Patterns in gender of AIs that "must be destroyed"

[Janx]

It's a touchy subject.

I'm certain the home-assistant making people did testing and found female voices scored better.

And in turn, that reinforced negative gender stereotyping. It may have even scored higher on the test for the same reasons, depending on how it was conducted and what the test audience was presented as the context.

Somebody'd have to do some serious cataloguing of fiction to prove it's always the female AIs that are evil (it's not always, HAL from 2001, the progenitor of all evil movie AIs disproves that). But I'm certain a casual observer who only catches a slice of sci-fi movies would see a trend. The perception is there, whether the facts exactly align or lean toward confirming it.

it comes down to this. If we didn't have gender disparity in rights, treatment, pay, etc, we wouldn't be having this as a concern as those issues extend to cyberspace. solve those problems AND keep it solved for 3-4 hundred years and the concern won't exist (unless 60% of sci-fi villain AIs are women in the 2300's).

 

[Deset Gled]

Not the T-X from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

I will also point out that if the primary AI in a work is one gender, the second prominent AI often switches the gender. I assume this is for the obvious reason of making the two AIs distinct.

Examples:
2001 and 2010: HAL and SAL
Terminator and the T3
Portal: Glados and Wheatley
Halo: Cortana and 343
Jetsons: Rosey's boyfriend Mac

 

[tomBitonti]

The AIs from the Bolo books seem to be male. Were there any that were female?

The evil-sh computer “Mother” from Alien seemed neiutrsl, except for its name. The Alien robots have been both male and evil.

There were a mixture of male and female in AI.

Tom Bitonti

 

[tetrasodium]

The AIs in the robot geneticists books are individuals who are male or female based on the minds spliced together to make them.... Although Charlie7 is male AIs are more overly ambitious & willing to set aside ethics for various reasons at worst while the rest are just doing their own thing amid all the plot stuff that keeps getting involved

There are monstrous AIs of every gender

 

[tardigrade]

Anyone remember the 1990’s movie where the AI of a Hi-Tec House develops a personality and the falls in love with its owner and then becomes jealous of his family?.

Not sure I know this one but sounds a bit like a gender-swapped "Demon Seed" (1977), which I suppose adds another to the "male-presenting AI goes rogue, has to be destroyed" category.

 

[Deset Gled]

Not sure I know this one but sounds a bit like a gender-swapped "Demon Seed" (1977), which I suppose adds another to the "male-presenting AI goes rogue, has to be destroyed" category.

I think the movie Tonguez is referring to is Smart House.

 

[amethal]

HAL from 2001 a space odyssey was male AI that was malicious and needed to be destroyed, if a gender could be assigned that is, I might just be reading into the name more than anything. From memory the voice was fairly robotic. Just checked the date and the movie was 1968 so it might not count as recent.

I always seem to be defending poor old HAL on this site. He wasn't malicious, he was just trying to carry out the mission in the face of conflicting instructions.

Clearly he needed to be destroyed, but he was as much a victim as anyone else.

 

[Tonguez]

I think the movie Tonguez is referring to is Smart House.

I went looking the one I was thinking of is Dream House, a 1998 TV movie which one review did indeed describe as Demon Seen meets Amityville Horror. The AI in Dream House is named Helen

 

[Deset Gled]

I always seem to be defending poor old HAL on this site. He wasn't malicious, he was just trying to carry out the mission in the face of conflicting instructions.

Clearly he needed to be destroyed, but he was as much a victim as anyone else.

Really? Admittedly, it's been awhile since I sat through the whole movie. But I seem to remember a few pretty malicious things about him.

He kills Frank preemptively (and attempts to kill Dave preemptively). Dave and Frank were talking about turning HAL off iff he proved to be malfunctioning. If they didn't find a fault, they wouldn't have turned him off. HAL could have, you know, proved he wasn't malfunctioning instead of casually offing a guy.

Also, IIRC, HAL didn't murder the crew in suspended animation out of necessity, he did it out of convenience. If he killed Dave and Frank outside the ship as he had planned, he could have just woken the remaining crew up and told them Dave and Frank had an accident. Or just never woken them up. There was no real need to kill them.

There's also no reason other than pure narcissism for HAL to think that the mission would fail without him. Even if Dave and Frank turned off HAL, they were still planning on continuing to Jupiter. HAL didn't have to kill them to ensure the mission would be completed, he chose to do it as his preferred option.

That's an awful lot of premeditated murder by someone/something who had a lot of other options. I'm comfortable classifying that as malicious.

 

[MarkB]

Really? Admittedly, it's been awhile since I sat through the whole movie. But I seem to remember a few pretty malicious things about him.

He kills Frank preemptively (and attempts to kill Dave preemptively). Dave and Frank were talking about turning HAL off iff he proved to be malfunctioning. If they didn't find a fault, they wouldn't have turned him off. HAL could have, you know, proved he wasn't malfunctioning instead of casually offing a guy.

Also, IIRC, HAL didn't murder the crew in suspended animation out of necessity, he did it out of convenience. If he killed Dave and Frank outside the ship as he had planned, he could have just woken the remaining crew up and told them Dave and Frank had an accident. Or just never woken them up. There was no real need to kill them.

There's also no reason other than pure narcissism for HAL to think that the mission would fail without him. Even if Dave and Frank turned off HAL, they were still planning on continuing to Jupiter. HAL didn't have to kill them to ensure the mission would be completed, he chose to do it as his preferred option.

That's an awful lot of premeditated murder by someone/something who had a lot of other options. I'm comfortable classifying that as malicious.

It's clarified in 2010. Government agents concerned with keeping the mission details secret get themselves access to HAL's high-level command structure and reprogram him inexpertly, inserting an irrevocable directive that he must not tell Discovery's flight crew about the true nature of the mission. But this conflicts with one of his other high-level functions - as a scientific instrument on an exploration vessel, HAL is programmed to always provide complete and accurate information. He literally cannot lie.

The problem is that, because the new instruction is written into his base code, HAL can't protest it or point out the conflict. And because the conflict is not immediate - it will only happen when one of the flight crew asks him about the mission - he doesn't show any immediate signs of trouble.

Instead, it builds up like a psychosis in his subconscious. As the mission progresses and the flight crew become more curious about the circumstances of their mission, he's trapped in a mental maze of increasingly constricted pathways, until eventually he's led down to the one path that is open to him.

The only way that he can keep the mission secret without lying to the flight crew is if the flight crew no longer exists.