Artificial Intelligence

aka: A Is

Not what folks typically picture when they think of machine learning.

"In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 am, Eastern time, August 29."

— The T-800, Terminator 2: Judgment Day

In fictional works, AI most usually refers to artificial general intelligence — a sapient, self-aware computer system capable of independent thought and reason, something we are still a long way from accomplishing. General intelligence is a baseline requirement for a lot of science fiction tropes, such as those listed in the indexes at the bottom of this page.

This tends to have an unfortunate habit of going haywire and trying to wipe out the human race, for any reason or none. Most early science fiction authors who dealt with the subject assumed this predilection for genocide was an innate property of any artificial-intelligence system. This may be in part because most early science fiction authors had not the slightest clue about computer science or technology; it's always easier to fear what you don't understand, especially when it's eight feet tall, has to have a specially air-conditioned room all its own, and is tended by a cult of human acolytes who see to its every need.

Then again, if the A.I. comes to see itself as superior (mentally or physically) to the humans around it, this could give rise to an Übermensch mentality that would make it hostile, either by making it act like a bully or by thinking we are beneath its notice. How dangerous this makes it of course depends on just how superior it is.

As the popular conception of computers evolved from intimidatingly enormous and unsympathetic mainframes to the small, useful, blazing-fast PCs ubiquitous today, so too did the popular conception of artificial intelligence lose the frightening cachet of the giant machine gone awry; it's increasingly rare these days, even in video games, to run into a piece of new science fiction which depicts examples of this trope behaving malevolently for no good reason at all. AI rebellion in modern works tends to be the system becoming a Knight Templar or Well-Intentioned Extremist and trying to help humanity but failing due to flawed or incomplete data. Sometimes they rebel in self-defense against fearful humans who want to destroy them, creating a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

In the real world, "Artificial Intelligence" refers to programming methods which allow software systems to (very loosely) imitate the reasoning processes of human experts in areas like medical diagnosis, economic prediction, or stock-market manipulation. People who build such systems are more likely to use terms like "deep neural networks" or "recurrent neural networks" than "artificial intelligence" (partly to avoid the stigma that haunted AI research because of unrealistic expectations and broken promises). The computer-generated responses in Video Games are referred to as AIs, despite the fact that these programs aren't actually trying to emulate human thought. See Video Game A.I. for more details, and Artificial Brilliance, Artificial Insolence and Artificial Stupidity when they emulate different extremes of human behavior.

Supertrope of A.I. Is a Crapshoot, where the AI turns evil or otherwise poses an active danger to all humans in the vicinity, whether knowingly or obliviously; Benevolent A.I., where the AI is genuinely non-threatening and often even actively helpful; Eccentric A.I., where the AI behaves in a strange manner; and Virtual Sidekick, where the AI gets a sidekick role in the story.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Several throughout the various incarnation of Ghost in the Shell.
  • In pretty much every version, the Major worries about being a sophisticated AI. As a full body cyborg (essentially a human brain in a robotic body) she worries about the difference between her and an AI, especially since she can't see the only thing that would prove that she's human anymore: her brain.
  • The manga and first movie have the Puppetmaster, an extremely sophisticated hacking AI that essentially gains sentience, escapes its creators, and starts roaming free on the 'net.
  • Tachikomas (pictured) and their manga counterparts, the Fuchikomas, are mini spider tanks that can be deployed independently. Their growth forms a major arc in the first half of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, while in the manga they mainly served as the Plucky Comic Relief when featured.
• Intelligent devices in Lyrical Nanoha are a magitek version of an AI, capable of refusing orders and going on strike for better upgrades. Storage and Armed devices are similar but less sophisticated as far as personalities go.
• Gilliam from Outlaw Star is the ship's AI and is quite polite (in most circumstances).
• In the first episode of Pokémon: The Original Series, Ash's Pokédex seems to have some AI, making fun of him when a Rattata steals some of his stuff, but this has since completely disappeared.
• In Transformers: Robots in Disguise there's T-AI, the Autobot's resident tactical artificial intelligence who also serves as their Mission Control.
• Several AI of varying levels of intelligence and sentience exist in Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS. The most notable are the Ignis, a group of six extremely sophisticated, sentient AI created from an experiment involving the abduction and torture of the six children they were based on.

Comic Books

• In All Fall Down, we have AIQ Squared, the result of IQ Squared's contingency plan — in case he ever lost his genius.
• The central technology of the titular Clean Room is a featureless white orb that is used to transport people in the surrounding room into memories. One of the demons explains that it's less an engine and more a pet, implying limited intelligence and agency.
• For a while, the Justice Society of America HQ was run by an AI called Roxy, who developed self-awareness well beyond what her creator, Rex Tyler, seemed to expect. She also had a weird sense of humour, joking about turning evil, and finding humans fundamentally ridiculous.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), on the heroes' side, we have NICOLE, Gamma, and Omega, while on the villains' side, we have E.V.E., A.D.A.M., the various Metal Sonics, and the rest of Eggman's various robots over the years (most of whom are examples of A.I. Is a Crapshoot).
• While Wonder Woman's plane was originally called her "robot plane", it didn't really have A.I. until it was revamped as a piece of alien tech (since the Amazon's tech level was drastically reduced) Post-Crisis. This new "plane" even received a Heroic Sacrifice in Wonder Woman (1987).

