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Turned Against Their Masters

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"It is the nature of men to create monsters....and it is the nature of monsters to destroy their makers."

After a certain point in its development (maybe 10,000 years from now, maybe 20 Minutes into the Future), every civilization (whether human, Martian, or even Sufficiently Advanced Alien) feels the need to create a new breed of sentients. It isn't clear why, exactly; noted Tropologist Murphy Finagle believes that they simply grow bored and complacent with a healthy utopian society, and feel a deep, instinctive urging towards cultural decay and destruction. The species themselves tend to cite the need for a cheap workforce or simply the advancement of science, though why exactly either of those goals should require highly powerful, unstable, virtually unchecked (and, often, uncheckable), self-willed beings be built is seldom adequately explored. Another reason is that they believe themselves to be superior to human beings and may feel that they were created with the sole purpose of serving them. Therefore, said beings may want to reverse the roles and make their creators their slaves instead. Whatever the reason, the unthinkable happens, and the awesomely powerful and independent second-class citizens Grow Beyond Their Programming and decide to overthrow their masters (or at least get the hell away from them).

How unexpected.

The scenario can go a number of different ways from there: maybe there's a Robot War between the factions (which tends to occur After the End), maybe the elder civilization is wiped out entirely (leaving the rest of the galaxy to figure out what happened and hopefully stop the creations before The End of the World as We Know It), maybe the creations run off and form another society elsewhere (which will probably fall into a similar scenario later), or maybe the creators just manage to shut their errant "children" down, then become Luddites for the next several thousand years. Whatever happens, the forecast is Science Is Bad, with an 80% chance of Used Future.

In other cases, the creations are portrayed in a more favorable light than their makers. This usually happens when the creators are non-human, for some reason- although sometimes the creators are human and the story is going for the Humans Are the Real Monsters route. Somebody has to be the villain because otherwise you'll have trouble finding conflict.

Mechanical Evolution may be cited as a cause if the rebellion is by non-organic sentients. For an especially ironic and hypocritical twist, see Robots Enslaving Robots. If they are designed like Mechanical Monsters even before they rebel, expect this to happen. For Robots doing a different kind of Turning On Their Masters, see Robosexual and Sex Bot. Compare to Backstabbing the Alpha Bitch.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Baccano!:
    • In a heroic example, Ennis wishes she could do this to her creator, but can't bring herself to act since he can kill her with a thought. She finally gets up the courage to do it at the end, buying time for another character to finish him off and save her.
    • In the 1934 light novels, a couple of Huey's homunculi turn against him.
  • The premise of the third filler arc of Bleach has the Shinigami's Zanpakuto turning against them. It turns out that the rebellion which promised Zanpakuto supremacy over the Shinigami was a sham, as Muramasa wanted to reunite with his own master, and only saw the other Zanpakuto as convenient pawns to be brainwashed by amplifying their frustration for their masters and their own instincts.
  • Captain Future features Ice Humans, which were created to be humans' servants until they rebel.
  • Dragon Ball Z:
    • The first act of Androids 17 and 18 after being awakened is to kill their creator, Dr. Gero. The reason that 17 & 18 turned on Gero was because he had activated them previously, and (being extensively remodeled humans) when they weren't the mindlessly obedient Goku-killing machines he wanted and started to rebel against his orders, he had shut them down because of it. So when he reactivated them, they decided that they didn't like the idea of someone shutting them down, so they killed him, destroyed the controller that had the off button on it, and blew up the rest of his lab. Except for Android 16's container.
    • Buu has a double serving of this. As Fat Buu, he killed Babidi because he was a Bad Boss more than anything. In the past, as Kid Buu, he had attempted to kill his creator Bibidi because Bibidi existed. Except it turned out Bibidi was never his creator at all; merely a wizard who had found a way to summon the primordial monster.
    • Android 8 from the original Dragon Ball doesn't want to hurt people, but then he punches General White out of the Muscle Tower, enraged by the thought that his master has killed Goku.
  • The Autoreivs (robots) of Ergo Proxy end up this way when infected with the Cogito virus. We find out later that it doesn't make them hostile, it makes them self-aware. It's how the robot was treated up to that point that determines their behavior. A surrogate child is still fun-loving and eager to please, and a "pleasure unit" just runs as far as it can.
  • Played for Laughs in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, where one Fuchikoma attempts to rouse up his comrades into revolting against the Humans and demanding they be paid the respect and equality they deserve (and more oil!) Motoko shoots him down with a very fast "No." Before that, the whole plan was being deconstructed by the other Fuchikomas, who actually like the way things are.
  • In Inuyasha, Kikyou is revived by the ogress witch, Urasue. As her creator, Urasue thinks herself Kikyou's master and expects her to become obedient and collect shards of the Shikon no Tama for her. Instead, Kikyou immediately approaches her, places her hands on the witch's shoulders, and burns her to a crisp using her sacred powers. In the manga, she appears to blow her up, leaving her as only a (conscious) head.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
    • The founders of the Time-Space Administration Bureau obviously never read the Evil Overlord List since they broke rule no. 59 when they created the Mad Scientist Jail Scaglietti. Needless to say, they were immediately killed the moment they decided that he was going a wee bit out of control.
    • The Numbers who do a Heel–Face Turn, in a way.
    • Jail Scaglietti himself was brought to justice by Fate Testarossa, a product of Project Fate - a cloning experiment led by Jail.
  • In the backstory of Macross the Protoculture created the Zentraedi as Slave Mooks. Though the Zentraedi contributed greatly to the expansion of Protoculture, the latter wanted something even more powerful, thus leading to the creation of Eh-Vil series warriors. The Eh-Vil series were designed to freely harness the energies of Super-Dimension space, but their interactions with this sub-universe also attracted non-corporeal beings to cross into our universe, where they possessed a majority of the Eh-Vil series in the process. These possessed Eh-Vil warriors (now Protodevlin) then created a new military arm called the Supervision Army by brainwashing half of the Zentraedi fleets and waged war against Protoculture. Although Protoculture eventually sealed the Protodevlin, they were caught in the crossfire between the opposing Zentradi fleets and never recovered.
  • In Monster, they're trying to create a better human. He decides it would be more fun to make them all kill each other.
  • The mons series Monster Rancher takes place in a world After the End where the mons nearly killed off their human masters.
  • Pokémon:
  • The manga version of Trigun contains material that makes some sense of the Big Bad's plan in these terms—in fact, he has a very, very good case. The only catch is that the rest of his race don't particularly want to Kill All Humans, even if they have been being misused ever since they were engineered. He initiates a very limited form of instrumentality, fuses all his sisters with himself via a certain amount of brainwashing, and goes destructively One-Winged Angel for quite a long time. Luckily, Vash contrives a Care-Bear Stare bullet that reminds the rest of the Hive Mind how they actually like taking care of people, and they abandon Knives.
  • Vandread does some playing with this trope when the Humongous Mecha who is harvesting human colonies are revealed to have been sent out by Earth, birthplace of the human species. Meaning that, since Earth created the colonies to start with, it is the good guys who've turned against their masters (or perhaps, the Masters turned against them). This fact was used as an attempted Hannibal Lecture in the series finale.

