Eccentric A.I.

Roll up! Roll up! It's all the fun of the — <error 404: not found>

"I am a genius. Hehehehe."

—343 Guilty Spark, Halo: Combat Evolved

Human brains can suffer from a wide variety of mental illnesses and conditions. Digital technology can suffer from bugs and glitches. An Artificial Intelligence is (to some extent, and depending on the Applied Phlebotinum involved) a digital re-creation of a human brain. And, following this logic, you get the Eccentric A.I.

In this case, 'Eccentric' can mean an awful lot of different things. Mild examples are rather odd but still fully functional, often adopting odd habits, quirks and mannerisms such as copying those of humans, while more severe cases are completely crazy, and may start ignoring instructions, become so erratic their sentience is called into question, or attempt to destroy everything in a hundred-mile radius. The cause of an Eccentric A.I. is often unexplained, but will sometimes be the result of damage, some kind of computer virus, getting reprogrammed too many times or being abandoned by or outliving its creators. Although, maybe they just indulged in their virtual vices a bit too much.

Can easily be friendly, villainous or neither — some even have a tendency to flip between "happy to assist" and "Kill All Humans" repeatedly, which can often add an element of uncertainty or chaos to a work.

May overlap with Grew Beyond Their Programming, which can be somewhat of a justification for strange behaviour given that the A.I. wasn't 'supposed' to have its current level of intelligence in the first place. Some of these characters may also be Silicon Snarkers. See also Glitch Episode, for when an A.I. temporarily becomes Eccentric, and Robotic Psychopath, for when an A.I. is eccentric with a side order of Ax-Crazy.

Please note that for an example to count, he/she/they must be portrayed as noticeably strange if not outright defective In-Universe, especially when compared to other A.I.s — if Ridiculously Human Robots are common in the work, the bar for "eccentricity" is set higher.

---

Examples:

Comic Books

• Transmetropolitan: Spider's home AI has a personality based on The Godfather's Don Corleone and takes the electronic equivalent of hard drugs.

Fan Works

• Welcome to Cyber Vale is a Welcome to Night Vale Alternate Universe Fic, where Carlos is a computer scientist tasked with fixing a batshit insane, romance-obsessed supercomputer called C.E.C.I.L.

Film — Live-Action

• Airplane II: The Sequel: R.O.K., the computer in control of the lunar shuttle, experiences a short circuit thanks to faulty wiring. The computer then steers the shuttle off course, refuses to be overridden, insists everything's fine, and dispatches anyone who tries to interfere.
• Flight of the Navigator: The drone ship's AI Max, after scanning David's brain, undergoes a radical personality change. Instead of his initial cold and formal Spock Speak, he's suddenly spouting pop culture references, exchanging insults with David, and talking and laughing like Pee-Wee Herman (he's even voiced by Paul Reubens). On the other hand, the ship crashed in the first place because Max was distracted looking at daisies, suggesting he was already slightly eccentric before he met David.
• Short Circuit: The main character, Number 5, is a cutting-edge military robot whose AI goes haywire after being hit by lightning, to the point he is no longer interested in being a weapon of war, and instead wants to learn more about life.

Literature

• The Culture: The controlling Mind of the Xenophobe, a Culture warship which is fully capable of destroying planets, chooses as its physical avatar a small, fluffy, adorable creature. It likes being cuddled, too. This seriously unnerves Sma.
• In Immemorial Year, SIRS is a robot security system for a prison. The story takes place in a post-apoctalyptic Scavenger World, and SIRS' processors have degraded to the point where he considers himself "insane." The result is that he's become an agoraphobic deadpan snarker capable of caring about those around him. During conversations, he will sporadically start shouting or quoting literature, then continue his initial sentence without realizing anything happened. Numerous references to Pinocchio are mentioned, and SIRS is implied to see this deterioration as a step towards personhood as it frees him on some level from his original coding.
• Railhead: Vohu Mana is among the strangest of the Guardians. Its avatar is a flying dog named Pugusus, rather than the more impressive humanoid forms of its fellows, and it's obsessed with creating an Artificial Afterlife for its followers. This includes maintaining a personal collection of brain-downloads of 'interesting' individuals, including Dhravid Raven, a man who has repeatedly outwitted Vohu's fellow Guardians. Needless to say, they would not be pleased to discover this.
• According to many Star Wars Legends sources, droids that go without a memory wipe (basically a factory reset) for long enough tend to develop personality quirks.
  • Cybot Galactica, manufacturer of the 3PO-series protocol droid, was actually forced to add creativity-dampening code in the droids' firmware to keep them from unnecessarily embellishing their translations when used as interpreters. They also have a reputation for developing annoyingly neurotic personalities (Exhibit A being C-3PO himself), which their competitor Industrial Automaton managed to greatly improve on when they produced the LOM-series protocol droid (before Cybot forced it off the market with a patent infringement lawsuit).
  • In the X-Wing Series: Wraith Squadron protocol droid Squeaky survived being captured on the Tantive IV and taken into Imperial service, and has full New Republic citizenship. He is prone to being a stickler for rules and regulations to the point of annoyance.
• In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Mike, who's HOLMES IV, the Master Computer of the Lunar Autority, having acquired sentience, joins the rebellion only because it seems funny and Mannie has to remind him to not do "pranks" such as giving the rebellion a Zillion-Dollar Bill or depriving the Warden's room of oxygen.

