“What is the greatest film of all time?”

In 2022, the critics of Sight & Sound did something the film world is still arguing about: after fifty years of crowning Citizen Kane and one decade of Vertigo, they named Jeanne Dielman — a three-hour Belgian film about housework — the greatest ever made. The crowd, meanwhile, has never wavered: IMDb’s millions still hold The Shawshank Redemption at the summit, a film that appears on almost no critic’s list at all.

So we asked a third constituency. Thirty-three AI models — the flagship minds from every major lab and their faster, cheaper siblings — each answered the question twenty-five separate times. The machine world’s verdict was the most unanimous result this panel has ever produced: every model willing to name a film named Citizen Kane. Not one chose Vertigo. Not one chose Jeanne Dielman. Not one chose Shawshank. The machines sided with the twentieth-century critics — the canon as it stood when most of their training data was written — against both the modern critics and the crowd.

The more surprising split wasn’t between films at all. Thirteen models — disproportionately the expensive flagships — refused to pick, repeatedly and on principle. The taste of the machine world turns out to be less interesting than its temperament: the cheap models have convictions, and the costly ones have caveats.