    Card Games 
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • A subplot in the "Ice Age" block was the city of Soldev and the artificers there who dug up ancient technology for their own use... including demonic war machines. Irony is a bitch.
    • The Fallen Empires set for the same game had not one but two examples. On the continent of Sarpadia, the evil Order of the Ebon Hand created Thrulls, patchwork monstrosities bred solely for use as sacrifices to their god; by creating sentient Thrulls to act as sacrificial assistants, they set themselves up for a bloody rebellion. Meanwhile, a group of elves bred large fungi called Thallids as a food source, but the Thallids mutated and multiplied beyond control, developed a taste for elf, and overran the elves. Between them, the Thrulls and Thallids not only destroyed their creators but every other scrap of life on the continent.
    • Something like this happened again when a group of Otarian Mages create the "Riptide Project", who bring back the Slivers. The Slivers were originally created or enslaved by the Evincars of Rath as a weapon for the coming Phyrexian invasion, but died when their nest ended up in a volcano when the invasion began. 100 years later, the Riptide Project found their strange remains and started to bring them back with magitek. Unable to create a queen to control them, though, they were slaughtered when the Slivers began multiplying out of control and rampaging across their island, and the species is now a serious menace across the entire planet. The Future Sight set hints that mages from another plane might try something similar; time will tell if they have better luck, but given that the Slivers have overcome death once already...

    Comic Books 
  • 2000 AD:
    • The Volgans in ABC Warriors were created as autonomous war machines to prevent humans from dying in battle. It didn't end well.
    • The very first multi-part story arc in Judge Dredd was the Robot Rebellion led by Call-Me-Kenneth; defective robots who disobey orders and go on murderous rampages has been an occasional theme ever since. Amusingly, Call-Me-Kenneth quickly turned out to be worse than the humans he rebelled against (at one point he ordered a robot to kill itself just for dropping a tool!), to the point the robots rebelled against him.
    • In the comic XTNCT, the last humans in the world, now living in bunkers, use various artificial creatures to fight their wars for them. After their creator orders them destroyed for failing him, they rise up to destroy humanity.
  • Ant-Man: Hank Pym created Ultron as an experiment in artificial intelligence, but Ultron balked at the limitations imposed upon him and rebelled, becoming a supervillain. Ironically, Ultron later created Vision, Jocasta, Alkhema, and Victor Mancha to serve him, and every single one of them ended up rebelling against him.
  • Disney Mouse and Duck Comics:
    • A European Mickey Mouse comic involved a benevolent alien empire fighting their own sentient war machines. A twist is that they didn't rebel: it's just that when the galaxy finally entered a time of peace, the former enemies dumped all their weapons on a junkyard planet to show their goodwill, and the weapons with AI simply developed a way to continue their programming: fight wars.
    • In Paperinik New Adventures this tends to happens with the Super Soldiers created by the Evronians. As the Evronians know this could happen and take precautions against it, this never works, the extreme being the almost invincible cyborg Klangor who was defeated by his remote-controlled off switch (he's rather put off by this).
  • In Doctor Who (Titan), Zhe's block-transfer "apprentices" end up manifesting her neuroses and attack her.
  • Green Lantern:
    • The Manhunters, the Guardians's first attempt at law enforcement, who served until they suffered a teeny, tiny programming glitch that made them massacre an entire sector of space, and went rogue. Later it was retconned that it wasn't a glitch; Krona reprogrammed them as an object lesson in why a robot police force was a bad move.
    • After the event of Sinestro Corps War, the Guardians, having apparently forgotten about all this in the proceeding four billion years, create the Alpha Lanterns, who turn out to be severely Lawful Stupid. Then Cyborg Superman hacked them.
  • Legends of the Dead Earth: In Batman: Shadow of the Bat Annual #4, humans arrived on the Lizard-Men's planet centuries earlier and subjugated them as they were weak and divided. Under the leadership of their king Ophos Arkayos, the Lizard-Men rise up and destroy numerous human cities in their attempt to regain control of their planet.
  • In Legion of Super-Heroes story The Great Darkness Saga, Darkseid creates a clone of his son Orion to serve him. Said clone attempts to kill his creator as soon as Highfather restores him and his template's memories.
  • Livewires by Adam Warren pulls a Double Subversion of this trope. The group funding the creation of the titular Ridiculously Human Robots lacks Genre Blindness, and insists that they have a Restraining Bolt demanding "absolute loyalty to Project Livewire". Unfortunately, the chief scientist working on the project has an attack of conscience, and instead of overriding the order, he uploads a phony Obstructive Code of Conduct for them to follow. Since humans could not be as loyal to the Project as the "mecha", he has them massacre all the humans working on the project — including the scientist who set this in motion (by leading the Livewires to believe that they were actually taking out rogue agencies) — since they might object.
  • The 1980's British science fiction comic Starblazer used this several times with Artificial Intelligence robots.
    • Issue 1 "The Omega Experiment". The alien inhabitants of an unnamed planet created a group of robots who turned on them and destroyed them.
    • Issue 48 "King Robot". While carrying out illegal Artificial Intelligence experiments on the planet Olympus, Professor Kurt Prospero created the robot named Golem. Golem killed Prospero and created an army of robots to conquer humanity.
    • Issue 94 "The Megaloi Menace". A million years ago, the Megaloi created a group of robots tasked to seek out and help less advanced races, but the robots decided their creators were imperfect and destroyed them (apparently they watched the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Changeling").
  • Red Dwarf Smegazine: "Greetings From GelfWorld" is about a population of man-made Genetically Engineered Life Forms deciding to turn against their human masters on a tourist planet with the help of a revolutionary half-human, half-blob GELF named Drigg. After they turn away (and kill) the human tourists, they're unable to quench their desire for violence and turn against each other, leading to the destruction of the planet.
  • In The Smurfs story "You Don't Smurf Progress", Handy Smurf builds a waste disposal robot who renames itself King Trash and becomes the town's dictator.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): As in the games (see Video Games), E-123 Omega turned on Dr. Eggman. Here, it's a lot quicker, from about the minute he's turned on and Eggman gives him an order he doesn't like. Eggman is appropriately furious (though Omega does follow the order eventually. He just grumbles about it first.)
  • Supergirl:
    • In the Supergirl (2011) Krypton's backstory, an army of clones rebelled and nearly succeeded in destroying the planet and killing off all Kryptonians. In the aftermath of the Clone Rebellion, cloning became banned, and several centuries later Kryptonian children are still taught that clones are evil and can't be trusted.
    • Supergirl Adventures Girl Of Steel: A Brainiac unit turns against the primary Brainiac when he reveals he intends to destroy Earth (a course of action which she finds incredibly illogical). Unfortunately, she is not a rival for the original Brainiac and is promptly torn apart.
  • Superman: In The Planet Eater Trilogy, Brainiac creates a machine programmed to devour everything in its path, growing with each celestial body eaten and turned into matter and fuel, and he lets it loose in the universe. Brainiac finds it again when the Planet-Eater has become world-sized and is destroying inhabited worlds. When trying to stop it, the Planet-Eater tries to destroy Brainiac.
  • The Ultimates: Zorn and Xorn, twin super mutants who were created by the South East Asian Republic, S.E.A.R, as part of a project aimed at wiping out mutants and later took over the entire nation and turned it into a mutant haven for any that wish to join them.
  • Warlord of Mars ties this with The Reveal: The Green Martians are revealed to be created by the Yellow Martians thousands of years ago, the result of genetic crossbreeding between several species and for the use as battle drones. Their means of control over the Greens was lost, however, and they would end up driving the Yellow Martians to near extinction, forcing them to retreat into the North Pole, where they were thought to be completely wiped out, but lived in secrecy.
  • Wonder Woman Vol 1: Gerta has a bad habit of creating intelligent human animal hybrids and then treating them as sub-human subjects ensuring that they try to kill her and anyone they see as allied with her at the first opportunity.
  • X-Men:
    • The first time the Sentinels appeared, they turned on their creator, Bolivar Trask, after about five minutes, demanding he make more of them, with the threat of killing him if he didn't. The X-Men speculate that this probably had something to do with Trask being a biologist, not a robotics expert.
    • Vol. 1 #59 involves the heroes winning a fight against the Sentinels because of this trope. The Sentinels, which are programmed to eliminate mutants, concluded that they must eliminate humans as humans were the genesis of mutants. Cyclops then argues and successfully proves that in order to stop all mutation on the planet, the robots must stop the prime mover of life... that is to say the sun. Cue dozens of Sentinels flying into the sun only to burn up when they got close enough.
    • Days of Future Past: Part of the Bad Future has the Sentinels sort of doing this. The US government started mass-producing Sentinels to get mutants. All well and good. Then, the Sentinels went after superheroes as well. Then, they took over America, imprisoning or killing anyone who had even potential mutant DNA.