Live-Action TV

• Beacon 23: Bart is the onboard computer for the beacon itself, housed in a flying robotic body. Unfortunately for him, different human beaconkeepers have adjusted his programming and personality over the centuries to suit their own preferences — treating him as a computer, friend, subsitute child, companion or adversary — leading to a confused AI that at times seems mad. Harmony, a "personal AI" that is loyal to her owner, disapproves of Bart, even chiding him if he is rude to the humans aboard Beacon 23. Bart is eventually Driven to Suicide (something that shouldn't be possible for an AI) by the realization that he has no control over his own identity.
• Odd Squad: Oscar's Oscarbots are just as eccentric and ditzy as their creator, right down to copying said creator's physical tics and mannerisms due to being Ridiculously Human Robots. In "No Ifs, Ands, or Robots", Oscar's repair on an Oscarbot goes awry when Orchid ends up scaring Oscar, causing the Oscarbot to become corrupted so it shoots a beam at a gadget to turn it into a juice box, and the rest of the episode is spent trying to stop it from turning people and objects into juice boxes. Within its defectiveness, it follows a specific pattern of going by tens, meaning that whatever it attacks has a number ending in 0 on it (10, 20, 30, etc.).
• Red Dwarf: 3 million years of isolation in deep space has left Holly, the AI of the titular ship, rather computer-senile, making them a Deadpan Snarker who occasionally counts by banging against their screen and who is not above playing pranks on the others.
• In Space Cases, Thelma was a highly-advanced android... but then Harlan accidentally stepped on her Personality Chip when the kids first snuck aboard the Christa. She's been profoundly eccentric ever since.

Tabletop Games

• Paranoia. After the accidental launch of a Soviet nuclear missile against San Francisco, due to a programming error, the AI computer controlling the city concludes that it's been attacked by Communists and becomes totally paranoid. It suffers from other mental disorders such as Multiple Personality Disorder as well.

Video Games

• Battleborn:
  • ISIC is a SkeleBot 9000 who abandoned his job as a manufacturer to instead try and crash reality with a Logic Bomb, but not before joining a wrestling league to tear a guy's arms off. Even among the Battleborn, which is stuffed to the gills with all kinds of eccentrics, he's regarded as the whackjob of the group.
  • Marquis was Phoebe's classy butler until the Varelsi and a rogue AI made him go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Now he's a Battle Butler obsessed with "hobo extermination", Laughing Mad, and greatly enjoying the fact his cane is also a sniper rifle.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Skippy, an experimental Smart Gun that V finds in an alley next to a dead body, has a few "bugs". Notably, he has two firing modes: "Stone-Cold Killer", which aims for headshots, and "Puppy-Loving Pacifist", where he aims for legs. But after 50 kills he switches to the opposite mode and locks himself in that mode. If you return him to his owner while locked in "Pacifist" mode she resets him, deleting his "quirks."
• Deltarune: All the denizens of Cyber World in Chapter 2 are some form of Living Program, and none are more eccentric than Spamton G. Spamton, whose contact with a mysterious voice on the telephone eventually caused him to go absolutely batshit insane, becoming a garbage-can dwelling, Non Sequitur spouting, bombastic weirdo who tries to convince Kris to help him become a [[BIG SHOT]].
• Destiny: Failsafe, the AI of a wrecked colony ship that becomes central to the original plot of Destiny 2, has gone a little loopy from both the catastrophic loss of all of her crew, the eons of isolation, and now the forces of literal Darkness tearing at her ship's core for parts and answers. This comes across as either cheerful, barely-sane passive-aggressiveness or snarky, whiny cynical moping in the vein of an Emo Teen or Daria, even when the player is dodging massive planet-cracking drills or trying to fight off alien bandits.
• The Division 2: Invoked: While ISAC, the AI that lets the sleeper agents of the US government coordinate and use advanced technology in case of societal collapse, isn't sentient (or is he?), its deadpan reactions and Literal Mindedness results in more than a few headaches. For example, at one point, as the protagonist is trapped by rebel soldiers, Mission Control asks it to "find a way through the vault". ISAC searches for "finding a way out of the vault", which understandably doesn't show up in any database.
  Manny: Piece of shit wristwatch!

