesting to hear that some viewers haven’t seen anything like this before, or don’t quite know how to read it. 

Jazmin: I was really leaning into the language of personal documentary, and anytime someone asked, why would you put yourself in the movie? What kind of choice is that? I’d just be like, why wouldn’t I? Why would Agnès Varda? It’s fun! Or take someone like Nathan Fielder, he’s one of my favourite examples. We’re used to following a guy whose edit is sometimes ethically questionable, and we still follow him into the rabbit hole, not knowing where we’re going to end up. And honestly, so many people, usually non-Black people and men, are allowed to do that kind of self-insertion without question. But when we do it, suddenly it’s like, why would your personal life relate to this at all?

If a person uploads a crying selfie to the internet? Some people see that and go, Why the hell would you post that? You’re so self-absorbed. But then there’s this whole other group that’s like, this is powerful. This is resistance. You’re taking up space in a way that matters. I’ve had this running theory that girls crying in selfie mode is a radical act – and I get how people can look at that and think, oh my god, just log off. So for me, the film is kind of a way to make sense of those two responses happening at once, holding space for both the cynicism and the sincerity.

Like, yes, this is my first movie, and I wanted it to be joyful too, we’re in cute clothes, bathed in fluorescent light, filming people we love and respect who we’ve never seen on screen before. But at the same time, I knew from the jump we were making a film about cyberfeminism, about being online, about the kinds of issues that mostly affect Black women, and those aren’t topics people always lean into. I think, especially as women, we’re taught to dress up our pain. We’re told, if you want to be taken seriously, you’d better look good. Desirability is so tied to whether people will even listen to you. I see that even in myself in the film, I’m crying but still making a joke, because somewhere I’ve internalised that if it’s not funny, people won’t care.

And you can feel that shift if you watch the film a couple of times. At the start, we’re all coordinated and styled and there’s more performance in how we present. But by the end, it’s stripped back. We’ve been through something. The polish falls away and what’s left is just us, our growth, our disappointments, all of it.

Olivia: I found out recently that that's not common perception. I spoke with a friend of mine, not too long ago, who said that at no point did they feel like you guys stopped dressing up. 

Jazmin: Well, that’s valid. The reality is our minds are beautiful. We are fashionable. We don't have to try. And maybe that's something that we're learning too: that it's still going to be cinematic and dramatic, because inherently, these are black fem queer stories and we never see these things. They're very rarely shown, so it's going to be interesting regardless. But I must say, Olivia, you just entered the process with such a degree of presence that, for me, the first part of the film was catching up to that and learning how to be in front of the camera. 

Olivia: Agnès, I wanted to ask you – are you familiar with the Instagram page/curatorial project Everyone Is a Girl? It’s run by a friend of mine, Esther, who’s also based in the UK. I think that there’s a strain of European Cyber feminism that has a very long tradition, but also European autofiction and the feminist documentary making of the 70s and 80s. When you say “girl core” – Jaz and I are coming from a very American-centric, hyper-capitalist and honestly, a bit paedophilia obsessed nation and there’s a lot tied up in there. I’m always curious about feminism as a project in the UK, especially as we’re going to be meeting a UK audience soon. It’s such an old country with a lot of traditions in terms of the way property is decided, and that extends to contemporary understandings of cyber feminism, I guess.

Honestly, when I use the term girl core, I’m thinking of the spirit of the Rookie Magazines, which I came across as a teenager. The autobiographical essays about identity politics and girlhood that teens submitted and were published alongside Petra Collins hazy high school dream space images. They were, of course, American (although Collins is Canadian) and certainly indulged in this kind of coming-of-age beauty. But at the time, they were also my first insight into 90s riot grrrl zines and feminist music as well as discussions about fashion, politics, mental health, sex and sexuality that weren’t flippant and really involved young people developing their perspectives. The submissions indulged in those teenage interests and obsessions. But it certainly paved the way for me to want to go on and study literature and some of these ideas further.

I was first introduced to cyberfeminism during my undergraduate degree, through Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Then later, in my master’s, we looked at Sadie Plant’s Zeros + Ones, where the British scholar traces the influence of women’s textile work, particularly weaving, on the origins of computing. As you’re saying, women have always been coded into these systems.

During the pandemic years, there was a real interest in cyberfeminism again. Joanna Walsh’s Girl Online stands out, it's like a reimagining of VNS Matrix’s A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, but from the perspective of a burnt-out millennial. Instead of using their chaotic, punk-inflected aesthetic to critique male-dominated tech culture, Walsh proposes a feminist ethics of care. She’s thinking about how online spaces, particularly social media, produce and regulate the self, and how those same extractive, capitalist systems are entangled with chronic illness and burnout. There was also Patricia Lockwood’s Noone is Talking About This – she’s American, but a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. The first half of the book is written in disjointed vignettes like a Twitter thread, really funny and rapid.

Jazmin: If you want some light reading and you haven’t already come across Lote by Shola, who we’re continuing to collaborate with, you should check it out. If you’re into autotheory and archives and being a little baddie, that book is incredible.

I will definitely be checking that out - and, in that vein, can you tell me more about your use of critical fabulation as a tool in the film?  