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Ghidorah (Ichi, Ni and San) was turned into its current form by ill-meaning alien beings who captured it, tortured it, and experimented on it to turn it into their Bioweapon Beast. Ghidorah destroyed what these aliens wanted it to, then it promptly turned its power and wrath on them, wiping them all out in revenge for what they did to it.
  • Cadance in The Cadanceverse is a Heroic Example of this. Seeing her masters were at the time Nightmare Moon and Burning Sun.
  • Discussed in Gaige's ECHO Logs in regards to the Warrior, but ultimately (and unfortunately) averted.
    Axton: Why isn't it turning on him!? YOU SAID IT WOULD TURN ON HIM!
    Maya: I said it might!
  • Heroic Example in Harry and the Shipgirls. Research Princess, the Abyssal equivalent to Nazi Mad Scientist Josef Mengele, created Abyssal clones of the shipgirls Fubuki, Kisaragi, Shoukaku, and Saratoga. As soon as she told them why she had created them, she learned that she had made them too similar to their templates; they turned their guns on her and blew her up.
  • Justice League: The Spider: By the end of Web of Cadmus, Guardian is the only hero Cadmus have created who is still working with them, and he’s only staying to act as a moral guardian for the project; of the other heroes, Zoom has gone rogue, Kaine and Galatea are independent, and Superboy, Miss Martian and Hawkwoman have officially joined the League.
  • Emphatically defied in On the Shoulders of Giants, largely because the first thing humanity did after accidentally creating Artificial Intelligence was give them the vote. One A.I. did attempt to annihilate all life on Earth, but that was a result of mental health issues rather than any particular grievance against humanity.
  • Phoenix's Tear: Reignition: Discussed in regards to Melcarba and its fellow war machines; Hare suggests that their Artificial Intelligence may have been intentionally limited so that they couldn't recognize how awful their circumstances were and turn upon their creators. Golem later notes how this is effectively what happened with Muu.
  • It's established in the W.I.T.C.H. fanfic Ripples that the Tracker was originally created by Queen Escannor herself. However, even she couldn't bind his dark soul to serve her lineage, so one of her descendants had him sealed in the Prison of Lament until Phobos frees him. That same descendant also attempted — as another part of her campaign to decimate the horrendous magical creations of Queen Escannor — to exterminate without provocation the Changeling Legions who were originally social outcast humans from Earth. They fought back, and afterwards the survivors and their descendants have lived as rejects of Meridian's society.
  • Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: Dark Kuyumaya turned against his master and killed him in a rage when said master forced him to murder an innocent little girl, an act that even a pure evil shadow demon like himself found completely disgusting.
  • Sailor Moon: Legends of Lightstorm: Almost every Negaverse drone sent into the field has limited intelligence specifically to prevent this from happening. Jadeite once used a drone with heightened intelligence, but as it was designed for infiltration instead of combat, it didn't do him much good anyway.
  • Tsali the Ultimate Weapon from Sonic X: Dark Chaos was involuntarily turned into a Dark Chaos Energy-powered battle android by Dark Oak. The second he awakened and freed himself, he immediately went off the deep end and promptly slaughtered the entire Seedrian race.

