I, Robot Filmmaker Says Tesla Copied His Designs

Alex Proyas, the Australian filmmaker who directed the 2004 film I, Robot, is amongst those calling out surprising similarities between the designs in his film and those of AI-powered products shown at a Tesla event last week.

At the “We, Robot” event Tesla showed a new version of its Optimus humanoid robot, which bears some similarity to the robots in Proyas’ dystopian film, an adaptation of an Isaac Asimov short-story collection originally published in 1950.

The company also showed a Cybercab automated taxi without steering wheel or pedals, the highlight of the event, and a Robovan.

While the Optimus design is only vaguely similar to the robots in I, Robot, the similarity of the Cybercab to an automated Audi in the film and the Robovan to the film’s robot carrier had some raising their eyebrows.

‘Can I have my designs back?’

“Hey Elon, can I have my designs back please?” Proyas wrote on X.

In a response to another user on Instagram, Proyas wrote that he had worked with a “very talented design team” on the film.

“Elon Musk on the other hand has a not so talented design team who watched a lot of movies, including I, Robot it seems,” he wrote.

Filmmaker Matt Granger, who worked as an assistant to Proyas on the film, accused Tesla chief executive Elon Musk of an “utter lack of creativity”.

Patrick Tatopoulos, the film’s production designer, wrote on Instagram, “Maybe it is just me, or should I feel honoured that Elon found some inspiration in my I, Robot designs?”

“Either way it’s fun to watch.”

The Optimus robots still have some ways to go before they can approach the version depicted in 1950 – the models on display last week were actually remotely controlled by human operators for some tasks, although they were able to walk without external control using artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported.

Musk told attendees the robots would eventually be available to consumers for $20,000 (£15,300) to $30,000.

Sci-fi inspiration

The Tesla chief has cited science fiction inspirations in his other projects, with SpaceX’s autonomous landing barges, used to recover its first-stage rockets, being named after sentient spaceships in Iain M. Banks novels.

He has said the xAI chatbot Grok was modelled on Marvin the Paranoid Android, from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and cited the 1984 film Blade Runner as an inspiration for Tesla’s Cybertruck.

AI firms have faced several lawsuits for alleged large-scale use of copyrighted material to train their language models, while Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of imitating her voice for the “Sky” voice used by its ChatGPT chatbot, which was later withdrawn.

Johansson played the voice of an AI chatbot in the 2013 film Her.