A few weeks ago, I had a hankering for some sci-fi. Not Marvel sci-fi. Not blockbuster sci-fi. I wanted the weird stuff — cerebral, indie, atmospheric. The kind of movie that leaves you staring at the ceiling afterward.
So I did what any reasonable person would do. I Googled it.
What I got was a wall of SEO-optimized listicles drowning in ads. “Top 20 Sci-Fi Movies You NEED to Watch in 2024!” I skimmed a few. They were clearly written to rank, not to inform. Every list had the same ten movies, padded with affiliate links and autoplay video ads. I was immediately annoyed.
Fine. I’ll try YouTube. That’s what the kids use, right? Video recommendations from real humans?
Nope. Even worse. The 2024+ recommendation videos looked like they were themselves AI-generated. Robot voices reading robot scripts over robot-selected clip montages, recommending movies I’m not even sure exist. The spam had metastasized.
And that’s when it hit me: I had to use AI to fight AI.
This is the arms race nobody talks about. The bad guys — spammers, content farms, SEO grifters — adopted AI first. They’re flooding every search result, every recommendation algorithm, every corner of the internet with machine-generated slop. And the only way to cut through it is to deploy your own AI on the other side.
So I fired up Gemini and had an actual conversation. I told it I wanted indie sci-fi. Cerebral. Atmospheric. Ideas over explosions. And instead of a spam-filled listicle, I got a dialogue. It asked me what I liked. I mentioned Vesper and Blade Runner. It pivoted. It synthesized. It gave me movies I’d never heard of:
- After Yang — a meditative look at AI and grief
- The Artifice Girl — a dialogue-driven chamber piece on sentient ethics
- Mars Express — a French animated neo-noir in the Blade Runner tradition
- Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes — a micro-budget Japanese time-loop comedy
These are real recommendations from something that understood what I was actually looking for. No ads. No affiliate links. No spam.
I ended up watching Mars Express first, and it was awesome. A hard-boiled detective story set on Mars with real questions about android consciousness — exactly what I was looking for. A spammy listicle never would have surfaced it. An AI conversation did.
Here’s the thing that should make you uncomfortable: the internet we built — the one with search engines and open access to information — is being eaten alive by the very AI tools that were supposed to make it better. The only antidote to AI-generated noise is AI-generated signal. We’re in a cybernetic arms race, and if you’re not deploying AI on your side of the fight, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.
I just wanted to find a movie. Instead, I found a metaphor for the entire internet in 2026.