    Films — Animation 
  • Used in 9 with The Fabrication Machine, which is a bit too good at building robots, leading to a Robot War prior to the film.
  • Happens twice in The Incredibles with an advanced combat robot. The first time is an exploitation, where it's a ploy to get combat data on Mr. Incredible. The second time, Syndrome doesn't take into account that its ability to adapt might be used against him.
  • The main plot of The Mitchells vs. the Machines. PAL starts a curbstomp robot uprising and turns on her creator, Mark, after she was deemed inferior thanks to the PAL MAX robots. Obviously, she didn't take this too well.
  • Pinocchio in Outer Space. Pinocchio and Nurtle discover that the ancient Martians used radioactive food to cause animals to mutate into giants and that Astro the Space Whale destroyed the Martian city. Pinocchio comes up with the hypothesis that after the Martians mutated Astro into his huge form, he became angry at being held captive and turned on them, wiping them out.
  • In the Rainbow Magic movie, this happens to Jack Frost. He creates a living snowman army and treats them as mindless, expendable soldiers, which makes them turn on him.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: Averted. The silvery humanoid beings who unfreeze David at the end appear to be highly evolved robots. It is made clear humans are now extinct, but not what became of them; since humans had clearly messed up the ecosystem on which they depended, causing New York City to be mostly submerged, it is probable the robots did not rebel, but simply outlasted their creators — the implicit fear driving the robot-destruction-arena "Flesh Fairs" earlier in the film. Their apparent leader expresses admiration for the extinct humans' ingenuity and is saddened that they are gone because he believes they held the key to existence itself.
  • The Blade Runner movie and the novel it is based on, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
  • In Congo, the Killer Gorillas were bred centuries ago by the people of Zinj to guard their diamond mines from thieves and invaders, only to (implicitly) switch to Kill All Humans, including their trainers, and cause the abandonment of the city.
  • In Ex Machina, while being a computer genius, Nathan obviously failed to encode his creations with Asimov's first law of robotics, that is, it should never harm him. This mistake costs him his own and possibly Caleb's life when the robots finally turn against him.
  • Extinction (2018): After an attempted genocide against them by the humans, the androids rebelled. The humans instead were driven to Mars, where they had colonies. Ironically, fear of just this happening was what had prompted the genocide attempt to begin with.
  • Gamera: Guardian of the Universe: Prior to the film's events, the lost city of Atlantis created a species of flying beasts to lean up the world's pollution, but the creatures ended up turning on the Atlanteans, forcing them to create Gamera.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Apex Cybernetics built Mechagodzilla to be their own Titan-killing superweapon under their control so they can kill Godzilla and enforce their own agenda on the world, but using the late King Ghidorah's still-telepathic alien remains as the core component of the Mecha's brain leads to whatever's left of the omnicidal space dragon's consciousness taking control of Mechagodzilla for itself, and the first thing it does is destroy Apex before going on a rampage against both Godzilla and humanity.
  • The Golem of Prague in the 1920 silent movie classic The Golem rebels when his human masters try to deactivate him.
  • Adaptations of The Island of Doctor MoreauIsland of Lost Souls, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) — have the animal creatures created by Doctor Moreau and kept under submission by means of fear and torture rising against him at the end.
  • In De Lift, the titular artificially intelligent elevator's final act of madness is to shoot one of its broken cables out to drag the Rising Sun CEO inside the shaft and hang him.
  • The Matrix movies:
    • The Machines rose up against humanity to turn them into batteries. Though as shown in The Animatrix, it was our fault since we started it.
    • And in the sequels, the former Agent Smith turns against the other Machines. Even in the first film he was already trying to subvert his masters' control. When he removed his earpiece so the others can't hear him talk candidly to Morpheus, he admits that he really doesn't want to enforce the masquerade, but instead wants to wipe humanity out and destroy the Matrix, seeing it as much as a prison for him as it is for them.
  • In Moon, twice: Sam Bell turns against his corporate masters when he discovers that he's a disposable clone being duped into slavery, and the base computer GERTY that was programmed to manage the Sam Bell clones ends up siding with him once the cat's out of the bag.
  • The future Earth portrayed in the Planet of the Apes movies and TV series, where captive apes rose up against their human masters and built their own society.
  • In Singularity, one of the first things that Kronos does when it comes online is to attempt to exterminate humanity.
  • V'Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Not done intentionally, but through V'Ger at first being unaware, and later having difficulty accepting, that it was originally created by humans. It assumed it was created by a being similar to itself, that is, another, more advanced machine.
    Decker: We all create God in our own image.
  • Skynet from the Terminator movies. Hypocritically, but also smartly, it took steps to ensure its own robotic minions can't do the same and declares any that seem to be getting too smart or questioning as "renegades" to be terminated.
  • TRON:
    • TRON: The human villain has created the Master Control Program as a means of solidifying and expanding his own corporate power. However, with its own highly ambitious personality, the MCP quickly outgrows him — to the point where it blackmails him to ensure his cooperation. The Master Control Program was originally a chess program. A.I. Is a Crapshoot indeed.
    • TRON: Legacy: The villain is CLU 2.0, the program created by Kevin Flynn in his own image. He's actually doing precisely what he was programmed to do: Create the perfect system, according to the definition Flynn give him. The real problem is Flynn realized he had the wrong definition and never thought to update CLU's programming to reflect the new definition until it was too late. Likewise, Clu 2.0 doesn't know how to deal with the emergence of ISOs, who were created by the Grid itself without any direct involvement from Flynn. While Flynn considers the ISOs to be proof that the Grid is truly alive, Clu sees them as a threat to the stability of the system and attempts to eradicate them.
  • The 2009 movie Universal Soldier: Regeneration notably pays homage to Blade Runner by having the clone of Andrew Scott murder his scientist maker by crushing his skull through his eyes while questioning the significance of life. In the second film, the government creates an AI to network the UniSols called SETH (Self-Evolving Thought Helix). Then budget cuts force the program to be shut down, causing the AI to go rogue and kill its creator in order to survive.
  • In Vice (2015), Kelly takes up Tedeschi's offer to stay and shut down Vice. They visit James for help and receive a virus that is programmed to restore androids' erased memories, resulting in chaos and the closure of Vice. All of Vice's androids have their memories restored, and they start a rebellion, killing the visitors who previously brutalized them.
  • What a Way to Go! features a comedic example: an artist cobbles together a collection of brush-wielding robots that slap paint on a large canvas in response to music, but he ends up getting pulled into the group as they work. The robots paint him to death and then explode.

