The Rogue AI Trope in Sci-Fi, Explained

gamerant.com:

If one wanted to throw together a generic sci-fi story and needed a go-to villain, they've got a handful of easy options to pull from. The hostile alien, the corrupt corporate overlord, and the domineering space emperor are all extremely common, but they pale in comparison to the undisputed champion; the evil artificial intelligence.

Everyone knows what artificial intelligence is in the modern day. They gather data every time a person uses the internet, they provide services large and small, and they're essential to most of modern life. Modern people talk about AI in everything from gaming to politics, but the go-to pop culture association still looks more like Skynet than Baymax.

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Everyone can name a few killer AIs. They're extremely common across every major art medium. The greatest villain of all time list from movies to books, to video games, will inevitably feature a couple of man-made intellects abusing their godlike power to wipe out their creators. Rogue AIs typically begin their existence as advanced yet straightforward machines designed to do something humans can't easily accomplish. Maybe they were built to make life easier on a global scale, to respond to catastrophic disasters, or wage war more efficiently than any person ever could. From the earliest days of science fiction literature to the groundbreaking recent developments in the medium, artificial intelligence is still the central villain of the genre.

The concept of machines attaining human-like intelligence and using it to unseat humanity has been a concern since at least 1863 when Samuel Butler wrote Darwin among the Machines. Though it wouldn't typically make the list, the organic