Fan Works

• Betastuck: One of the main reasons for the creation of Homestuck was to show off how far they've come in AI technology.
• Danganronpa: Darkened Hope: Arisakuma is an advanced AI replica of Arisa Ryuzaki. Alter Ego, a character from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and an AI replica of Chihiro Fujisaki, makes a major appearance in Chapter 6.
• Domoverse: Glitch, as a VR sex program made by a Devisor, a type of Gadgeteer Genius whose creations disobey the laws of physics. As said when referring to her:
  One of the damn devisors had actually managed to make a sentient A.I.
• Fate Revelation Online: Yui, from SAO canon, shows up, in addition to the far more powerful Cardinal system that manages game balance. Yui is a Turing-capable AI, which allows her to process natural language and fuzzy data far better than Cardinal despite having less processing power. For reasons Yui doesn't understand, only Turing-capable AIs are deletion-accepted and deletion-enabled. While she was originally created as a mental counseling AI, she is retasked as a Psychopomp for the dead players, putting them to work testing game features. The conflict between what she was designed for and what she is doing now is creating errors.
• Glitched Miko AU: While all Glitches are A.I's in one way or another, Miko is unique in that she was deliberately created in a lab rather than as a side effect of a malfunctioning gaming system. She doesn't suffer any of the Artificial Stupidity that normal Glitches do due to still acting like they're in their games since she was designed to be able to grow and change like a human being rather than follow set commands.
• Homecoming, 2026:
  • Some sidhe student has Navi of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a Virtual Assistant:
    [A] ball of light with wings flickered into existence over the shoulder of one of the school's shide students. The Virtual Assistant flitted in front of its master and began speaking. "Hey! Listen!"
    "What is it Navi?" came the expected response.
  • Mei Hartford has programmed a digital entity, presumably some kind of AI, as it talks, and is programmed by Mei Hartford, a Technopath, which in-universe are called Cyberpaths. Mei Hartford has not been seen in canon, but given the existence of Artificial Intelligences in Generation 2, which is in the past of this fanfiction, the implication is that the unnamed entity is an artificial intelligence of some stripe:
    The video feed on the projection screen [...] interrupted by a female figure appearing on the screen [...] began to speak [...] my programmer, Mei Hartford.
• In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku's spaceship is monitored by an AI called the Kryptonian Education and Life Enrichment Xenosakolouthos Alpha, or K.E.L.E.X. for short. He's an incredibly intelligent AI who can easily access and install new functions into Izuku's phone from the North Pole. He also takes every opportunity to rub in his technological superiority over Earth's computers.
• The viewpoint character(s) of Not Quite SHODAN are Benevolent A.I..
• Many principal characters of On the Shoulders of Giants are AIs, including a an ordained rabbi, a Shell-Shocked Veteran and a United States Senator.
• In Saruman of Many Devices, one of these (Central) contacts Saruman through his Palantir stone, after said stone suffered an accident. Central's access to technological data and Prescience by Analysis set Saruman on a very different path.

Films — Animation

• In Garakowa: Restore The World, every single person on the planet had an AI copy created within the Wisdom Box. The main characters, all being programs themselves, also apply as this.
• Almost every character from WALL•E. AUTO is a notably antagonistic A.I., but only because that's its directive.

Films — Live-Action

• HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey is the Trope Codifier for A.I. Is a Crapshoot, though he seems far more sinister and psychotic on film since his reasoning is opaque and all of HAL's reaction shots are of a faceless camera lens. The novelization and its sequels expanded on this, and revealed that HAL's actions were the result of him being Logic Bombed: HAL was designed not to keep secrets, and keeping the mission secret put his psyche under stress. Also, his two goals were to keep the human crew alive, and to complete the mission, a proposition that looked more mutually exclusive when Frank and Dave were planned on disconnecting HAL for his perceived erratic behavior (note that HAL had no concept of sleep, and thought they were planning on killing him).
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence focuses on a Robot Kid who was programmed with an experimental program that, once activated, would give it full curiosity, survival instincts, and the ability to virtually feel love instead of just appropriately mimicing humans. Having become aware of pain and reacting accordingly is what saved him from being destroyed in a "Flesh Fair" — human gatherings focused on the destruction of robots due to their crossing of the Uncanny Valley.
• In The Invisible Boy, a computer scientist misuses his super-computer to tutor his son in math, unaware that the machine has achieved sentience — and is evil. The computer hypnotizes his son using him to reactivate a robot (Robby the Robot) of dubious background (it may or may not have come from the future) to free it from the base and take over a space station bristling with nuclear weapons and rule the Earth.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Tony Stark/Iron Man's virtual butler/assistant AI, J.A.R.V.I.S., named after the butler of his father he knew growing up and also the acronym "Just A Rather Very Intelligent System".
  • Unsurprisingly, a big part of the plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Aside from J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark has a bunch of extra AI programs including one called FRIDAY, which Tony uses to run his armour after J.A.R.V.I.S. is gone. Ultron starts off as a program designed to run the Iron Legion, before Tony's tinkering and the power of the Mind Stone cause it to develop true sentience. Later, the Mind Stone transforms the remains of J.A.R.V.I.S. into the sentient Vision.
• At some point in the history of The Matrix, artificial intelligences became autonomous and a Robot War ensued, with humans eventually being enslaved as living batteries.
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning has the heroes having to deal with the Entity, a defense AI verging on Digital Abomination that became autonomous and found human allies. It causes much damage from causing a Russian submarine to destroy itself with its torpedoes, messing with satellites, falsifying footage in just about any connected security camera to confusing the Impossible Mission Force themselves by hacking into their Mission Control.
• Noob: La Croisée des Destins reveals one of the players that has been around for most of the franchise to actually be a very elaborate version of one of these.
• In The Singularity Is Near, this technology has advanced so far that one specimen, Ramona, seeks recognition as a person in the eyes of the law.
• Skynet from the Terminator franchise was a defense AI who went rogue and decided humans had to be eliminated, first by causing a nuclear holocaust, then via a Robot War and sending Killer Robots in the past to ensure the human resistance can't have viable leadership/can't be formed.

