Movies that Show AI's Sinister Side

Before the sequel films in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cybernetic AI turned good, he was definitely bad to the bone in the first film, The Terminator. In fact, there were no good terminators in that movie. The AI, known as Skynet, only had one goal - to destroy humanity and prevent its resistance against AI world domination.

The film’s plot centers around a robot going back in time to unalive a woman who will give birth to the leader of the resistance. The low-budget sci-fi film may be filled with outdated special effects and outdated haircuts, but it’s one of the most influential sci-fi films of all time.

The alien in Alien – later referred to as a xenomorph in the sequels – may seem like the main antagonist of the film, but the doom of the crew was really the fault of the AI trying to protect it: Ash. While the crew members aboard the spaceship, the Nostromo, debated freezing the organism or leaving it behind, Ash wanted to take it back home on orders from corporate.

Ash and the corporation behind their space venture never cared about the human lives aboard the ship, making them the true antagonists of the film. Wanting to study it, no matter the cost, nearly all the characters in the film are wiped out except for one because of Ash. The alien was doing what it does.

Probably one of the most famous sinister AIs in film history would have to be the spaceship AI HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The AI in the film plots against the space crew while refusing any orders from the humans aboard, uttering the film’s famous line, “I'm Sorry Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That.”

The 1968 film was one of the first films to depict scientifically accurate space flight, which is probably why people think director Stanley Kubrick was behind the alleged moon landing hoax. But he was also one of the first filmmakers to show us the sinister side of AI and what it could mean for humans.

Flash forward, nearly 50 years later, and AI is still depicted as the villain in modern cinema. In Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One, Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise, faces his most formidable opponent yet – an AI known as The Entity. The highly intelligent AI knows pretty much everything about everyone.

The AI can erase people from video recordings or deepfake people into them. It predicts the future while also being completely aware of what people are up to at the moment. The AI in the seventh Mission Impossible film is so advanced and so sinister that it’s going to take a whole other film to stop it.

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, creates an AI named Ultron, which he designs to protect the world. However, as Ultron becomes self-aware, it has other plans on its mind, changing its goal to wipe out humanity as a way of saving the world – from us.

While it wasn’t what Tony Stark intended, the film goes to show the dangers of putting the security of the world in the hands of artificial intelligence. Fortunately, the Avengers are able to stop AI in the movie, but it begs the question: what do we do in real life where there are no superheroes?

The Matrix has a fairly similar backstory to that of The Terminator. At some point in the late 20^th century, AI took over and enslaved humanity, placing them in a digital simulation while turning them into batteries for energy. Nearly all the AI in The Matrix is on the bad side, except for a few entities like the Oracle – but even she claims to be neutral.

Only two sequels later, is NEO, played by Keanu Reeves, able to stop the AI agent Smith and the machines from destroying what is left of the free people of the real world – and even then, much of humanity is still under the control of the machines, stuck inside the Matrix. The worst part about this movie is that it could be a true story, and we would never know.

WALL-E probably has one of the nicest AIs depicted in film history, but its antagonist is pretty bad. In the world of WALL-E, humanity is living off-world, away from Earth, until it is sustainable once again. AUTO, the sinister AI, takes its objective as keeping humanity away from Earth entirely.

AUTO turns humanity into lazy zombies relying on technology rather than their human capabilities. Through strategic measures, AUTO is able to keep humans away from Earth and stuck in space for an indefinite time – that is until WALL-E shows up and brings people back to Earth, which becomes inhabitable once again.

Easily manipulated by the pleasures of the flesh, Austin Powers is easily fooled by Dr. Evil’s fem-bots, believing them to be real women rather than weapons. The fem-bots seduce Austin Powers, but he is able to narrowly escape his doom. The fem-bots prove to be formidable enemies – at least in regard to Austin Powers.

While the movie may be utterly ridiculous, and not a serious depiction of AI capabilities and dangers, it’s a sinister portrayal of AI, nonetheless. It’s also worth noting that Britney Spears plays a fem-bot in the film upon her request, because she wanted to wear a bra that shot out bullets.

Godzilla and King Kong go at it pretty hard in the film Godzilla vs. Kong, but arguably, neither of them is really the villain in the movie, especially when you get to the end of it, where Godzilla and Kong join forces to defeat a worse enemy – Mechagodzilla, a man-made monster.

Mechagodzilla first appeared in the 1974 film Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla where it was an extraterrestrial entity. But later versions of Mechagodzilla depicted it as a weapon created for the purpose of defeating Godzilla. In Godzilla vs. Kong it is controlled by the mind of Ghidorah – sorry if this is getting complicated – it’s just one of those situations where you had to be there.

While Roy Batty is arguably not all bad - he wants to live a longer, normal life, after all - he does do things that are considerably sinister, to say the least. He unalives several people, including his creator and the guy who helped design them, and he harms some fairly innocent people too.

In the end, though, he does redeem himself by saving Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) life and giving us one of the best monologues in science fiction history. Nevertheless, the good he did never erased the bad things he did to get to that point. While the movie is decidedly sympathetic to the replicants, as they are called, some are portrayed as more innocent than others.

RoboCop is one of the most popular cyborgs of the 1980s, but the titular character and protagonist of the film isn’t the only depiction of AI in the film. In one of the film’s opening scenes, there’s a RoboCop prototype that is completely AI with no human qualities, known as ED-209.

ED-209 is essentially a robotic police officer with artificial intelligence and no human qualities. During a test of its capabilities, the robot malfunctions and turns against a group of board members, unaliving everyone in the room. And that’s why they create a Robo-Cop that’s a little more human. The movie spawned two sequels and an eventual remake.

The Transformers films are centered around two factions of robots – one of them good and one of them bad. The Autobots are the good guys, while the Decepticons are the baddies. Sorry, that’s not really up for interpretation. The movies aren’t that nuanced, I’m afraid. And to make things clearer, only one of them wants humanity euthanized.

Megatron is perhaps the baddest of the bad when it comes to evil AI. He’s cruel; he’s tyrannical and completely sinister. In Transformers: Age of Extinction, it is revealed that all the Transformers were created by a group of extraterrestrials, which is what makes them AI rather than just aliens.

Prometheus, a prequel to the original Alien film, once again makes artificial intelligence the enemy. While past Alien sequels had depicted AI in a more positive light, this film remembered its origins, where the AI is more focused on protecting the alien than it is protecting the crew aboard the spaceship.

Once David’s curiosity is peaked by the discovery of the alien species, he ends up infecting a crewmate with it just to see what happens – and arguably to be vindictive as well. Essentially, he is responsible for the demise of everyone in the film and certainly has no qualms about it – which is further evident by his actions in the sequel.

Up until the Star Wars prequel, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the AI characters of Star Wars were basically all good guys. The first three films in fact, take place from the perspective of its AI characters - C3P0 and R2D2. But for the prequel, for the first time, we had fully AI bad guys.

The Battle Droids in The Phantom Menace are a bit dim and not great fighters, but they still pose a threat to the characters in the film due to their sheer numbers. As the army of the trade federation, they represent the control of corporations and how AI can be used for evil rather than good.

Maschinenmensch, also known as "Machine-Man" in English, is a humanoid robot character from the 1927 German science fiction film "Metropolis." The machine is used by the film's antagonist to manipulate and control people. The film was directed by Fritz Lang and is renowned for its groundbreaking special effects – for its time.

Aside from film majors, most people of the modern age haven’t seen it. While it may have been one of the first depictions of a sinister AI in film, it never quite had the popularity of 2001 or The Terminator. That being said, it arguably paved the way for AIs future depiction in film.