A.I. (the movie) cult

Factual Questions
1

Okay, Snopes doesn’t have anything on this. I heard from a friend of mine (who’s a fairly reliable source of believing every bit of bullshit that he runs across) of a cult related to the movie A.I. due out this month. Here’s the “story”:

[nutshell]

On the original movie trailer there are some odd dashes on the title. Evidently, when compiled from left to right they
formed a telephone number. When you call this telephone number it makes some reference to a person in the trailer credits. Some random job like “movie historian” refers to a person who does not exist. When you do a web search on her, you discover a whole story about how she was killed by
androids or something. Then through other careful investigation people found other clues that tied the story in. They have massive newsgroups to share this information.

[/nutshell]

I did a cursory web search, but nothing came up. Somebody here has to have heard an inkling of this somewhere, so I asking: “What’s the straight dope?”

2

There’s a whole mess of very subtle websites out there, all part of the marketing effort for this film.

http://www.netscape.co.uk/technology/features/010418_aiai.htm???cp=iukh3p1
BBC News | SCI/TECH | AI is alive on the internet

3

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cloudmakers

It looks like it’s basically a publicity stunt, to get people involved in the game to want to see the movie more to tell other people about it etc…

But the gist of it that your friend related to you is basically correct.

4

It seems like a publicity gimmick, but when you actually start getting into it, it’s truly incredible just how elaborate the thing really is. One of the websites asks visitors to register their name and telephone number, and some people have actually reported being called by some kind of computerized voice. Creepy.

[url=“http://www.coronaproductions.com/cgi-bin/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&forum=A.I.&number=39&DaysPrune=30&LastLogin=”]Here’s a dedicated board** on a movie-related website. Tons of great information.

5

Holy shit, that was incompetent.

6

This thread talks a little bit more about this web campaign

7

To fill in some blanks…

The random job was “Sentient Machine Therapist”, which of course isn’t a real job, which was the whole point.

And the main website of the group that’s playing the game is: http://www.cloudmakers.org/

And it is a game, not just a bunch of random websites. There are puzzles that have to be solved in order to get further in the game. Quite difficult puzzles at that.

8

Putting such things in movies is not unheard of. Here’s something interesting about The Matrix that I learned at The Easter Egg Archive:

9

Sweet. That’s pretty cool, thanks.

Mods, I imagine this’ll denegrate into some sort of conversation, if anything. In fact, it’ll probably die on its own accord, as there seems to already be an A.I. thread elsewhere. So, do with it as you will, sagacious ones.