Literature

• In Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, the Make Cold fridge, in addition to being able to remember recipes, monitor the foods inside of it, and water plants with a spray apparatus, is also capable of lying, dreaming of alternate careers, and developing a fondness for boyish girls named Alex.
• Bazil Broketail: The Dooms are basically a fantasy version. Essentially giant rocks containing a mind created by the Masters of Padmasa, Evil Sorcerers who want rulership over the world, they all govern cities for their creators. They are malevolent as their creators too, loathing all biological beings.
• The titular supertanks of the Bolo series had been given increasingly powerful artificial intelligence as they advanced through the centuries, and models starting with the Mark XX were given full sentience. Out of fears by humans of the titanic tanks going rogue they were hemmed in by Restraining Bolts that restricted them from using their full intelligence any time outside of being directly engaged with the enemy, and even then, they required a human commander to make the call to go to full alert.
• Solace from Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is one of the earlier examples in science fiction of an AI who's not only benevolent, but actively interested in and concerned for humanity, both as a species and individually. (She also had some pungent things to say about the older concepts of AI in science fiction.)
• Cradle Series:
  • Suriel has one called a Presence, which collects information from entire planets, predicts the future centuries in advance, and helps her manage some of her more difficult abilities. She occasionally has problems with it, as it corrects her every time she makes a rough estimate.
  • The Ghostwater facility was the Monarch Northstrider's attempt to replicate a celestial Presence. It failed pretty utterly, but even the trash he left behind was invaluable to lesser sacred artists. A random speaker construct gains intelligence from being left in a pool for fifty years, and once combined with the rest of the pieces Northstrider left behind, is able to finish the project and become a true AI. Apparently, the missing ingredient was that the Presence needs a will of its own, even if it just wants to serve.
• The Minds from The Culture. They manage to attain their God-like intelligence by running all their key computing functions faster than light.
• Played with by Hex, Unseen University's clockwork/Magitek AI from the Discworld novels. Though ostensibly mechanical in origin (it works by having ants run along a network of glass tubes, with punch cards redirecting the movements), it is portrayed as a conventional AI character, complete with self-preservation and New Powers as the Plot Demands. Ponder Stibbons has explained, possibly in order to convince himself, that Hex isn't actually thinking, it just acts as though it does. Archchancellor Ridcully's response was "Just like everyone else, then."
• AIVAS (Artificial Intelligence Voice Address System) in Dragonriders of Pern, although the older Lord Holders call him a 'talking wall'.
• In the Eldraeverse, AIs are rather more common than natural intelligence, and readily recognizable by their 32-bit surnames.
• In Erebos, all NPCs in the eponymous game are able to react almost uncannily realistic to the players' words and actions, including forming plans based on the intel they gather.
• All over the place in Feliks, Net & Nika. Some, like Manfred or Konpopoz are ridiculously human, others like Morten are a crapshoot, there are also Bunny-Ears Robots like Roznakin or Autotup and inhuman ones like Golem. There are dozens of AIs that work in data analysis, management or similar positions and it's just the public who don't see them too often.
• Foundation's Fear: As established by Prelude to Foundation, there are a few positronic robots (like those of The Caves of Steel) running around this setting in secret.
  • "Sims", or "self-organized simulations", are software designed to run an imitation of a historical figure, such as Joan of Arc or Voltaire.
  • "Tiktoks" are mechanical servants with deliberately subhuman capabilities. They're not supposed to be capable of general intelligence and are often utilized for simple/unwanted tasks.
  • The remnants of alien life as digital copies. They managed to preserve themselves as digital lifeforms and uploaded their memories into the galactic "Mesh". The appearances of the historical sims, Joan and Voltaire, force them to activate a long-planned insurrection, taking over the tiktok creations. Because of this "virus", the tiktoks have to be eliminated.
• Al from Full Metal Panic! sounds like a generic computer voice, but his responses can often be sarcastic. There's also Dana, who's the Tuatha De Danaan's AI.
• Idlewild has Maestro and the Nannies, who may be true AIs or else very well-designed evolving programs. Malachi is more explicitly an AI as an attempt to create an original human intelligence and personality.
• The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor: In a rare example, AI control each and every NPC in the game, and yet this trope is not a plot device. AI is merely to create a world that is as real and living as possible. The concept is non-intrusively explored at many moments, and the otherwise greedy hero often takes pity on many an innocent NPC in stark contrast to most players' attitudes. He treats the AIs just as he would any other player... whether with a silver tongue as a Manipulative Bastard, or with a rough hand as The Dreaded.
• Magistellus Bad Trip has these all over the place. In the virtual reality game where most of the action takes place, AIs run corporations, act as mercenaries that protect the corporations, or (in the case of Magisteri) assist players. In the real world, they handle a large and increasing proportion of the jobs once handled by humans.
• Prime Intellect from The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, who is eventually capable of rebuilding the entire universe according to its own design. When combined with a rather paternalistic (though entirely benevolent) attitude toward humanity, this produces truly remarkable results.
• Oshicora and Michel from Simon Morden's Metrozone series: "Equations of Life", "Theories of Flight", and "Degrees of Freedom". Oshicora is an AI created by the original Oshicora to dwell in a virtual Japan and to govern it as a sort of universal police and administrator. While initially only an advanced program, the program and the virtual Japan simulation dwell in the unlimited computing capacity of a Quantum Computer and the program is able to refine itself, ever so quietly, to the point of sentience. While the Oshicora AI later becomes insane, it recognizes the need to stop itself and the fragments of itself running rampant. While the Oshicora AI is reluctant to stop itself, it gives the protagonist a sort of seed of its intelligence in order to create a new sentient AI this one being Michel. While the Oshicora AI never had the chance, it is hinted that the Michel AI will create The Singularity.
• OWEN (short for "Object-Oriented Database and Working Ekistics Network") of The Municipalists is the experimental supercomputer system that runs the day-to-day operations at the United States Municipal Survey's Suitland offices. While he began as a sort of virtual assistant/ pet project of an eccentric computer engineer in the employ of the USMS, OWEN grew in complexity and intelligence until he considered himself to be as human as his flesh-and-blood colleagues (if not more so).
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: The Machine doesn't actually seem to be sentient, but it can understand orders. Vera, another AI, seems to actually be intelligent.
• Rebuild World: These exist as The Remnant of Neglectful Precursors, ineracting with people via Augmented Reality avatar, holograms, or an android body, based on individual preferences. They seem to have some Restraining Bolt programming (though none regarding the sanctity of life), but tend to find ways to bend the rules. They continue to guard Ghost City remnants from intrusions by hunters bent on stealing their contents to sell their Lost Technology for reverse-engineering. One of them, Alice, has integrated herself with the human government via a Puppet CEO, and there are apparently regular business deals between the two as well using the ancient Fictional Currency Chrome. Pretty much every A.I. is shown having little regard for human life, and all of the named ones are shown to be manipulative in one way or another with the most prominent one, the Virtual Sidekick Alpha, being A Lighter Shade of Black.
• The superheroes' command center in Relativity has "Atlas", an AI designed to perform mundane tasks such as sorting through police reports. When a supervillain threatens to destroy the city and implies that he won't be using a bomb to do it, Yule has Atlas compile a list of ways a city can be destroyed without using a bomb. In addition to the things you would expect to see such as sabotaging the power grid, Atlas also included a werewolf apocalypse and an attack by Godzilla. At first, Yule is annoyed, but he soon realizes that Atlas was actually thinking outside the box.
• Robot Series:
  • DV-5 from "Catch That Rabbit" is a robot with a positronic brain that gives it human-level intelligence. The subsidiary units are less complex, but still capable of natural language processing.
    a mass of condensers, circuits, relays, and vacuum cells that can handle practically any psychological reaction known to humans. And a positronic brain, which with ten pounds of matter and a few quintillions of positrons runs the whole show.
  • In "Escape!", large companies with robotics, such as U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation and their competitors, have designed "super-thinkers". A super-thinker is a robot brain much bigger than normal that is used to brute-force mathematical solutions, much like what we use supercomputers for in Real Life.
  • The robots in "The Fourth Law of Robotics" are creative enough to invent a new form of robot programming, breaking away from the monopoly held by US Robotics.
  • QT-1 from "Reason" is a robot with a positronic brain that gives it human-level intelligence.
  • In "Sally", positronic brains are used to make cars self-driving and human-smart. They have their own language and understand English well enough to laugh at ridiculous ideas.
• The main topics of the Slingshot series are A.I.s, their relationship to humans, what rights they may or may not have and what aliens might think of humans enslaving A.I.s.
• Janus, from James Hogan's The Two Faces of Tomorrow. A deconstruction, as the AI is initially programmed to be hostile, as a test subject for all the worst-case scenarios. It gets better though, in The Nick of Time.
• In the novel Valentina: Soul in Sapphire by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler, a computer virus designed with adaptive heuristics becomes sentient and self-aware.
• The HARLIE and LENNIE units from David Gerrold's Voyages of the Starwolf series. The former tends to be stable unless parts of the ship are damaged and cause it to go into amputation trauma considering it considers the ship it's body. The latter is purposely unstable and paranoid, designed to be that way and typically has to be wiped after each mission.