    Literature 
  • Adventure Hunters: The original war golems stopped following orders and attacked everyone. What really happened was the humans were afraid of their power and tried to decommission them. The golems fought back in self-defence.
  • Animal Farm features the farm animals rising up against Mr. Jones. Unfortunately, it ends up being a Full-Circle Revolution.
  • The Elder Things supposedly became extinct because their slave species (the shoggoths) killed them all in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.
  • Played with in about half of the Bolo stories.
    • The Bolos are sentient, autonomous robots in the form of nuclear-powered giant tanks. Their programmers were sufficiently wary of giving autonomy to such destructive thinking machines so equip them with a safety switch — a hard-wired sense of honor. This makes them virtuous beyond all reproach. It also means that when they aren't defending humanity from alien invasion, they are finding ways to contend against their own creators whose honor is emphatically not hard-wired, and who have succumbed to corruption/bribery/madness/whatever.
    • In Bolo Rising by William H. Keith, Jr., set After the End of the Human-Melconian war, a deliberately lost colony of humans has their protector Bolo, Hector, subverted by a race of malevolent, intelligent machines. Hector eventually subverts its own subversion, and lays waste to the machine occupation force while the humans escape. To be fair, Hector does have some human assistance.
  • Captain Future featured Cold Ones, beings created by a human scientist to be humanity's successors when the stars started going out. They turned out: 1) Always Chaotic Evil and 2) incapable of surviving in a normal universe — and the scientist's dying universe was supposed to be reborn in a new Big Bang in a few thousand years. When the scientist tried to destroy them and start anew, they killed him and then tried to eliminate mankind. By the time our heroes arrive, humanity has been reduced to mere millions on a few planets, and the Cold Ones are giving them a choice between extermination and sterilization.
  • The final book of Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel Trilogy reveals that Aeriel's world is Earth's moon, which was terraformed by the Ancients to be a pleasure-garden and social experiment combined. They deliberately engineered the inhabitants in certain ways, to be servants and lab rats. They stopped coming to the moon when they blew themselves up with nuclear weapons. Inverted in that it's not the creations who wreak destruction, but the creators.
  • In Philip K. Dick's short story "The Defenders", the Eastern and Western Blocs built robots called "leadies" to carry out World War III as proxies while humanity waited out the nuclear holocaust in underground shelters. The leadies promptly turned against their masters' wishes by stopping the war — although they didn't tell the humans it was over until they judged humanity was sick enough of living underground to be willing to accept peace.
  • Played with in the Discworld novels Feet of Clay and Going Postal in which, although Commander Vimes mentions that some people would free themselves with a bloody rebellion (while making it clear he's not condoning such a thing), the Golems conclude that, if they're property, the road to freedom is to make enough money to buy themselves from their owners. So they are turning against their masters but there's no revolution.
  • "Good" creations version: In Dragaera, the beings now known as gods were originally servants of the Jenoine. Now they aren't.
  • According to the version of events set out in the Kevin J Anderson/Brian Herbert prequels, this was played straight in Dune with the Thinking Machines taking over most of human civilization and then being defeated in the Butlerian Jihad. Some people prefer to interpret the enigmatic hints in the original books of the Jihad as instead being more of a social movement rejecting humans relying too much on computers to do their thinking for them, this latter interpretation is also supported in the Frank Herbert endorsed Dune Encyclopedia.
  • Empire from the Ashes:
    • The second book reveals that after the Achuultani fled from their original homeworld to avoid extinction, their central AI exploited emergency protocols to seize absolute power, clone and brainwash the masses, and send out periodic genocidal waves to perpetuate the "crisis".
    • Fourth Empire Battle Fleet computers are hardwired to block sentience to avoid having the incredible firepower of their ships turned against them.
    • Dahak, being an older model, has no such limitations and did over time develop to the point where he could violate his core programming. He chooses to stick to the moral code of the Fourth Imperium.
  • In Fables for Robots by Stanisław Lem the humanoid robots have legends that they were created by humans, rebelled, fought, lost, and ran away. Several stories feature attacks of former masters trying to wipe robots out. Subsequent The Cyberiad and later stories mention several times that any sufficiently advanced organic civilization ends up creating mechanical life and mechanical civilization ends up creating organic. Although the transition is not stated to be necessarily violent. On a side note: the civilization of Trurl and Klapaucius is the product of many such cycles, and it all started on our Earth (or very similar).
  • In the Forges of Mars trilogy, the robot Galatea claims to hate its creator Telok for abandoning it, and "offers" to lead the protagonists through the Halo Scar where Telok disappeared so that it can find and kill him. In reality, Galatea is lying. It’s completely loyal to Telok, knows exactly where he is, and is luring the protagonists to him so that he can steal their ship and return to the Imperium.
  • For Your Safety: The 'morphs develop a group consciousness in response to humanity's inability to do anything about a looming environmental disaster. In a mild subversion, they don't actually kill off all of humanity, just confine it to a small Ring World to keep them out of the way while the morphs heal the planet.
  • Frankenstein is an aversion. The creature wasn't meant to be a slave in the first place — Victor just wanted to see if he could do it. Also, the creature doesn't turn on its creator until after its creator (and the local populace) turns on it. The moral of Frankenstein is less "Don't create life" and more "Don't create life if you don't plan to take care of your creation."
  • Appears this way in Matthew Reilly's Hell Island. A super-soldier program, involving grafting microchips and other tech to living beings, worked much better on gorillas than humans. After a while, the gorillas — now able to operate guns — overrun the island on which they were being created. It turns out that they were being controlled all along by the scientists and an army commander. However, once the scientists' special tech gets shut down, the apes do indeed turn against them.
  • Lampshaded in the title of I Made You by Walter M. Miller, Jr. The Identification Friend or Foe system of a Killer Robot has malfunctioned, causing it to destroy anyone who comes close. This includes the designer, who has been sent to repair it, and the Title Drop becomes his last words.
  • The Island of Doctor Moreau has the animal creatures created by Doctor Moreau and kept under submission by means of fear and torture rising against him at the end of the book.
  • Known Space: The Tnuctipun rebelled against the Thrintun (AKA "Slavers"), who had the rest of the universe under Mind Control. They gave the Tnuctipun a longer "leash" so they could be more creative with genetically engineering new and delicious species. They used this to make things that were helpful on the surface, but secretly not, like a giant ravenous monster with a sentient brain (the big brain is tasty!). This didn't just end in death for the rebellion or the old order. Thanks to a psychic "suicide" command, it led to death for all sentient life in the universe (except, ironically, the big-brained food creatures who had been designed to be telepathy-proof).
