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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.

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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 monster of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein could be described as artificially intelligent, and its rebellion is well-earned. The general concept of a created being turning on its inventor is central to the rogue AI trope, and it has its origin in Shelly's opus. Closer to the modern iteration of the trope is Karel Čapek's 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots or R.U.R. That Czech work coined the term "robot", from an old Dutch word meaning "slave". It's a socialist work that depicts the oppression and replacement of the working people by a race of sapient machines. The capital-owning class is happy to abuse their machine employees, given their lack of material needs, but they find that even robots have a breaking point. The machines revolt, resulting in the extinction of mankind.

In most of the stories featuring an evil AI, the humans that invented the deadly machine are, in many ways, the real villain. Though, that can be hard to internalize when the machine is the one doing all the torture and murder. Perhaps the seminal work of evil AI is Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It's thirteen pages long, and it's perhaps the most perfect modern depiction of the concept of hell anyone's ever come up with. The story follows the five final human beings on Earth who have been taken prisoner by a proto-Skynet called AM. AM was programmed to win the Cold War and chose to interpret that order by nuking all mankind out of existence. As both a final punishment and a form of eternal entertainment, AM set to work torturing five seemingly random people forever. It's one of the most viscerally unpleasant works of fiction in modern history, but fans of the trope would be hard-pressed to find a more evil AI than AM.

Both film and video games have been homes to the evil AI trend. Video games love to pit the hero of their tale against a killer AI, but the tone is a moving target. Harlan Ellison himself adapted his opus to the world of PC gaming in 1995, creating the kind of game one might play to experience a prolonged and painful feverish nightmare. AM is far from the only machine gamers have had to outwit over the years, however. System Shock's SHODAN replaces AM's incalculable hate for the beings that created it with a towering god complex that leads her to seek power she believes she's owed. On the other side of the spectrum is Portal's GLaDOS, who kills all who oppose her, but does so with a sardonic and cynical sense of humor. GLaDOS manages to be one of the most beloved characters in gaming, thanks to a combination of bitter unfeeling spite and dry gallows humor.

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The newfound world of cruelty embodied by Mary Shelly's Modern Prometheus went on to invent creations more horrible than a man assembled from corpses. It's the same tale, a person invents something they shouldn't have, it begins to question its existence, and the lack of answers drives it to act out. The horror of the rogue AI is the horror of being alive, the horror of a being that, unlike us, can know its purpose and find it unsatisfactory. People aren't scared of a machine deciding it's going to be evil, they fear the possibility that something we make could inherit our traits. The ultimate villain of science fiction is the hand-crafted sapience that embodies the failures of intelligent life, and there'll no doubt be countless more examples.

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