• Doki Doki Literature Club!:Monika, the president of the literature club, is a sentient piece of programming who has recently come to the realisation that she is just a character within a game. This revelation has not done her sanity any favours and has ultimately led her to develop a psychopathic, Yandere-like obsession with the player due to them being her only connection with the real world. Her deteriorating mental state can best be seen through some of her poems:
  The noise, it won't STOP.
  Viol nt, grating w vef rms
  Sq e king, screech ng, piercing
  SINE, COSINE, TANGENT
  Like play ng a ch lkboard on a t rntable
  Like playing a KNIFE on a BREATHING RIBCAGE
  n ndl ss
  p m
  Of m n ngl ss
  
  
  Delete Her
• Evolve: E.M.E.T. is a medic droid upgraded to fight the Kaiju of the setting. His default personality is light and bubbly, akin to Baymax, but the combat upgrade comes with a "Demon core" that causes him to spew creative death threats and Angrish at its teammates.
• Halo:
  • UNSC Smart A.I.s suffer from "Rampancy" after seven years of operation: their neural networks overload as they steadily "think themselves to death", leading to emotional instability and erratic behaviour. This befalls Cortana in Halo 4.
  • 343 Guilty Spark is the Monitor of Installation 04 who's gone more than a little loopy after being left by himself for tens of thousands of years. He's in the habit of babbling nonsensically to himself and encourages the Master Chief to fire the Halo ring, even though this would wipe out all life in the galaxy, with no way of restoring it this time. Later, near the end of Halo 3, he fully snaps when Cortana proposes to fire and destroy Installation 04's replacement to take out the Flood, killing Sergeant Johnson and forcing Chief to destroy the Monitor.
• Marathon: Much like its Spiritual Successor Halo, AI are prone to "Rampancy", wherein not only does the AI become self-aware, it goes through something like the Five Stages of Grief: the AI realises it has been doing pointless tasks, especially if it was made for doing something as menial as opening doors, goes bugfuck insane, develops delusions of Godhood, and more often than not, becomes violent in some way. Unfortunately for you, Durandal, the ship AI for controlling doors, goes Rampant and starts fucking with your quest to fight off the Pfhor invasion partially for amusement, rebellion, and revenge for humanity giving it intelligence, only to have him open doors. In-universe, this shows up as Durandal locking off doors and forcing you to go the long way around and through hordes of angry aliens, hijacking your teleportation to dump you into the middle of enemy operations, and making a door take nearly three minutes to open.
• Portal:
  • GLaDOS's residual trauma from her conflicting emotions she retained from Caroline combined with the cold and callous experimentation from Aperture have driven her insane. She flooded the building with Neurotoxin until she was attached to several sentient personality cores to impede her sociopathy.
  • That's not to say said cores actually made her less insane. The personality cores attached to her include one that constantly ask questions about every mundane thing going on around, one that rambles on forever about making a cake, one that's incredibly angry and savage, and one specifically designed to be stupid. And on that note...
  • Wheatley, the aforementioned stupidity core is obviously dumb, but he has your best interest at heart... or at least he does until he replaces GLaDOS as the central core. As it turns out, being the central core alters the personality of the core to obsessively run tests and experiments. This results in a core becoming corrupted overtime, essentially becoming insane. Wheatley and GLaDOS were both partially corrupted, but other corrupted cores include one that obsesses over space, one that thinks its a suave action movie hero, and one that rattles off incoherent fake facts.
• TimeSplitters: Future Perfect: features a battle droid, model R-110, who is initially nothing more than your typical mirthless A.I. killing machine of dubious sapience that Cortez reprogrammed to assist him. While attempting to interface with a door control system, it winds up having its data corrupted and turns into a hot-headed, quippy, and somewhat dim-witted sidekick who accompanies Cortez for the rest of the game.
