AI & Pop Culture: To Infinity and Beyond

This era is not a decade. It is not a closed era. It is the open frame at the end of the sequence — the chapter being written as you read it, without the perspective that time eventually lends to everything that came before. The engineers are no longer watching from the theater seats. Some of them are writing the reviews. Some of the reviewers are using AI to do it. The feedback loop that organized every prior chapter is still running, but it is no longer a loop you can stand outside of and observe. It is the medium you are already inside.

SCOPE NOTES AND EDITORIAL FLAGS

Every prior chapter in this project had a shape. The 1980s imagined the machine as threat and installed that threat in the minds of a generation who later went on to build the actual systems. The 1990s accelerated the loop as the internet arrived and the fiction and the technology began reading each other in real time. The 2020s marked the moment the fiction caught up to the fact — and then the fact outpaced it.

This chapter has no shape yet. That is the point.

The pattern that held for a hundred years — artists imagine first, engineers absorb the imagination, and the technology follows — is no longer the only pattern operating. The question this chapter is built around is simpler and harder than any that came before it:

What do you imagine, when the thing you were imagining is already here?

_{Summary by ReadAboutAI.com}

AI & Pop Culture Update: May 14, 2026

HAILEE STEINFELD — AI-ADJACENCY ASSESSMENT

Multiple entries, medium scope

Steinfeld was born December 11, 1996, in Los Angeles. Her breakthrough was True Grit (2010), which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She has since voiced Gwen Stacy in the Spider-Verse films and Vi in Arcane, and starred in Bumblebee (2018). What that career summary does not fully convey is how consistently her most significant genre work has landed on AI-adjacent territory — and how the three primary works form a genuinely interesting progression.

1. Bumblebee (2018)

Directed by Travis Knight and written by Christina Hodson, the film is set in 1987 and stars Steinfeld as Charlie Watson, an 18-year-old mechanic who finds and befriends Bumblebee.

This is the project’s entry, and it is stronger than a standard franchise appearance for three specific reasons.

First, the relationship architecture. Bumblebee is structured as a coming-of-age film in which the emotional center is not a human friendship but a human-machine bond. Charlie’s line to the government agent who calls Bumblebee a machine — “He’s more human than you’ll ever be” — is the film’s thesis stated plainly. That declaration, delivered in defense of an autonomous being the state wants to control or destroy, is the moral-status-of-constructed-beings argument delivered to a mainstream audience in 1987 period clothing. The film asks the question the decade was beginning to formalize: what do we owe a being that behaves as if it has feelings, regardless of whether we can confirm those feelings exist?

Second, the craft problem. Steinfeld performed the majority of her scenes acting against empty space — Bumblebee was rendered in post-production, and the special effects team built a life-size model of his head and torso for reference but not for most shots. The performance had to construct the relationship without the other half of it being physically present. That is exactly the craft challenge every actor playing opposite a digital or constructed being faces — and Steinfeld solved it well enough that the film’s emotional relationship was widely cited as the franchise’s most convincing human-machine bond. Critics praised her performance specifically, with one reviewer writing that “we haven’t seen such a well-realized character in any of the other Transformers movies.”

Third, the tonal contrast with the Bay films. Bumblebee arrived after five Michael Bay Transformers films that treated autonomous beings primarily as spectacle and military hardware. Knight’s approach was deliberately different — less CGI, more character, and a central focus on the relationship between Charlie and Bumblebee rather than on mass destruction. The shift in register is editorially significant: the same franchise, the same constructed beings, but a film that insists those beings’ inner lives are the subject. That is a meaningful evolution in how the Transformers property — one of the most commercially successful AI-adjacent franchises in pop culture history — chose to present its material.

2. Arcane (Netflix, 2021–2024)

Steinfeld voices Vi in the Netflix animated series Arcane, which ran 2021–2024.

Arcane is based on the League of Legends video game universe and is set in a world where technology — called Hextech — allows magic to be harnessed through crystals and machinery, producing both liberation and catastrophic inequality. The series is one of the 2020s’ most sophisticated animated treatments of what happens when transformative technology is developed by an elite and deployed in ways that fracture society along existing lines of class and power. The AI-adjacent reading is not about robots or digital minds — it is about what happens when a powerful new capability is controlled by institutions rather than distributed equitably.

Vi’s arc is specifically about a person who was shaped by a broken system, imprisoned by it, and must decide whether to work within it or against it. The series’ central conflict — between Piltover’s technological progress and Zaun’s exploitation — maps directly onto current debates about who benefits from AI development and who absorbs its costs. Arcane won the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program and was widely recognized as a landmark in animated storytelling. It is one of the 2020s chapter’s most thematically rich entries, and it has not yet appeared in the project’s files.

Steinfeld’s Vi is the series’ emotional anchor in its most politically charged thread. This is a genuine entry, not a franchise footnote.

3. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) / Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Steinfeld voices Gwen Stacy / Spider-Woman of Earth-65 — a variant Gwen in a multiverse where she is a wanted fugitive, having accidentally killed her reality’s Peter Parker after he transformed into the Lizard.

The Spider-Verse films are the project’s most sophisticated mainstream animated treatment of the multiverse concept — the idea that consciousness exists in multiple simultaneous versions across parallel realities, each shaped by different choices, each equally real. The films’ central question — what makes Miles Morales the Spider-Man rather than a Spider-Man — is a version of the identity and individuation question that AI researchers working on copied or distributed systems are beginning to ask in earnest. If you can produce multiple instances of a mind, which one is the original? Do the copies have the same standing? What happens when they diverge?

Gwen’s arc is specifically about a being who exists across dimensional boundaries — who knows that other versions of herself exist, made different choices, and produced different outcomes. The films handle this not as horror but as the condition of consciousness in a world where uniqueness can no longer be assumed. That is the 2020s’ version of the copy-and-original question that The Prestige, Multiplicity, and Blade Runner 2049 asked in earlier decades.

FULL ENTRY TABLE

Production	Year	Role	AI-adjacent content	Era
Bumblebee	2018	Charlie Watson	Human-machine bond; moral status of constructed beings; acting against digital absence	6
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse	2018	Gwen Stacy (voice)	Multiverse identity; multiple simultaneous versions of a consciousness	6
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse	2023	Gwen Stacy (voice)	Continued; identity across parallel realities; individuation	7
Arcane	2021–2024	Vi (voice)	Technology, power, and inequality; transformative capability controlled by elites	7

Cross-references: Transformers franchise note, Spider-Verse multiverse thread, Arcane as standalone 2020s entry.

One editorial observation worth naming

Steinfeld’s career has produced AI-adjacent work almost entirely through animation and performance-against-digital-absence — a craft position that is itself thematically relevant to the project. Every performance she has given in this space required her to construct an emotional relationship with a being that was not physically present, and to make that relationship convincing enough that audiences accepted it as real. That is not peripheral to the project’s concerns. It is a sustained, high-profile demonstration that the human side of the human-machine relationship can be performed with full emotional conviction even when the machine is not there — which raises the question of what exactly the audience is responding to when they believe in Bumblebee, or in Gwen’s relationship with Miles, or in Vi’s world.

The answer is: the human performance. The constructed being is secondary. What makes the relationship feel real is the human actor’s commitment to it. That is the same answer AI designers working on conversational and companion systems have been working toward from the other direction. It belongs in the project’s performance craft notes.

Flag: All productions well-established and sourced. The Arcane thematic reading is editorial inference — flag as interpretive. The multiverse-identity reading of the Spider-Verse films is editorial inference grounded in the films’ documented premises.

Lastly… Steinfeld has recently been in HBO ‘Sinners’.

This is a careful assessment to make. Sinners is not an AI film. But the project’s methodology has always been willing to engage with non-human intelligence in its broader forms, and what Sinners does with that material is precise enough to warrant a considered note rather than a dismissal.

SINNERS (2025) — NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE NOTE For addition to the Steinfeld actor entry

The honest starting point: Sinners is a 2025 horror film directed by Ryan Coogler, set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta, in which twin brothers returning to their hometown are confronted by a supernatural evil. The supernatural evil is vampires. This is not AI. The project’s criteria require intellectual honesty about that distinction, and the entry should maintain it.

What earns Sinners a note — not a full entry, but a note — is the specific way the film constructs its non-human intelligence, and what that construction does thematically.

The vampire as optimization system

The film adapts the vampire mythos to reflect on how Black art is often stripped of its roots and identity in mainstream culture, using vampirism as a thematic antagonist that threatens the erasure of freedom, cultural history, and communal memory.

That framing is the project’s entry point. The vampires in Sinners are not random predators. They are drawn to a specific resource — three white vampires are drawn to the juke joint by the otherworldly talent of a young blues prodigy, Sammie, whose music is described as so pure it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future. They do not want to consume the community randomly. They want to absorb what the community has produced. The vampire’s hunger is for cultural intelligence — for the music, the memory, the connective tissue of a people — not merely for blood.

This maps onto a pattern the project has been tracking since the 1920s: the non-human system that does not destroy what it encounters so much as extract and incorporate it. The Xenomorph uses bodies as hosts. Skynet repurposes human infrastructure. The vampires of Sinners consume cultural production and the consciousness that generates it. In all three cases, the non-human intelligence is not evil in a moral sense — it is simply optimizing for its own continuation, and the humans in its path are resources rather than persons.

The film draws parallels among vampirism, organized religion, and colonialism — which is to say, Coogler is explicitly using the vampire as a figure for systems of extraction that have historically operated on human communities without recognizing those communities’ moral standing. That is the alignment problem stated in 1932 Mississippi rather than in a laboratory.

