I'm sure someone at the studio at some point described this project as Colossus meets Rosemary's Baby

I haven't seen Demon Seed in who knows how many years. I remembered it being well done, and the ending certainly stuck with me, but until I saw this video, I hadn't given much thought to the film or to how well the major elements had aged. If you remade the film under a different title, I doubt many viewers would suspect that the source novel was over 50 years old.

The Tragic Betrayal in the Editing Room of Demon Seed (1977)




It's important to note not just how closely Demon Seed tracks with current narratives about AI, but how well established all of these elements were at least a decade before the movie was made. A supercomputer had taken over the world in Colossus. The original Star Trek (which was always a reliable reflection of the popular sci-fi of the postwar era) had featured multiple rogue AIs and at least one episode where the plot hinged on deepfakes. We won't even try to cover I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and all of the other notable examples from '50s and '60s short stories and novels.

At the risk of oversimplifying the matter and ignoring more than a few exceptions, it is generally safe to say that the idea of what we now call the future emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and reached its final form in the quarter century following the end of World War II. What's perhaps most remarkable about this is how static, some would even say stagnant, the perception of the future has been over the last 50 years. Except for some cyberpunk trappings, the old visions of tech visionaries almost invariably consist of flashbacks to the Eisenhower administration.