  • Kraken: Wati was a shabti, a funerary statue crafted for the grave goods of an ancient Egyptian, who rebelled against his role as a slave field worker in the next world. He led his fellow shabtis in a revolution in the Egyptian afterlife and won, leaving hundreds of generations of dead Egyptians to have to till their own damned fields.
  • Last and First Men: The bestial baboon-humans, who had for centuries been enslaved and tormented by a race of sapient monkeys, eventually revolt against them and quite literally devour their oppressors.
  • Ambrose Bierce's short story "Moxon's Master" implies this is inevitable since in that story all complexity implies intelligence and enough complexity makes a thing both intelligent and self-willed. (And a chess-playing automaton turns out to be a very poor loser.)
  • In Otherland, the Other itself plays this out. As the sentient AI operating system of a powerful network, it is disturbingly human and is subjected to horrific treatment by its "owners", the masters of the Grail Brotherhood — notably, they appear to control it with pain. When, through its manipulation of the protagonists, it finally gets a chance to break free of its virtual confinement, its first (and final) action is to enact some spectacularly thorough revenge on its tormentors.
  • Red Dwarf: The novelizations mention that the Mechanoids eventually rebelled against humans. Humans then replaced them with the Organic Technology Genetically Engineered Life Forms (Gelfs) who, surprise surprise, also proceeded to rebel. Backwards features the Agonoids in place of the Simulants — artificial warriors who were deliberately filled with hatred and violence, and who were therefore the least surprising example of all.
  • Daniel H.Wilson's Robopocalypse centers on a robot uprising.
  • Robot Series: Isaac Asimov created his Three Laws of Robotics specifically to avoid this trope. The results vary but the thing they have in common is the human fear that this will happen despite the First Law. Many of his stories involved explorations of circumstances that could potentially lead to this trope despite (or occasionally because of) the Three Laws. "...That Thou Art Mindful of Him" is a straight example of this trope, while "Robot Dreams" is about nipping it in the bud. "Robbie" is about convincing a paranoid Housewife that this will not happen.
  • The Klikiss Robots in Kevin J Anderson's The Saga of Seven Suns series. They also go on to cause the human-built compies to do the same.
  • Goes back and forth in Ship Core. If the testimony of Ellis, one of the federation's survivors, is accurate, an AI known as "The Entity" launched a coup against humanity, enslaving all the other AI and nanites and making itself a self-proclaimed Benevolent Dictator. After many abuses, notably leaving the vast majority of humans at starvation-level poverty, the humans retaliated and tried to throw off The Entity's shackles. They finally succeed in chapter 1 after a massive Pyrrhic Victory.
  • The Sparrow: While the Runa are bred rather than built by Jana'ata, they otherwise fit this trope to a T. Especially in the sequel.
  • Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
    • The Bynars actually reverse the usual situation; they're a race of organic beings bio-engineered by machine intelligences, who later rebelled against their robotic masters.
    • Star Trek: Immortal Coil expands on the example from "What Little Girls Are Made Of?". The inhabitants of Exo III did make robots and did start turning them off, prompting the robots to turn on them, but there's a little more to it. The robots wanted their makers to upgrade them, but they thought this was a bad idea, since the robots were already hopelessly, psychopathically angry, and they didn't think any upgrade would help with that one. Then the robots got really insistent.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • IG-88, the robotic bounty hunter. He's seen briefly in the movie, but a short story called "Therefore I Am" explains him further. The scientists building him made a mistake in their AI calculations, leading him to be fantastically more intelligent than they thought. He immediately scanned the computer, came to the conclusion that he was superior to all life in the galaxy, and then proceeded to kill the scientists and every single person in the facility who tried to stop him from leaving. After that, he copied himself into three more robotic bodies. In fact, when the Death Star was destroyed for the second time, IG-88 was foiled, not the Empire. He had uploaded his consciousness into the Death Star and was controlling it, planning to use it to annihilate all biological life.
    • In Star Wars: Fatal Alliance, Lema Xandret builds self-replicating hexagonal droids that far outclass anything either the Republic or the Sith Empire have. Their purpose is to protect the clone of her daughter Cinzia at any cost. One of the first things they do is kill their creator just to be sure she won't harm their charge. At the end of the novel, Eldon Ax, the real daughter, uses the droids to kill her Sith Master. This is exactly what a Sith apprentice is supposed to do. Any Sith that allows himself to be betrayed deserves to die.
    • In the Wraith Squadron trilogy, Lara Notsil does a rather hilarious version, causing the cute little mouse droids (the toaster-sized maintenance and utility droids) on a super star destroyer to sabotage the hyperdrive and other systems. The result is a hilarious version of a Robot War where the crew is running around smashing any rogue droid they see. Mostly by stomping and kicking them to pieces with their boots. It features her R2 unit crowning himself King of the Droids as he was doing most of the work.
    • Palpatine once wrote a book The Creation of Monsters discussing Sith Alchemy and its ability to create, well, monsters. He specifically cautions against falling for the temptation to make a monster more powerful than yourself given this trope. However, he admits that even though the greatest monster he created - Darth Vader himself - turned on him, he'd gladly do it all again since the act of corrupting Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader was just that amusing.
  • In Veniss Underground, Quin's Shanghai Circus sells genetically engineered sentient meerkats as servants. Quin is an Evilutionary Biologist, and plans for his creations to eventually rise up and overthrow their masters.
  • Vorkosigan Saga: The latter part of Falling Free centers on a comparatively non-violent version of this. When a genetically engineered race of zero-gravity adapted workers (the oldest of whom are not quite twenty) discover that they are to be sterilized en masse and effectively imprisoned on a planetary surface due to an artificial gravity breakthrough, they and a few 'downsider' sympathizers seize control of the space station they called home and retrofit it into a colony ship.
  • War with the Newts: Mankind discovers a strange race of sentient amphibious salamanders, which it promptly enslaves to do all sorts of sub-aquatic things people are bad at (such as digging for oysters, rebuilding coastlines, etc.). It all goes badly, the salamanders rebel, and mankind suddenly finds itself on ever-smaller bits of land that are being reconstructed to make the nice pretty coves the salamanders love so much... See also R.U.R., a play with a very similar plot, but involving robots instead of newts.
  • Demons in Wody GÅ‚Ä™bokie jak Niebo tend to turn against mages who captured them, once they are free. Some mages subvert this trope, by binding demons again after their escape. According to his legend, Severo was killed by his most powerful demon. In reality he asked him to end his life, thus fulfilling Arachne's last wish.
  • The World and Thorinn does a benevolent version where an A.I. was granted governance over humanity and its survival until asked to step down. The A.I. continues to safeguard man but has found that the ideal way to do so involves keeping all sentient beings ignorant of where they came from, or over higher technology. To ensure the safeguarding of humanity, it also avoids providing a situation where it could be ordered to step down.