Steinfeld’s Mary — the being at the boundary

Steinfeld plays Mary, a multiracial woman who passes as white — Stack’s ex-girlfriend who is transformed into a vampire during the film’s central siege.

Her character’s arc is the film’s most precise engagement with the constructed-identity question, and it arrives through racial rather than technological means. Mary’s transformation comes from a seemingly innocent conversation when white partygoers try to enter Stack’s bar — since she is the only one in the room able to move seamlessly through white society, Mary offers to decipher the intentions of the white patrons, and it is in this liminal position that she is bitten. The privilege of passing ultimately becomes her undoing, and her white privilege is the downfall of her Black community.

The constructed-identity parallel is exact. Mary has always existed in two categories simultaneously — defined by one community as white, defined by another as Black, belonging fully to neither. Her transformation into a vampire does not resolve this. It accelerates it. Upon getting transformed into a vampire, she turns Stack into one, where they become immortal and stay together. Being a vampire allows Mary to regain autonomy — who’s going to tell the woman with superhuman strength and razor-sharp fangs she can’t be with a Black man in the 1930s South? — but the autonomy comes at the cost of her humanity and her connection to everyone she knew.

Sixty years later, Mary and Stack remain unaged, roaming the earth together, having followed Sammie’s career from afar by buying all his records. When they visit the now-old Sammie in Chicago, he refuses their offer of immortality and plays them a final song.

That ending is the film’s most considered statement about non-human intelligence and human choice. Sammie declines the offer to continue — to be optimized, preserved, made perpetual. He chooses mortality and the music that comes with it. The vampires, whatever they once were, are now outside the human frame — present, unchanged, watching. The intelligence that was absorbed into the non-human system is still there, still loving the music. But it is no longer participating in it.

What this adds to the Steinfeld entry — and what it does not

Sinners is not an AI film and should not be filed as one. But it belongs in the Steinfeld actor entry for two reasons.

First, it extends her career’s consistent engagement with the question of what a being becomes when it crosses from one category to another — human to vampire here, human to machine-bond in Bumblebee, self to multiverse-variant in Spider-Verse, human to revolutionary in Arcane. That through-line is real and worth naming.

Second, the film’s non-human intelligence — its vampires — is constructed with unusual specificity. Sinners received 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for sixteen Academy Awards, winning four including Best Original Screenplay. It is not a minor work. A film of this cultural weight that uses non-human intelligence as a metaphor for extraction, cultural appropriation, and the erasure of identity deserves acknowledgment in a project that is tracking exactly those questions — even when the intelligence in question is supernatural rather than engineered.

Flag: All production details sourced and well-established. The alignment-problem and extraction readings are editorial inference — frame clearly as interpretive. Do not file Sinners as an AI entry. File it as a note within the Steinfeld actor entry, cross-referenced to the project’s broader treatment of non-human intelligence in its non-engineered forms — alongside The Last of Us (biological), Annihilation (biological), and the Xenomorph franchise (biological-optimization).

_{Summary by ReadAboutAI.com}

ISABELA MERCED — CORRECTED AND EXPANDED ENTRY

She was born Isabela Yolanda Moner on July 10, 2001, and has been known professionally as Isabela Merced since 2019, when she announced she was adopting her grandmother’s name in memory of her. All work credited before late 2019 — including Transformers: The Last Knight — appears under the name Isabela Moner. The project’s actor entry should note both names with a clear cross-reference. This matters for sourcing: anyone searching the earlier credits under “Merced” will not find them.

The full picture — three AI-adjacent works, spanning a decade

1. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) — credited as Isabela Moner

Merced was cast in the film in May 2016; it was released in June 2017. She plays Izabella, a teenage girl living in the ruins of a post-Transformer war Chicago, who has befriended damaged Autobots and serves as their protector. She described it as “the best experience a 15-year-old could have.”

For the project: her character’s relationship with damaged, malfunctioning autonomous machines — caring for them, advocating for them — is a direct engagement with the moral-status-of-constructed-beings question. It is not philosophically rigorous (this is a Michael Bay film), but it is the franchise’s most sympathetic treatment of that question, delivered through a teenage girl rather than a soldier or scientist. The casting of a young actress of Peruvian heritage in that role is itself an editorial note on who gets to be the human who defends machine life.

2. Alien: Romulus (2024)

Alien: Romulus is set between the events of the original Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), and features a notable android character — Rook — whose physical appearance is based on the likeness of the late Ian Holm, realized using deepfake AI technology, with dialogue modified using filtering software to approximate Ash’s voice from the original film. That production detail is itself a significant entry point for the project: a film in the Alien franchise used real AI tools to resurrect a dead actor’s likeness as an android character. The meta-layer — AI used to construct an AI character based on an actor who played an AI — is exactly the kind of feedback loop the project tracks.