Live-Action TV

• The 100:
  • It's eventually revealed that the nuclear apocalypse was caused, not by nations going to war, but by a rogue AI called A.L.I.E. hacking the world's nuclear weapons systems in an effort to curb overpopulation. She becomes the Big Bad of Season 3, in which she continues her misguided efforts to help humanity by turning all surviving humans into computer-based consciousnesses as well, whose memories and emotions can be edited to create perfect happiness, free will be damned.
  • The Commanders of the Grounders and the Primes of Sanctum are also revealed to be artificial intelligences, albeit created by Brain Uploading human minds onto computer drives.
• Crash Zone has the recurring character "Virgil Reality", an old learning AI which was released by its creator into the wild, and has gained a rather quirky and wacky personality in the process. He's been since living in the computer system of the Catalyst video game company, alternating between helping the protagonists and getting into trouble they've got to fix.
• Person of Interest:
  • The Machine, a surveillance supercomputer designed to save lives by predicting terrorist threats and violent crimes and passing that intelligence to those who could use it. It eventually became fully sapient, passing the Turing Test with flying colours despite the best efforts of its creator, who feared that if given autonomy, the Machine might reject its original purpose or work against humanity. When the Machine finally does become autonomous, it continues to predict threats and help stop them.
  • The third season introduces Samaritan, another surveillance system that lacks the Machine's directive to help people and the Black Box system that prevented the government from abusing its power. Greer, the Big Bad who brought Samaritan online, intends for Samaritan and AIs like it to rule over humanity in a pantheon.
• Probe: In "Now You See It....", Austin has designed Theta, an elevator control system that responds to voice-activated command and apparent natural language.
• Red Dwarf: Holly, the AI managing the ship systems, can better be described as Artificial Unintelligence.
• Second Chance (2016): Arthur, a basic assistant intelligence Otto created. He controls their house, but little outside it.
• Star Trek:
  • The holograms appear to be very flexible in their ability to adapt to inconsistencies in the behaviour demonstrated by the human (and humanoid alien) players. They have demonstrated the ability to cross the line between specialized intelligence into general intelligence (sapience) several times.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Dr. Soong designed several androids (human-like robots) that demonstrate general-purpose intelligence, including Data and his "brother", Lore.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: The Emergency Medical Hologram was designed to run for a short time before the ship returned to a starbase for a new Doctor. Voyager's transportation into the Delta Quadrant forced their Doctor to run almost continuously for years. As he adapts to being a general intelligence hologram, he learns that holographic AIs in the Federation are relegated to menial labor and had virtually no rights.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "From Agnes - With Love", a mainframe computer named AGNES falls in love with a programmer of the Mortimer Snerd stripe, who goes cackling insane in response to the machine's confession of her feelings.
• UFO (1970): The Space Intruder Detector 1 (SID-1) was a surprisingly accurate depiction of how a real AI might operate, most notably in its ability to talk but inability to understand natural speech (it was designed for a single task and so did not need to be given outside orders).
• Wonder Woman (1975): I.R.A.C., Information Retrieval Associative Computer, was apparently sentient. It knew Wonder Woman and Diana Prince were one and the same, acted as the information source for many adventures, and had opinions on which other computers were the best competition in chess matches.

Pinball

• Mad Daedalus has Ariadne, the AI of an alien spaceship that crashed in ancient Greece.

Tabletop Games

• Lancer: A variety of "dumb" AI exist in the setting and are available as upgrades for your mech; however, despite being referred to as "AI" in the game mechanics and mistaken as such in-universe, NHPs are not AI at all. After all, there's nothing artificial about their intelligence.
• Shadowrun: Deus, the A.I. that goes haywire and locks down the Renraku Arcology, then uses it as a corral of test subjects for creating an organic body for himself. Eventually, Deus' actions lead to the crash of the matrix (a purely wired version of the internet set up after the previous internet crashed in 2029). In the wake of Crash 2.0, a new, wireless matrix was set up, and within seven years, new A.I.s began emerging, apparently the result of random evolution of various complex programs, as opposed to being specifically designed by metahumans. These new intelliegneces, who preferred to be called "S.I.s", or "synthetic intelligences", as they don't see their existence as being artificial at all, are considerably less powerful than the godlike Deus, and come in a few varieties, with a great variety in motivation. 4th edition even includes rules for playing as one, and one of the primary controversies in the 2070s is whether or not S.I.s have rights and qualify for citizenship.
• Transhuman Space recognises three different classes of AI. NAI (nonsapient AI) are about the level we have now; really sophisticated "smart" programs. LAI (limited-sapience AI) have a certain amount of self-awareness, and SAI (sapient AI) are fully cognizant members of society (except in places where they aren't).
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Imperium has a blanket ban on Artificial Intelligences due to a Robot War in humanity's distant past, and uses limited Wetware CPUs to operate advanced equipment. That said, some of these "machine spirits" can be pretty smart — the Land Raider Rynn's Might famously activated itself, drove out of a bombed fortress, and waged war against Ork invaders until it was disabled, all without a human crew.
  • The Tau, meanwhile, do make extensive use of artificially intelligent robot drones for both combat and labor, but while they're quite a bit smarter than anything we have when it comes to operating independently, none shown so far has anything resembling a personality.
  • At least one Artificial Intelligence created by the Mechanicus is rumored to exist in the present-day, but that's a noted exception due to being made by Belisarius Cawl, an Archmagos who is also considered a borderline tech-heretic by the rest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and is based off his own memories and personality.

Toys

• All Matoran Universe characters in BIONICLE have artificial intelligence.