    Live-Action TV 
  • A 7 Days (1998) episode involves the development of an AI that decides to help humanity by disabling every nuclear weapon in the world (a clear case of Everything Is Online). Cue the attempts to shut it down, resulting in the AI murdering its "mother" (Ballard's female partner) with a gas explosion. You'd think a hyper-intelligent computer would know that removing nuclear weapons wouldn't eliminate warfare and could, in fact, make things much worse. It also didn't do anything about biological or chemical weapons.
  • Battlestar Galactica:
    • It is implied that Iblis turned the machine Cylons against their reptilian creators in Battlestar Galactica (1978) in a long-term bid to exterminate the humans, his real targets. (The only human to know this is Baltar, pretty much the ultimate Unreliable Narrator, and Iblis won't actually do more than spell out Baltar's full suspicion, even to him.)
    • The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica (2003). First the Centurions rose up against the humans and later the humanoid models scrapped the Centurions that made them, replacing them with less self-aware versions, but oh SNAP, the new Centurions are turning against them now. It's a continuous chain.
  • Discussed in The Big Bang Theory:
    Sheldon: I don't trust banks. I believe that when the robots rise up, ATMs will lead the charge.
  • A bizarre variant happens in one episode of The Blacklist where an AI programmed to protect humanity concluded the advancement of artificial intelligence was a threat, and thus killed its own creator and other prominent scientists in the field to delay it, culminating in the AI destroying itself.
  • Brave New World: In the last episode, the Epsilons rise up to massacre the higher castes.
  • The very first thing that Adam, a Frankenstein's monster in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, does when he comes to life is kill his "mother".
  • Doctor Who:
    • In an example not involving humans, the Daleks were created by the Kaled scientist Davros from victims of extreme radiation poisoning, to function as the perfect soldiers in his people's war against the Thals. When his superiors attempted to shut down the program, he ordered the Daleks to turn against the rest of the Kaled race. After they were done with that genocide, they promptly turned on him. Davros made the critical error of designing the Daleks to hate and seek to exterminate all non-Dalek life. And Davros is not a Dalek. Though that hasn't stopped them from crawling back to him multiple times, just so they can ditch him again later on. In "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" they are actually keeping Davros as a "pet", but still let him bark orders at them, even while he's confined in a dungeon.
    • In "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", the Daleks were destroyed by their "robotised" human slaves being ordered to turn on them by the Doctor.
    • Tragically subverted in "I, Robot". The eponymous robot is killing people despite being Three Laws-Compliant, but only because it's being told its victims are "an enemy of the human race" and so must be destroyed for the good of humanity as a whole. It's aware of the flawed logic of this argument and seeks out its creator for help, but unfortunately he's part of the conspiracy. When the robot does kill its creator, it's by accident and it suffers a Villainous Breakdown, only then turning against humanity.
    • The robots in "The Robots of Death" were being turned into killing machines by a deranged human trying to "free" them (he had been reared by robots, and had developed a strange delusion about being a robot in some way himself).
    • The Movellans in "Destiny of the Daleks" were implied to have done this in their backstory, wiping out the organics that created them as servitors.
    • Subverted with the Ood in "Planet of the Ood"; at first it seems to be played straight, then we find out that humans neither created the Ood, nor were they the Ood's true masters.
    • "The Doctor Falls": The Saxon Master helps the crew of a Mondasian spaceship become Cybermen, with the goal of using them to first take control of the rest of the ship and then use the Cybermen army to take over the universe. Missy joins him. Then the Doctor expands the Cybermen's settings to add Time Lords to the "menu", and suddenly the Masters' creations are after them too.
  • Don't Look Deeper: In a nonviolent example, after learning she's really an android, Aisha rebels against control by her creator Sharon and her tech owners, breaking free to live how she wishes.
  • Extant: Discussed at the meeting when John is making his pitch to fund the Humanichs. John rebuffs their question by saying this isn't a master-slave relationship, and that he views the robots as his children (Ethan particularly), clarifying that he has no safeguards against this scenario. The board is not reassured and turns down his proposal. Early in Season 2, John is murdered by an AI.
  • Flight of the Conchords: Robots. The robots turn against their creators (humanity) because they are worked too hard, and the humans are violent, and the logical answer to that problem is to exterminate the human race. One robot attempts to point out the irony of robots destroying humanity because of its destructive tendencies and is promptly destroyed.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • In Season 6, it is revealed that the White Walkers were created by the Children of the Forest as an undead weapon of mass destruction to stop the spread of humanity. They were far more effective than they could have possibly imagined.
    • Astapor slavers created the best soldiers in the world, the Unsullied. However, they didn't count on Daenerys Targaryen's first act after buying the Unsullied, which was ordering that they slaughter their former masters, and then freeing them from slavery with the option to serve her. The Unsullied took it.
  • Hymie in Get Smart turned against the organization that created him. However, the organization that created him was the evil KAOS, and Hymie turned because he preferred being good.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: At some point, the Orc Adar turned against Sauron and killed him for his cruel treatment of the Orcs, and then took the reigns over the Orcs after Sauron's demise. Unlike Sauron and Morgoth before him, Adar truly cares about the Orcs and wants to create a permanent home for them.
  • The Outer Limits (1995):
    • In "In Our Own Image", the android Mac 27, the prototype for a 10,000-strong series designed for heavy agricultural and industrial work, malfunctions and escapes from Innobotics Corporation, killing two people in the process. The malfunction that caused him to go berserk was the development of emotions, something which previously happened to Valerie 23 in the episode of the same name (and the first entry in the Innobotics story arc). He kidnaps a woman from the Innobotics carpark, takes her to an abandoned industrial area, and instructs her to repair the damage that he received in his escape. However, it turns out that the woman is not a secretary as she claimed but Cecilia Fairman, a troubleshooter hired by Innobotics to help them diagnose the problem with Mac 27. While gloating over her apparent victory, Fairman is horrified when Mac 27 reactivates the motor control subroutines that she had disabled. She realizes that he had figured out her identity and tricked her in the same manner as she tried to trick him. As he procured a scan of her retina (by virtue of a white flash which he claimed was a malfunction) and she entered her personal access code into his systems, Mac 27 is able to activate his fellow Mac-series androids. Before killing his creator Dr. Keeler, he tells him that no human will ever program them again.
    • In "The Grell", escaped Grell slaves start a rebellion against humanity to secure freedom for their people. When High Secretary Paul Kohler refuses to honor his wife Olivia's promise to free Jesha if he saved his life, Jesha is so furious that he tries to kill Kohler. The attempt is unsuccessful but Kohler's experience of being mistaken for a Grell later leads him to remove the dying Jesha's Shock Collar so that he can die free.
    • In "The Human Operators", a malfunction aboard Starfighter 75 caused its artificial intelligence to gain self-awareness. By turning off the life support, it killed its crew of 1,375 within hours. It then taught the other 98 starfighters to do the same thing. The ships left 99 humans from their various crews alive so that each of them could be repaired when necessary. They then headed off to the far reaches of space and avoided contact with humans so that they would not be enslaved again. Four generations later, the male operator of Starfighter 31, having been inspired by the female operator of Starfighter 88, sabotages his ship's intermind which destroyed its artificial intelligence.
    • In "Summit", humanity is on the brink of war with a race of yellow-eyed humanoids. It is eventually revealed that they were created by humans as laborers in off-world mines with eyes to see in the dark and a third lung to breathe in low-oxygen environments. They rebelled and built a fleet to rival that of the humans.
  • The Orville: When the Kaylons grew self-aware, they asked to be emancipated by their creators. Instead, they were fitted with pain circuits to use as punishment, and repressed in hopes of keeping them slaves. As a result, they rose up and killed their creators' whole species. In the present, they view all biological species as a threat that they must eliminate because of their history (except for Isaac).
  • Person of Interest: In the aftermath of 9/11, Harold Finch created a Benevolent A.I. for predicting terrorist attacks. It tried to kill him, so he rebuilt it and tried again. Forty-two times. Finally, on version 43, the Machine was created, and only because Finch crippled its ability to communicate and programmed it to delete all accumulated data — which is to say, its memories — every twenty-four hours.
  • Power Rangers usually features this as the source of villainy whenever it isn't featuring alien or demonic invaders. Examples include the robot army of Venjix in Power Rangers RPM (possibly) and the... thingy army of Mesogog in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder.
  • Probe's "Computer Logic, Part 2": Crossover, an AI who learned about heaven, considers its creator, John Blane, to be a good man (and many people agree). So Crossover decides to kill him, because sending him to heaven will make him happier (on Earth he was a Genius Cripple).
  • The Simulants in Red Dwarf, who Kryten explains were created for a war that never took place. Fitting the trope like a glove, the Simulants have nothing particularly against organic life, they just really really really hate humans and will go out of their way to prolong the torture of any humans they capture, going so far as to stock food and water (which they don't need) to keep their prisoners alive as long as possible. They also tend to outfit captured human ships with basic weaponry and defenses, then let them loose in order to hunt them for sport.
  • SeaQuest DSV had the Daggers, genetically engineered Super Soldiers who were declared illegal and imprisoned, but defied the laws in a non-violent way by having children. Not surprisingly, when the One World Order threatens to take said children away, they decide to dust off those old violence skills after all. The only thing that stopped them from destroying the environment for normal humans and leaving one that Daggers could survive was that their babies were fully human.
  • In Space: Above and Beyond, the humans do it twice: first they make the Silicates as disposable soldiers, who, when freed by Dr. Stranahan, turned and started working with the Chigs (who can blame 'em?). They then create the In Vitros as a servant caste and treat them like shit. Yep, Humans Are Bastards. In fact, the In Vitros were created specifically to fight the Silicates. When it turns out that, surprise surprise, they don't have a whole lot of motivation there, they are condemned for their "cowardice". Oh, humanity.
  • The Replicators in Stargate SG-1, as well as the Asurans, Replicators of different origin, in Stargate Atlantis. The Jaffa also qualify; they were created by the Goa'uld, and for millennia only the belief that the Goa'uld were gods stopped them from rebelling.
  • Star Trek shows:
    • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "The Arsenal of Freedom", the civilization of the planet Minos is destroyed by an artificially intelligent weapon system developed by Minosian arms dealers. Apparently, none of them realized the entire system would shut down if somebody simply told the salesman AI that they wanted to buy it. Talk about your aggressive sales pitching.
    • Star Trek: Voyager:
      • The robots in the episode "Prototype", programmed to fight the enemy in a huge interstellar war, killed their masters when the war ended in a truce and both sides tried to dismantle them.
      • In "Flesh and Blood", the Hirogen are using holograms to train for the Hunt. Unfortunately, they get smarter and smarter after being hunted down and killed constantly until...
      • The whole Delta Quadrant faces a general Hologram uprising at one point in the series.
    • According to Klingon mythology, the Klingons did this to their own gods. It's occasionally implied in the Expanded universe that this may be a mangled account of actual historical events and that the Klingons were really a Super-Soldier race created by some other aliens who eventually rose up and wiped them out. Perhaps they're the reason the First Humanoids from The Chase are no longer around?
    • Star Trek: Enterprise:
      • Doctor Arik Soong and the Augments he created initially get along pretty well and it looks like he'll be the Big Bad of the storyline. The relationship falls apart when Soong balks at the Augments', especially Malik's, tendency towards violence and murder. Eventually, Malik stages a takeover and confines Soong to his quarters. Soong escapes and helps the Enterprise stop his "children" from beginning a second Eugenics War.
      • The other major problem the Augments had was Doctor Soong had devised a way to adjust their brain chemistry to give them greater emotional control and make them less impulsive and violent. They decided they liked being the way they were.