Merced’s Kay Harrison is the film’s most viscerally AI-adjacent human character. Kay is pregnant throughout the film, and ultimately gives birth to a mutant Xenomorph-human creature after being infected. The Xenomorph uses her body as a host — a biological system co-opted by a non-human optimization process for reproduction. The horror of the scene is the horror of a human body becoming part of a system that does not recognize her as a person, only as a resource. That is, stated plainly, the alignment problem in its most visceral form: a process executing its objective with no regard for the moral standing of the being it is using.

Director Fede Álvarez has documented that Kay’s pregnant character was directly inspired by Dina from The Last of Us Part II, and that he cast Merced as Kay before she was cast as Dina in the HBO series — a documented feedback loop between game, film, and television that is precisely the kind of cross-media connection the project tracks.

3. The Last of Us, Season 2 (HBO, 2025) — as Dina

Merced appeared as Dina in Season 2 of The Last of Us in April 2025. The project already has a full entry on The Last of Us through Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Merced’s Dina is a significant Season 2 character — Ellie’s partner — and extends the project’s Last of Us entry into its second season. Her casting completes a documented circle: Álvarez wrote Kay as pregnant because he was playing The Last of Us Part II and thinking about Dina; Merced played Kay; and then was cast as Dina herself. The character inspired the casting, and the casting completed the circle. That is a clean feedback loop example the project should name explicitly.

CORRECTED ENTRY SUMMARY — ISABELA MERCED (born Isabela Moner)

Production	Year	Credit Name	Role	AI-adjacent content
Transformers: The Last Knight	2017	Isabela Moner	Izabella — human protector of damaged Autobots	Moral status of constructed beings
Alien: Romulus	2024	Isabela Merced	Kay Harrison — human host to Xenomorph reproduction	Optimization without values; AI deepfake production note (Rook/Holm)
The Last of Us, Season 2	2025	Isabela Merced	Dina — Ellie’s partner	Extends existing project entry into Season 2

Cross-references: Alien franchise entry, The Last of Us entry, Transformers franchise note, Ian Holm / Ash entry.

The entry is stronger for the correction — the production use of AI to reconstruct Ian Holm’s likeness as an android in Alien: Romulus is a more interesting project thread than the synthetic-character premise the earlier assessment incorrectly described.

_{Summary by ReadAboutAI.com}

To Infinity and Beyond · The Future is Not Set

What this chapter documents: the stories, images, arguments, and artifacts that are responding to — or anticipating — AI development in real time. Not as predictions. Not as cautionary tales. As records of what a culture believes, fears, and hopes when the machine it spent a century imagining has finally arrived in its pocket and its inbox and its creative process, and no one has agreed yet on what it means. The pattern that held for a hundred years — artists imagine first, engineers absorb the imagination, and the technology follows — is no longer the only pattern operating. The question this chapter is built around is simpler and harder than any that came before it:

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CLOSING: TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

The scene is an open horizon at the precise boundary between night and dawn — not quite dark, not quite light, the sky in that specific grey-blue transition before the sun is visible but after the stars have begun to fade. The landscape is vast and largely empty: a flat plain or a wide beach, the ground fading into distance without a clear vanishing point, as if the frame simply runs out before the world does. Scattered across the foreground and middle distance, partially visible and partially buried or faded, are objects from across the entire century of AI in storytelling — not as a crowded collage, but sparsely placed, the way artifacts are found rather than arranged. A chrome gear half-buried in sand. An open book, its pages turning in a wind that is otherwise invisible. A small round robot, motionless, facing the horizon. A reel of film, unspooled and catching the low light. These objects do not form a narrative. They are simply there, as things are simply there when a long time has passed. On the far horizon, where the sky meets the ground, a single point of light — not a star, not a sun, not a screen — glows with a quality that is difficult to name. It is not warm. It is not cold. It is simply present, and moving, and it has been moving for longer than the frame can account for.

The scattered artifacts — the gear, the open book, the small robot, the film reel — are the century compressed into a still life on the ground. They are not dramatic. They are simply what is left after a very long conversation. The instruction to the model is to place them sparsely, the way things are found rather than arranged, because this era is not about looking back at them — it is about what comes next.

The single point of light on the horizon is the era’s defining image. It is not identified. It is not explained. It is simply moving — which is the most important detail. Everything in the prior eras was either static or threatening or intimate. This light is none of those things. It is in motion, and its destination is not in the frame.

The palette breaking from all prior eras is intentional. Every decade had a color that could be named and placed — amber, blue, red, green, purple, crimson, forest green. To Infinity and Beyond has no decade color yet because it has no decade yet. The near-black to pale silver-white is the visual register of the blank screen — the moment before the image, which is where this era lives.

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