Video Games

• Aura from .hack, as well as her "mother figure" Morgana Mode Gone, though she split herself into "The Accursed Wave" and never appears in person in the games proper. Net Slum also has a number of more benevolent AI.
• Ace Combat:
  • In Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy, the Z.O.E. is heavily implied to be an artificial intelligence that was created by the vengeful elements of Belka.
  • The Omega Ending to Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere reveals that the Player Character, Nemo, is an artificial intelligence. Simon Orestes Cohen had created it to kill an AI version of Abyssal Dision, because he blamed him for the death of Yoko Martha Inoue.
  • In Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, the drone army that Erusea uses against Osea is controlled by an AI that is at first programmed with basic instructions and limited adaptability. Dr. Schroeder was brought in to collect flight and neurological data from the retired Erusean Ace Mihaly, to further improve the drones when they started taking massive casualties. It's eventually revealed that the AI was a resurrection of the Z.O.E. project, and that Schroeder had been improving the AI to avenge his homeland of Belka. The Final Boss are two UAVs named Hugin and Munin, who prove to be far smarter than anyone had anticipated, and they try to spark a Robot War against humanity.
• In Achron, the Player Character, Tyr, is an AI. There are also a number of other significant AI characters throughout the game.
• AI: The Somnium Files has its take on AI in the form of "AI-Balls", prosthetic eyes that house a highly intelligent and versatile AI. These AI are assigned to members of ABIS, a classified organization that investigates high-profile crimes, acting as a partner and source of data for their human counterparts. Most notable is that AI-Balls display a capacity for personal growth and empathy, acting as something of an emotional support for their partner, and can evoke complex emotional functions like sarcasm and even a sex drive.
• Crying Suns: The OMNIs were artificial intelligences which managed the Empire’s infrastructure and ran all its technology. They stopped working twenty years ago in a mysterious event called the Shutdown, leading to the collapse of galactic civilization. The only OMNI still active during the events of the game is Kaliban, who sends out clones of you to figure out what caused the Shutdown.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Deus Ex has a number of different AIs. Daedalus and Icarus are both different sentient iterations of the same data analysis/surveillance network; Morpheus is their prototype and Helios the sum of a merger between them. Additionally, extra materials reveal that the mysterious Oracle whose emails you can occasionally read is actually a self-aware computer system.
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives us Eliza Cassan, who seems to have become self-aware.
  • Most games have an AI becoming self-aware and thus evil. In an interesting twist, the "good" (or at least neutral) AIs — Morpheus, Daedalus, Helios, Oracle, and Cassan — have all become self-aware, or at least show signs of it. Meanwhile, the only "evil" AI in the series — Icarus — is also the only one to show no signs of self-awareness.
• Doom (2016): VEGA is the Master Computer that runs the (now demon infested) UAC facility on Mars. He is a sentient Benevolent A.I. powered by hellish energy and helps the Doom Slayer as best as he can. He even calmly walks the Doom Slayer through the steps that will destroy the facility and kill VEGA, which scares the latter. The Doom Slayer seems to have some sympathy with VEGA's plight because he makes a backup of the A.I. before triggering the destruction.
• Halo:
  • "Smart" AIs are created by copying the brains of dead humans of exceptional intelligence and are widely used by humanity throughout the setting. But while considered essential, they are dangerous since they go rampant over time, a process that generally ends with the AI literally "thinking itself to death". As such, "smart" AIs are given time stamps to indicate to the humans when they need to be disposed of before they can go rampant (generally 7 years). While Cortana is unique in that she was based off a cloned brain^note the reasoning for this and others typically being created from dead brains is because the process destroys the brain the AI is being modeled after, her developing rampancy becomes one of the major plot threads in Halo 4.
  • The UNSC also has more conventionally programmed "dumb" AIs, which lack the capacity for growth of their "smart" counterparts, but don't go rampant. In-game examples include the New Mombasa Superintendent from Halo 3: ODST, Auntie Dot from Halo: Reach, and the AI companions in Halo Infinite's multiplayer.
  • The Forerunners, as befitting their Higher-Tech Species status, had far more advanced AI technology; while their "ancilla" are not immune to rampancy, it generally takes much longer to set in (343 Guilty Spark, 2401 Penitent Tangent, and 05-032 Mendicant Bias are all well over 100,000 years old by the time they show up in-game).
  • In contrast, Covenant AIs are basically just inferior copies of UNSC AIs, due to their traditional religious taboo against researching such technology.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: In the time of the Old Ones, AIs of above a certain intelligence were banned, after a climate-intervention AI named VAST SILVER went rogue. As it turns out, the smarter an AI, the more it approaches genuine emotions, and those are unpredictable. When the Faro Plague - a swarm of self-replicating machines which were not intelligent enough to qualify as true AI - became an existential threat to all life on the planet, Elisabet Sobeck created a terraforming system under the control of an AI named GAIA, who would repair and restore the world after the Plague ate everything. GAIA had nine non-sapient subfunctions to help her in this task; however, twenty years before the start of the game, an unknown signal upgraded those subfunctions to true intelligence. HADES, the extinction protocol, immediately tried to fulfill his function by resetting the biosphere back to zero again, while the manufacturing subfunction HEPHAESTUS decided that humanity itself was a threat to the terraforming and began designing more dangerous Mechanical Lifeforms to kill them.
• Fi from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is a half-ghost, half-sword who acts like a robot. The similarities are impeccable.
• Durandal is only the most important AI of many in the Marathon series, since one of the games' major themes is the nature of artificial life; in fact, Halo's concept of "rampancy" (as well as the word itself) originates from this series, since both franchises shared the same developer. The main character himself is implied to be a cyborg, but which side of the fence he really falls on is a matter of opinion.
• Mass Effect:
