Skip to main content

Apple’s virtual assistant is less humble and more murderous in Psycho Siri short film

Siri IconPoor Siri. As Apple’s virtual assistant, she (or he, if you’re not in the USA) is only trying to help, letting you know whether you need an umbrella, sorting out your calendar or answering another inane question so you and your mates can have a laugh at her expense.

It’s probably not the most rewarding of lives, and we wonder how many of you bother to say thank you after she sorts something out, but now Siri must even endure accusations that she could turn homicidal at anytime.

Just before Christmas, Siri was portrayed as a knife-wielding, mind-controlling, Honda-driving psychopath in “Siri”, a spoof horror film trailer. For one so humble, this probably stung a bit, but not nearly as much as “Psycho Siri.”

Psycho Siri is a short film about a man who finds an iPhone 4S, thinks it’s his lucky day, brings it home, but quickly regrets it. Siri is capable of some very unusual things here – perhaps she’s running iOS 5.1 – and delights in terrorizing her new owner.

Following in the footsteps of great killer technology films such as The Terminator and, erm, Maximum Overdrive, Psycho Siri is a warning to us all about what could happen if our tech gets too clever. Well, not really, it’s just a silly sub-five minute short with some good effects and some dodgy acting, but Siri’s feelings are hurt all the same.

Check out Psycho Siri below, and if there are any budding filmmakers watching, Siri says she’s hoping that next time, she’ll be more good T-800 than evil T-1000.

Editors' Recommendations

Andy Boxall
Senior Mobile Writer
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
We finally know the price of Asus’ most powerful gaming NUC
The Asus ROG NUC on a desk surrounded by three monitors.

The first Asus ROG NUC (Next Unit of Computing) model is just around the corner. The small form factor PC is now up for pre-order at a German retailer, and although it's powerful enough to rival some of the best laptops, it costs more than many comparable models -- and you'll still have to pay extra for a monitor.

Asus' first take on Intel's portable PC contains a lot of compute power in a small chassis. Although there are a few configurations of the PC, the one that was spotted up for sale ahead of time comes with Intel's latest Meteor Lake-H CPU, the Core Ultra 9 185H, which sports 16 cores and 22 threads and can be boosted to run at up to 5.1GHz, all with a thermal design power (TDP) of 45 watts. However, Asus allows overclocking, meaning that the CPU can run at up to 65 watts instead.

Read more
YouTube tells creators to start labeling ‘realistic’ AI content
YouTube on Roku.

YouTube is taking steps to try to help viewers better understand if what they’re watching has been created, whether completely or in part, by generative AI.

“Generative AI is transforming the ways creators express themselves -- from storyboarding ideas to experimenting with tools that enhance the creative process,” YouTube said in a message shared on Monday. “But viewers increasingly want more transparency about whether the content they’re seeing is altered or synthetic.”

Read more
AMD is making the CPU more and more obsolete in gaming
A demo of AMD GPU work graphs featuring in-game scenery including a castle and a town.

At GDC 2024, AMD just expanded on Microsoft's recently announced Work Graphs API, and a quick demo shows just how powerful the new tech can be for gaming performance. AMD's iteration moves draw calls and mesh nodes from the CPU to the GPU, cutting back on the time it takes to execute these tasks. As a result, AMD found that there was a massive performance improvement -- rendering time saw a 64% boost -- when using Work Graphs with mesh shaders.

Microsoft introduced Work Graphs as a way to streamline processes both in gaming and in productivity, all by giving the GPU the power to schedule and execute tasks without first communicating with the CPU. It's built into the Direct3D 12 API and it can reduce bottlenecks and improve gaming performance in 3D games.

Read more