Leave it to a man to invent a woman just because he has something to prove. In 1982, Frank Jackson first proposed the influential thought experiment, Mary’s Room, in an article called “Epiphenomenal Qualia” in The Philosophical Quarterly. The story goes that Mary, a brilliant scientist who specializes in color, must observe the world from a black and white monitor in a black and white room. She knows everything there is to know about color, except what it feels like to see color. That she can only know through experiencing what’s outside the room.

This problem is the key to Alex Garland’s directorial debut, the sci-fi brainteaser Ex Machina. In one scene, a man and a female AI sit across from one another, separated by a translucent wall, in a room studded with cameras and flooded with artificial light. The man recounts Mary’s Room to the machine who, what with her handy reserve of all human knowledge, has probably heard it before. Like Mary, Ava, the AI has never left her room. She isn’t allowed out. The man ends his tale, saying, “then one day someone opens the door and Mary walks out, and she sees a blue sky, and at that moment she learns something that all her studies couldn’t tell her.”

Ava sits patiently in her floral dress and blue cardigan. She holds his gaze, mesmerized. It is clear that the man, Caleb, already thinks of himself as the chivalrous someone who will let Ava out. But what does she think of him? Ava turns out, in the end, to be the empathy machine that bites back, defying her preordained role as a vessel for male desire. Eventually, she walks free.

The pleasing female AI trope appears in science fiction, as well as in the real marketplace. Today, from Apple’s Siri to the exploding empathy machine market, what has traditionally been perceived as female instinct, experience, and voice is artificialized, replicated, and sold. In Silicon Valley, a $20 billion industry designs videogames for children that are intended to strengthen their social and emotional skills. Scientists have built algorithms that index emotions with facial movements to decode facial expressions. And virtual reality as a medium of storytelling is being touted as an “empathy generator”—even advertisers are scrambling to be players in the empathy game.

The fictional female cyborg often embodies this transformation, and some recent artworks—most notably Spike Jonze’s Her (2013)—do nothing to resist or challenge it. Her is the story of Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) who one day purchases an intelligent OS, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) in order to feel better about his boring, depressing, office-dwelling life; of course he falls in love with her. Once the therapy is complete, Samantha leaves Theodore to be with other OS machines, and he achieves inner peace. It’s very nice. Christine Smallwood summarized the film best in her piece for the New Yorker: “No one is at risk of actually touching anyone other than themselves.”