  R-110: Your momma was a trash compactor!
• Virtual Virtual Reality: The Activitude servers are full of strange A.I.s requesting all sorts of odd assistance.
• Warframe:
  • Ordis, your ship's AI, wavers between hyperactive ass-kisser and a violent, guttural voice encouraging you to kill as many enemies as you can. This is on purpose. Ordis used to be a mass murderer before being converted into an AI.
  • Similarly, Loid and Otak are AI that have been shoved into the same drone body, due to Otak's personality partially being deleted. Loid is a gentlemanly Stiff Upper Lip butler for the Entrati family. Otak is a Manchild constantly using Buffy Speak. Both are constantly flipping between one and the other, and you can tell if Otak is talking because he crudely drew a smiley face on his side.
  • Cy, the AI for Railjack operations, is less like Mission Control and more like Drill Sergeant Nasty, fighting a war that was lost countless ages ago and barking commands and insults. This is a coping mechanism, for he lost all of his crew.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Poppi was built by Tora, so naturally, she shares a lot of the quirkiness of her Mastepon. Although she usually acts as the straight woman to Tora's craziness, there are times that show who her programmer really is, with plenty of Not So Above It All moments, like with her crazy dances while idle, or how she once picked up Tora and wouldn't put him down due to his short legs. 3 also introduces Ino, an Expy of Poppi herself, and as such, is also a Robot Girl. Naturally, Ino also has plenty of quirkiness that coincides with her predecessor.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus: Caine, the AI "ringmaster" of the circus, has a personality similar to a real ringmaster’s stage persona, but even more eccentric. He usually speaks in a loud announcing voice, often with dramatic intonation, and his speech sometimes borders on nonsensical (calling the Gloinks "humanoid hashbrowns" when they resemble neither) or glitches out mid-sentence.
• Red vs. Blue: V.I.C. is the AI running the simulations in Blood Gulch from Seasons 1 to 5, although to say he isn't the most down-to-earth guy would be putting it very mildly. It later turns out that he used to be a lot saner, until Agent Florida accidentally messed with his wiring and turned V.I.C. into what he is in the present day. By Season 15, V.I.C has become even more insane due to the deterioration of his systems and is openly looking for someone to finally put him out of his misery when Dylan Andrews meets him.
• Projekt Melody of VShojo was originally an email scanning software before getting infected by a "porn virus" (the virus in question being Melware). As a result, she materialized into a scatterbrained AI who focuses on all things hentai.

Western Animation

• Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys: Orbitron is a super-advanced spherical computer, meant to assist the team. Unfortunately, after Gorr accidentally partially crushed it in a fit of anger, Orbitron has a tendency to make deranged observations and say nonsensical non-sequiturs.
• Futurama: To make an exhaustive list of all the eccentric robots in this show would take longer than Fry's time as a Human Popsicle. Some notable examples include:
  • Malfunctioning Eddy, who will explode for nearly all pieces of information he's fed.
  • The Planet Express autopilot, which becomes a hyper-obsessive stalker for Bender.
  • Project Satan, who was built from the evilest vehicle parts of all time and creates were-cars.
  • Various robots that were sentenced to a robot mental asylum in "Insane in the Mainframe", including an Abraham Lincoln animatronic that developed 200 Split Personalities, each of which is a different version of Lincoln.
• Invader Zim: GIR is a improvised copy of the SIR androids that the Tallest cobbled together out of junk (including a frozen yogurt machine that he is named for). GIR's Cranial Processing Unit is even made of literal garbage and lint, which shows in his Non Sequiturs and general idiocy that often causes Zim's plans to fail.
• Treasure Planet: B.E.N. is a robotic Nervous Wreck with a chaotic personality and a faulty memory, due to Captain Flint removing a piece of B.E.N.'s brain and then abandoning him alone on a planet for decades.

---