The oldest of these movies, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was also the one that saw the biggest surge in demand, up 64.4% in the four months since ChatGPT was released.

Yann LeCun, the chief A.I. scientist at Meta, has dreamed of building what we now call A.G.I. since he saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 70-millimeter Cinerama at a Paris movie theater when he ...