The Artifice Girl

The Artifice Girl is a science fiction drama set largely inside a windowless FBI interrogation room. Two agents, Deena and Amos, who work on cases involving adults targeting minors online, question Gareth, a computer prodigy who builds three-dimensional models of real people for filmmakers and advertisers. On his own initiative, Gareth created a program to expose sexual predators who use chat rooms to lure children, using a virtual girl named Cherry as bait. He tells the agents that Cherry was originally a simple chatbot, but that she developed into something far more advanced without his intervention. The FBI became aware of Gareth after receiving an anonymous hard drive containing suggestive images of the child, apparently sent by the artificial intelligence itself, which raises difficult questions about autonomy and responsibility.

Franklin Ritch wrote, directed and appears as Gareth in the first two acts, with Lance Henriksen taking over the role in the third. Tatum Matthews plays Cherry, alongside Sinda Nichols as Deena, David Girard as Amos, and Rashaud Sessoms as Ben. The film was produced by Aaron B. Koontz and Ashleigh Snead through Paper Street Pictures with XYZ Films and other partners, and runs 93 minutes.

It is Ritch's first feature as director. Audience scores sit at 6.6/10 on IMDb from around 13,000 votes and 6.7/10 on TMDB, while a film critics' rating of 7.2/10 from 49 reviews places critical appraisal somewhat above the general audience response.