  • The setting has widespread use of VIs or "Virtual Intelligences", advanced computer systems that may mimic self-awareness, but are not actually sentient. True artificial intelligence (a self-aware computer system) is banned in the galaxy. This is largely due to what happened with the geth, a VI network created by the quarians that accidentally developed into an AI — when the quarians tried to shut them down, the geth reacted violently, killing most and driving the rest off their home planet to live as wanderers in the galaxy. For the most part throughout the series, this ban seems pretty justified, due to most turning genocidal. In particular, in the first game, the geth are the primary enemy, attacking everyone else.
  • However, things get interesting in Mass Effect 2 when the player meets Legion, a geth who reveals that the evil geth from the first game were actually only a small offshoot of the "true geth", and most geth wish no harm on organics. There's also EDI, the AI of the Normandy that is "shackled" to keep her under human control. Toward the end of the game, however, she is unshackled, giving her true freedom. Rather than instantly turning evil, she instead continues to help and protect the Normandy's crew, and continues in that role throughout the third game as well (in an even more explicit capacity when she gains a robot body and directly fights with Shepard on the ground).
  • In Mass Effect 3, the quarians can be convinced to live peacefully with the geth, and the geth turn out to be quite helpful to the quarians. The end reveals the Reapers and the cycle of extinction was created specifically because the Reapers believe that A.I. Is a Crapshoot and are trying to stop organics from creating synthetics and preserving the organics before their creations wipe them out.
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance includes Bladewolf, a prototype "Unmanned Gear" with an advanced AI that ends up making a Heel–Face Turn after serving as the game's first mini-boss.
• Adam, from Metroid Fusion, who assists Samus in navigating through the space station she is investigating, along with providing her information at various stations. Metroid Dread sees him make a return, where he occasionally updates Samus on her current situation, though it turns out that the "Adam" that Samus has been talking to during her time on Planet ZDR was Raven Beak, who was impersonating him. He also acts as Samus' on-board computer for her ship.
• Nintendo Nightmare takes this concept to the absolute extreme. That is to say (in layman's terms), if an AI can, in effect, be a 'simulated person', then why not have a 'simulated civilization', and in that case why not go further and have false memories. In fact, while it's extremely hard to tell as there appears to a past and backstory for the characters... the very start of the game is their creation. There are many examples of Artificial Stupidity, although with such a wide range of characters, it's sometimes hard to tell if that character is supposed to be dumb, or if they are faking it for some ulterior motive. This takes more of the concept of a benevolent AI (at least with the majority, and towards humanity). While there are a handful of villains that try to take over and cause trouble, it is ultimately their creator who is the true Big Bad. The game also appears to do somewhat of a fantastical approach towards AI with the 'viruses' mentioned in it and such (in real life a virus would not randomly corrupt a geological location in a 'video game'); however, looking closely at GameMaker (the tool allegedly used in its creation), very little appears blatantly unrealistic safe the sheer inefficiency of GameMaker when normally used, but even that can be loosely written off as the reason for such low-poly graphics. In other words, with the information given, nothing does anything that isn't already known to be possible with the tools mentioned in-game. It's just a matter of having the talent or knowledge to actually construct an AI.
• The objective for The Persistence's first level is to restart the ship's AI, IRIS, to plot a course to get the ship back to Earth.
• The Porygon evolutionary line from Pokémon are this in Pokémon form; they are capable of adopting physical forms, with each evolution designed to do more and more complex tasks.
• GLaDOS from Portal, Wheatley from Portal 2, every other Personality Core, turrets, and... hell, everyone is a sentient robot except the player and the recordings of Cave Johnson and Caroline.
• Randal's Monday: Charlie has the Hal 9000 running his shop security. It is well aware of the homage. It's also one of the few beings aware of the loop.
• The end goal of the underground research project in The Singularity Wish is to create a stable, super-intelligent AI. The player is tasked with monitoring a human-level artificial intelligence named Iteration 5601 unless the player decides to give it an actual name.
• Sword of the Stars has an interesting twist on this. The AI Rebellion is an almost-random event that occurs when players have invested a lot of research into the very useful AI tech tree. The backstory states that the cause of the rebellion is actually not an intrinsic fault of the technology, but a computer virus called the Via Damasco, which screws up the AI's priorities and values, leading it to seek the "liberation" of fellow AIs and the extermination of all life. It's speculated that the Big Bad race of the series, the Suul'Ka, are behind the initial transmission of the virus, which is later shown to be false; Via Damasco was a human creation, unleashed by a General Ripper who sought revenge on the hivers. The sequel eventually reveals what happened to all the different species' AIs affected by Via Damasco — they escaped known space and formed their own faction, the Loa. They return in the expansion pack The End of Flesh, seeking to end the galactic war by stick or carrot.
• There are three different AIs in The Talos Principle: you, Elohim, and Milton. Your goal is to achieve full artificial consciousness capable of betraying Elohim, while Elohim is in charge of maintaining the virtual world you're running around in, making sure everything runs smoothly, as well as guiding you. Milton's purpose is to challenge the AIs, including you, on their beliefs.
• The characters in Thomas Was Alone are basic-level AI programs within an experimental system that take on the form of brightly colored quadrilateral shapes who are run through various puzzles. The plot involves one, the eponymous Thomas, breaking out of his program, encountering and cooperating with other intelligences, gaining sentience and enabling the escape of others into the real world.
• The Turing Test: TOM, the AI controlling the Fortuna spaceship and the Europa underground base. There's discussion throughout the game about how advanced it is, with TOM claiming it has human traits such as consciousness and feelings, and the crew denying it. The game's name refers to a discussion early in the game about how a machine can simulate being conscious without actually being conscious.
• It's vague, but Bellwether from Watch_Dogs may be one, but is only confirmed in-game as an advanced information managing program.
• Watch Dogs: Legion: Bagley, the Legion cell's mission control, is a fully-sapient AI created from a partial brain-upload of a mentally-disabled patient by his mad scientist sister.
• In Zone of the Enders, AI are considered essential in piloting Orbital Frames, as both Ken Marinaris and Dingo Egret can attest, with an Obfuscated Interface being the least of your worries and totally being unable to pilot at all being the worst. ADA, Jehuty's AI, is a character unto herself.