Jazmin: Honestly, the idea of critical fabulation felt really liberatory to me. The idea that you can imagine other possibilities was exciting. It was actually a much bigger part of the film early on. Our initial plan was to fabulate a backstory for Mavis Beacon. We were like, look, if we don’t have enough Black cultural icons in tech, and we’ve got this one, let’s give her a rich, nuanced history. That idea opened up some really interesting questions, though. Like, without Renée’s participation, are we just projecting more ideas onto a woman who’s already shouldered so much responsibility as this character? That was an important moment of reflection. Especially because we were really inspired by The Watermelon Woman and wanted to be in conversation with that film. But we realised there’s a big difference: The Watermelon Woman is a narrative that looks like a documentary about a fictional person. Our film is a documentary that sometimes feels like a narrative, but it’s about a real person.

And I had to check myself. If it were up to me to create Mavis Beacon’s backstory, she'd be a queer sex worker, a revolutionary, someone radical. Someone I’d want as a role model. But that just wasn’t the truth. Through lots of conversations, we realised that it wasn’t fair. In the version we first pitched, we even said that, if we didn’t find her, we’d still erect a monument to her in Silicon Valley as a cautionary tale. But then we thought, okay, whose face do we use? Who maintains it? Who decides how she’s remembered? And now, being so chronically online, I’m seeing conversations, especially in the UK, about what happens to statues of women. You put one up and, over time, the boobs are a totally different colour from people grabbing them. 

So, in development, critical fabulation was a really generative framework. It gave us a way in. But then we had to ask: what’s our responsibility, as people making something we’re calling a documentary? How far can we go? What are the limits? And, interestingly, the parts of the film that feel the most hybrid are often where we redacted information, not where we added to it. Instead of embellishing, we obscured things, blurred details, removed people, because it didn’t feel ethical to include them. There are people we met whose stories the audience will never know, because we decided not to use that footage. That was part of making a film that still felt honest and true, true to the journey Olivia and I went on.

And, yeah, it’s still a film. We shaped timelines in the edit, we made choices, but we held ourselves to something. And I think I personally learned that the only story you really have permission to fabulate is your own. That’s the one you can play with. And of course, with Olivia, she’s in the room, she’s a collaborator, and I care deeply that she sees herself in the film too. It’s like that old truism you hear when you’re starting out as a writer: before you tell other people’s stories, you have to tell your own. I think this film is us reconciling with that.

The film also speaks to the way in which we became obsessed with mythmaking, collective memory and conspiracy theories, particularly during the COVID years. It also taps into a sense of growing unease about the role of AI, not just in shaping how we work, but in how we remember, archive and perhaps exclude the past. Olivia, you touched earlier on your fears about how AI might start to inform identity itself. And in the film, you invite the audience to trust their conspiracies. Could you both say more about that?

Olivia: Not to imply more collusion between our government and corporations, because they don’t need that. They do it on their own. But in terms of public education, I’m thinking about how they are siphoning away resources and how it feels less and less important to our governing body that the United States is full of intelligent, skilled, self-sufficient people. I was talking to a friend of mine recently, who works as a programmer. She’s really stressed because her peers are all using AI. In many ways, she views it as a cop out, lazy, etc., to get AI to write code for you. But she’s applying for jobs and that’s what her peers are doing. So now she’s like, I can’t write code at the speed that a computer can. Like, is my job auditing and checking behind the computer now? So she’s really grappling with whether she’s even going to stay in the field. How do you compete with the person rubbing out their brain and replacing it with a very fast machine?

Jazmin: In an interview that we gave recently, somebody mentioned AI has now passed the Turing Test, you know, the one where it can fool a human into thinking it's another human. But even wilder: AI can now apparently tell more accurately whether it's talking to a human or another AI. I remember a few years ago when people were saying they were going to use AI to figure out what dolphins and whales were saying. And I thought, okay, cool. But the moment we understand what animals are telling us? That’s the moment we unplug the internet. But then the conspiracy theorist in me is like, of course they’re never going to let us talk to the creatures we’re killing. At the same time, I do have my own fears of becoming irrelevant and I want to be able to read all the articles and keep up. But, at some point, you’ve got to think, how many swimming pools am I sacrificing to keep up with the pace of capitalism?

Olivia: I saw that article too and it really annoyed me. It felt like a scare tactic, trying to push this narrative that AI is this all-powerful thing. No offence and no shade to Alan Turing, but the Turing Test is stupid. You can quote me on that. It’s testing whether people can tell they’re talking to a machine. And not to be rude, but people can be pretty bad at that. So it's not a great benchmark for actual intelligence. And also, it’s based on this flawed idea that human brains and machines are similar enough to compare. They’re not. Computers don’t think. They just execute code. Of course, they can’t figure out whether they’re talking to a machine or a human. You mean they can’t solve the code? We use words like it can’t figure it out, as if there’s somebody in there figuring it out. No, there’s a sequence of diodes that are powering up and then lighting up and as a consequence, other ones are lighting up and powering off again, like it’s operated by electric hamsters on wheels!

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Agnès Houghton-Boyle is a critic and programmer based in London. Her writing features in Talking Shorts Magazine and Fetch London.