I found an article on Senses Of Cinema that says this...
A.I.'s naysayers sometimes admitted an almost androidal sangfroid, to the point of saying they just couldn't feel for David (Haley Joel Osment) because he's a robot, albeit an advanced model designed to love parents who've lost children in a near-future plague. Alas, the critical resistance is real. But they are not. Could they get away with that sort of dull literal-mindedness writing about any other art-form but movies? For starters, seeing David as merely mechanical and finally unworthy of emotional investment denies the basis of representational art and metaphor. This dumbfounding objection offends the essence of storytelling. Should a child detach from Pinocchio's fate because he is, after all, just wood? Isn't E.T. at best a believable fantasy, at worst a teardrop-proof rubber puppet? A modest proposal: David's most obvious meaning is Man. He's an avatar of human experience, yearning, and will to perfect himself before his Creator. With A.I. Spielberg tells the oldest newest story: Man's search for meaning.
By far the most common critical obfuscation, to avoid engaging the film on its own terms, involved the pitting of Kubrick against Spielberg, specifically suggesting that their ideas irreconcilably clash. That would be a legitimate approach if only they knew what they were talking about – that is, if A.I. weren't entirely, unmistakably Spielbergian, if not the summation of his art. Spielberg, the ecumenical, theistic humanist and modestly wise optimist (one humorist found the two perfect words, “elfin and rabbinic”) favours the more “open” cinematic style characteristic of Jean Renoir. That means appreciating such glorious moments as a mother and son looking upon each other with exquisite devotion not for a strictly circumscribed narrative meaning but for a certain, more ineffable beauty and emotion, the way audiences once generously engaged movies with the aesthetic qualities of How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) – and favorably compared its then old-fashioned tableaux vivants to the contemporary “closed” Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Here Spielberg uses his passion and great gift to syncretise story elements that certainly don't clash on the screen and only seem dissonant in the abstract – as if one entered with Kubrick's unmade movie already firmly in one's mind. It's not terribly important that the movie explores notions and images which intrigued Kubrick, the agnostic misanthrope who gravitated to the deterministic style of Fritz Lang. Kubrick and Spielberg would have formed completely unique creatures from the same clay. There's more to the authentic style of real artists than superficial treatment of plot points. Note that Kubrick stayed interested in A.I. for 20 years – but not so interested that he actually made the film. In the end he wanted Spielberg to direct it, too.
With Spielberg's opening of A.I. we see why. And, in any case, likely Kubrickian elements remain: The tramways fellated by obscenely gaping mouths, for example, could be transporting riders to the milk bar of A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1970). In Spielberg's 1941 (1979) Slim Pickens is practically a movie-length homage to his character in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1963). What of it? Kubrick's movies are distinctly different from Spielberg's, works of a brilliant, cynical satirist whose artistic downfall was an unceasing irony. Displaced as animus against Spielberg, the vehement abreaction to A.I. begins the embalming of Kubrick, worshipped by critics who no longer have to sit through the movies they invariably dismissed as too long, too boring, too cerebral, too... Ironic, isn't it? “In irony man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act,” Sartre wrote on the subject of Bad Faith. “He leads us to believe in order not to be believed.” A Kubrick A.I. may have been above and beyond belief, perhaps ending in the ironic, frigid futility of faith, David frozen dead, like Jack at the end of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), for eternity.
Spielberg sees not an ending but a beginning in that image – the Blue Fairy/Our Lady icon ever smiling and welcoming, David's eyes open and fixed upon her for 2,000 years, a superhuman act of monk-like devotion, imperfect man's perfection of a prayer that outlives history. In Spielberg's intriguing coda, the alien (or unrecognisably evolved robot that provocatively resembles the Giacometti curves of the mecha manufacturer's logo icon), whom we discover to be narrating the story, says that man's unique spirit radiated across the universe, interpenetrating and binding all things, leading them to hope that humans were “the key.” So Love is the energy that can be created but not destroyed. And it is certainly not wasted upon David. But a scientist poses a “moral question” early on: What is the responsibility of the creator to love the creation? Even if a robot can love humans, can humans learn to love them back?