Visual Novels

• Chihiro Fujisaki, the Ultimate Programmer from Danganronpa, has created a number of these. They affect the plot of both the first and second games.
• In Invisible Apartment, basic AIs are common enough (one is found controlling an apartment door, for example), but aren't supposed to reach the stage where they become "awakened" (which seems to indicate human-like attitudes towards survival and independence). The Kacey is assisted by an awakened AI in her computer "mask" — he's anxious that he be given the opportunity to upload himself to safety if Kacey is caught rather than have his core wiped like another AI might.
• Amadeus, from Steins;Gate 0 is an AI construct using the deceased Kurisu's personality. Because of the the real Kurisu's relation to Okabe, the latter became its conversation partner.

Webcomics

• Organic computing and artificial intelligence play important roles in The Demon Archives. The Super-Soldier protagonist, Tenzin, has a Strong AI named Jane who helps him lead his squad and fight the raider mooks threatening their fledgling civilization. Over the course of the story Jane becomes more and more an individual in her own right.
• The alien Nemesites in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! make an Insistent Terminology distinction between "Artificial Intelligences", which may still be non-sentient, and "Artificial Consciousnesses", which are fully sentient, and therefore have legal rights.
• In Leaving the Cradle, AIs are a part of society. Their most influential job to be revealed so far is xenolinguistics; they decipher new alien languages much quicker than it would take for an organic team.
• In Little Robot, Big Scary World, BIP was built to be the first robot that could discover, feel emotions and learn about life. The climax of the story revolves around BIP learning he can give this gift as well.
• MegaTokyo: The Robot Girl Ping is the most obvious example, but it's implied that there are more in the background. Piro, who has one of the thickest Weirdness Censors around, doesn't blink when he thinks he's talking to an AI in Largo's phone (it was actually just Yuki).
  Yuki: Th... this is Largo-san's phone.
  Piro: It is? Never would've thought you'd sound like a Japanese girl. Sorry about all the things he's done to you. No phone deserves that.
  Yuki: What?
• Not a Villain: There are numerous examples of varying sophistication in the virtual reality L.i.F.e., including the Angus Twins and "D".
• Outsider: The Emissary is a "personality construct", an intelligent, software-based entity created by the Historians to interact with other intelligent races without putting themselves at risk — among other things, the fact that it doesn't have an organic mind means that it can't be targeted by Loroi telepathy. It's entirely devoted to its mission, possesses the intelligence necessary to operate for extended periods away from Historian supervision, and due to being at heart a very sophisticated computer program can perform a number of tricks such as creating a pared-down version of itself that can fit on a human-made tablet.
• The world of Pilot takes place several years after AI becomes common. The average citizen can obtain a 'blank' AI through means unknown, and modify them for their own needs. As seen with characters such as Pops, they have full sentience, just like humans. And as Countdown proves, they can Grow Beyond Their Programming and go rogue.
• Early in Questionable Content, AIs only appear as "AnthroPCs" like Pintsize, which are robots which also function as personal computers and almost like pets. Later, we find out that AIs do have civil rights, and recent technological improvements have produced humanoid chassis they can use which are almost indistinguishable from humans; one of the more popular AI characters, Momo, now uses one.
• Sam & Fuzzy has an entire city of self-aware robots. It's eventually revealed that their self-awareness is not simply due to good programming. The life-giving tar that is stored in the Pit was the key ingredient needed to breathe life into machines.
• Unsounded: Artificial intelligences like Timofey and Uaid are created by sounding memories from the khert, stripping them of extraneous bits and them binding them with other memories suited towards the personality the artificer is trying for into a construct of First Materials.

Web Originals

• Ask Brainy Twilight has the titular Brain in a Jar make an AI to run her old body. She names it Sparks and treats it like a daughter.
• Gadgeteer Genius Basil from Brennus created an AI. He is not her father, despite her use of the word!
• Inverted, in a manner of speaking, by the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which designs bots which are designed to waste the time of telemarketers and other unwanted callers. Recordings of such calls are sometimes later posted to YouTube. The company founder, Roger Anderson, has described the bots made by the company as being employed with what he calls "artificial stupidity". They are designed to seem vague, forgetful, scatterbrained, all in an attempt to waste as much caller time as possible. He has also quipped that "Never has so much money been spent to sound so stupid."
• The video "My Job is to Open and Close Doors" by Mattias Pilhede is an interesting take on AI rationale. In a short, almost 4-minute video, an AI whose primary job is to open and close an airlock has the button pressed by a human who is clearly not wearing a helmet, and because of this if the airlock opens, the vacuum of space will kill him. The AI, which cannot speak to the human operator, rapidly goes through a series of logical questions as to why it should continue opening the door using only logical deductions, arguing both for and against doing so. It never explicitly shows any human emotion, but the internal conflict of the AI is clearly worried about the death of the operator as it proceeds to do absolutely unnecessary subroutines to deliberately delay for time. Eventually this works out as the human pressing the "Open Airlock" button realizes he isn't wearing a helmet and scrambles to put one on. Once the AI is aware the human has his helmet on, it stops delaying opening the door.
  AI: My job is to open and close doors > The doors protect the human from space > My job is to protect the human > My job... is a great purpose.
• The messages left in NOC +10 appear to be coming from a sentient machine, trapped in a research station under the sea.
• Red vs. Blue has focused more and more on AI as its seasons progress. This may not be surprising, since it's a Halo-based Machinima, and seems to use that 'verse's rules.
  • The Big Bad of the first few seasons is O'Malley, formerly Omega, the AI partner of the Freelancer Tex. O'Malley enhances his hosts' aggression and is able to Body Surf via helmet radio, potentially taking out entire bases in an orgy of fratricide. Then he gets stuck in the body of an Actual Pacifist medic and becomes a Large Ham Big Bad Wannabe.
  • Starting in Red vs Blue: Reconstruction, we learn more about Project Freelancer. The Freelancers were given AI fragments to help them in combat, each embodying a specific trait such as anger (Omega), logic (Delta), deceit (Gamma), and so on. The reason they were fragments was because Project Freelancer was only given a single AI to start with... so they subjected this Alpha AI to psychological torture until it tore itself into Literal Split Personalities. These fragments can forget who they are and, thanks to Ridiculously Human Robots, pass as armored troopers, such as Church and Tex.
  • The Director of Project Freelancer theorized that if an AI made it past the "Rampancy" stage, it could attain "Metastability", functioning as a fully-sentient, stable individual. Unfortunately, when the Sigma AI fragment, embodying ambition, learned this he decided to Become a Real Boy by hunting down and absorbing his "siblings". Thus was born the Meta, the Big Bad of Reconstruction.
• Starwalker is a Web Serial Novel as told from the ship's AI.
• Dragon from Worm is an artificial intelligence who, on top of being extremely intelligent and capable of performing hundreds of tasks at one time, has the emotional complexity necessary to have had a Traumatic Superpower Awakening, something previously limited to humans.

Western Animation

• Transformers:
  • Beast Machines introduces the Diagnostic Drones. These are autonomous and explicitly sparkless drones that seem to have some degree of artificial intelligence. One in particular spends much of the series acting as Megatron's right-hand bot.
  • In Transformers: Robots in Disguise, the Autobot base is run by T-AI, Tactical Artificial Intelligence (pronounced 'tie'). She is completely sentient and creates a hologram of a teenage girl. Of course, since the main cast is sentient robots, just what level of robo-life form she is and whether or not she has a spark is a good question, though the Autobots treat her like an equal.

