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Did Max Headroom Warn Us About the Future of AI?
MTV, New Coke, and ChatGPT all rolled into one…
The time setting? Sometime in the near future. The place: A dystopian world dominated by television and large corporations. The character? A cyborg — driven by artificial intelligence — challenging the corporations and systems, while at the same time, creating its own persona to influence the public.
This may sound like a description of Tron, 1984, or BladeRunner, but it is in fact a fabricated personality used to parody the changing world of television networks and warn us about the future while going on to become a defining part of the 1980s.
There are certain defining images from the 1980s that have gone on to represent the decade. Acid wash jeans, perms, and ALF, these are just a few of those images you may be picturing. and then there’s Max Headroom. As long as you owned a TV during the 80s, flipped through a magazine, or looked up at a billboard, it was difficult to not see him.
Max headroom was a fictional, artificial intelligence character considered to be the first computer-generated TV host. And you could make the case that this character — from a commercial standpoint — is the spokesperson for the entire decade.