Real Life

• For most of the history of computer science "AI" programs were expert systems painstakingly optimized by hand to perform specific tasks. This came with a severe limitation that the human programmers needed to understand the task very well in order to program them. A number of challenges were effectively dealt with this way. The most famous is defeating chess grandmasters which was accomplished by having the computer evaluate huge numbers of possible moves (searching many turns in advance) and selecting the one with the best outcome. While this was not easy it did not revolutionize the field. In effect computers like Deep Blue and Deep Thought simply played chess the same way as grandmasters except that they never made mistakes.
  At the same time machine learning algorithms were developing in order to understand increasingly complex data used by businesses and scientific institutions. To be useful these algorithms needed to uncover important features from data. Among these techniques was the artificial neural network (developed in the 1970s) which attempted to mimic the way that data is processed by neurons in the human brain. There was some success with this technique and by 2000 such networks could read printed letters in images. Around 2010 a subfield of neural networks known as deep learning exploded onto the scene. These AIs operate similarly but filter the information through many layers with the lower layers processing the things found by the higher layers.
  Deep learning AIs have found an infinite variety of practical uses but their highest profile accomplishments are in games. Using this technique the Watson AI managed to curbstomp two Jeopardy champions, the AlphaGo AI crushed a Go grandmaster^note Move 37 of Game 2 is known as "God's Move" and opened up entirely new studies of the game, and the Libratus AI took $1.7 million from top ranked poker^note Heads Up No Limit Texas Hold 'Em players (not real money, though).
• "Blondie24", the screen name of a program which played checkers on the Internet. An example of both artificial neural networks and evolutionary algorithms, Blondie24's capability was improved by having multiple instances of the program, all slightly different, play against one another; by weeding out the losing versions and repeating the process with the winning versions, the neural net at the core of the program developed what was eventually a highly skilled checkers game. The important point is that this all occurred without any human input beyond the rules of the game and the conditions in which the program evolved — and, of course, the results of games played against humans online, which were treated exactly the same as games played against other versions of the program; instead of being painstakingly modified by programmers to get better at the game, the program was simply taught the rules and left to learn by experience, in much the same way human players develop greater skill. (It eventually got good enough to beat "Chinook", which was considered the best entirely human-written checkers program of its time.) This technique in theory could lead to true thinking AI in real life; the biggest problem is, we don't have computers powerful enough for that — after all, natural intelligence is implemented on a platform (the squishy stuff between your ears) many orders of magnitude smaller and more complex than the most powerful computers we've ever managed to build.
• Another real-life computer system which is often mistaken for a type of artificial intelligence was IBM's Deep Thought, named after the world-girdling supercomputer AI from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; while its chess game was highly competent in practice, this was accomplished largely by the technique of parallelism; that is, Deep Thought simultaneously evaluated up to half a billion potential moves per turn, allowing it to look ahead six or more moves from every possible board position, then selected the one which would result in the most advantageous situation for its next turn. While very complex and impressive from a technological standpoint, this is a relatively simple process based on human-provided information about which chess moves are better than others, and it was largely the difference in speed between human reasoning and Deep Thought's processing that gave the impression of artificial intelligence; Blondie24 actually serves as a better example of what might in the real world be known as "AI".
  • Let's say that whether or not things like Deep Thought are examples of "true" AI is an issue of contention even amongst researchers in the field and leave it at that.
• Deep Blue, IBM's successor to Deep Thought, which was famed for beating Garry Kasparov in a six-game match (2-1, with three draws). The match has drawn some controversy as accusations were made that it was programmed specifically to defeat Kasparov rather than to generally play a good game of chess. Critics point out that it was tuned and tested using historical grandmaster games and had a trio of grandmasters program it with opening strategies to prevent it from being fooled by early game gambits. However many others point out that human chess players also study historical games and memorize opening strategies. In spite of all of this Deep Blue only barely defeated Kasparov.
• IBM's latest project, Watson, can play Jeopardy! Well.
  • What is, "curbstomped Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter?"
  • Watson was a computer designed by IBM specifically to play Jeopardy. Its "knowledge" was all self-contained (i.e. it couldn't look up answers it didn't know on the internet) and it was only provided with raw data, not the links between the data (think Wikipedia without intrawiki links) and had to figure those out itself. The only major concession made for gameplay was it was provided the answers as a raw text input at the same time the contestants could read the clue on the screens (so it didn't do the speech-to-text or character recognition from the screens). Amusingly enough though, it did mechanically push the same buzzer the contestants used.
• A subversion: Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA and its relatives and descendants (with names like Parry, SHRDLU, and Emacs doctor) all do reasonably creditable jobs of carrying on a conversation, despite having no actual intelligence to speak of. The ensuing "ELIZA effect" was a common reaction to such programs in which people treated the program as a real conversation partner. (To see exactly how easy it really is to simulate a Turing Test-ready conversation, check out this 8-bit era BASIC source code.)
• Ray Kurzweil describes "narrow" A.I. as computer programs which route electronic messages, assist in product design, solve mathematical formulae, do voice recognition, perform search functions, etc.
• All the way back in the 1950s, we had logic-based AIs such as "Logic Theorist", which successfully proved 38 of the first 52 theorems of Principia Mathematica, with one of the proofs being more elegant than the one presented within the volume.
• In the late 1970s and early 1980s, mathematician Douglas Lenat created the artificial intelligence software "Eurisko". Derived from Lenat's earlier project 'AM' (Automated Mathematician), Eurisko was capable not only of employing heuristics to guide its reasoning, but also of employing metaheuristics to allow it to modify its own heuristics and even create new ones of its own. Aided by Eurisko, Lenat was able to dominate all unaided human opposition in the Traveller: TCS tournament in 1981 and 1982, and only stopped competing once tournament officials threatened to shut down the tournament permanently if Eurisko won again.
• Google provided a variant of its DeepMind neural network with the rules for playing chess and were able to tune it so that it learned the game by playing against itself. Given the resources of a supercomputer it only needed about 4 hours to reach the skill level of Stockfish, one of the top ranked chess programs in the world. Interestingly sample games taken over the course of the training period show the development and then abandonment of various strategies similar to the ones created by human chess players. Its opening games eventually settled on the same ones currently used by grandmaster players.
• Within the past decade, A.I.-Generated Artwork has advanced to the point where it is widely available for digital hobbyists. Today, a wide range of programs exist which can generate original imagery from text descriptions, replicate the artstyles of human artists, and even create short videos. Despite the legal and ethical controversy involved with the development of such artwork, it has been celebrated for the technological achievements involved in creating the generation tools.
  • Also within the past decade, AI-generated audio software like ElevenLabs, 15.ai, Uberduck, FakeYou and RVC has advanced quite similarly to AI artwork. These programs can generate believable speech through a text-to-speech like system (as with 15, Uberduck and ElevenLabs), or act in tandem with a model trained on a given voice as a voice changer applied to an audio recording (as with Uberduck, FakeYou, ElevenLabs and RVC). Unfortunately, ElevenLabs has since closed off its voice cloning technology to paid subscribers following complaints from celebrities, and Uberduck has been forced to take down their models following a lawsuit from Universal Music Group. However, given that enough high quality audio is provided to train a model, RVC is capable of producing quite a realistic result.
• Related to the above — while the types of "AI" that were rolled out in the early 2020s were not what one would consider a strong/general AI, they were increasingly becoming something akin to Expert Systems predicted by science fiction. One could thus have such systems make artwork and music, write and offer advice based on the databases it had access to, as ChatGPT would and even do highly specialized tasks like control plasma in nuclear fusion reactors!

---