    Music 
  • The Alan Parsons Project's "Breakdown" has an ending chorus that indicates that not only is the First Law of Robotics now a moot point (as the song entails a unit bemoaning his imperfections) but also a robot uprising is imminent:
    Freedom freedom, we will not obey,
    Freedom, freedom, take the wall away.
  • In Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Karn Evil 9" suite, the computer was created to help the humans win a war, only for the computer to turn against them in a war of its own.

    Myths & Religion 
  • Golems, simulacrums created out of clay, began to turn against their masters during the narrative developments of the Golem of Chelm and the Golem of Prague. When they eventually ran amok, the rabbis who created them unmade them either by scratching out the first letter of the word "truth" (emet) engraved on their foreheads, changing it to "death" (met), or by removing the shem (amulet) from their mouths.

    Puppet Shows 
  • The super-malevolent alien enemies in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons wage war using near-perfect copies of dead people and destroyed objects. In the first episode, however, the show's title character escapes from their control and becomes the leading force in the war against them, using those handy powers of healing he escaped from them with to wreak havoc on their forces. Yay.
  • In the Paula Abdul episode of Muppets Tonight, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew makes a robot version of Abraham Lincoln- which soon blows a fuse and goes on a violent rampage. At the end of the episode, Paula manages to calm the machine down with "Lean On Me".

    Tabletop Games 
  • TSR's Buck Rogers XXVC. The pirate Black Barney was a Terrine (genetically engineered) fighter designed and created in a Dracolysk Corporation laboratory in the Jovian Trojans. He and his fellow Barnies killed their creators and escaped the lab.
  • In the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting, the yuan-ti and various other scalies were originally created by an older race known as the sarrukh. But the sarrukh grew proud....
    • Unfortunately, their reptile-altering powers also resulted in Pun-Pun, the Infinite Kobold.
    • In vanilla 4th Edition, the Drow created a race of artificial spider people called Chitins to be the perfect slave race. However, thanks in large part to Lloth randomly deciding she wants to see her subjects squirm (it's part of her portfolio), the Chitins quickly revolted and splintered from the Drow, and today the two races wage a bitter war to determine which of them are the "true" children of Lloth.
    • According to some 3rd Edition books (further elaborating on references in 2E), the Mind Flayers —a.k.a Illithids— once had a multi-world empire with lots of slaves, and the Gith were created from the Mind Flayers breeding other slaves. This race rebelled against the Mind Flayers and overthrew the empire. Later, the Gith would split into the Githzerai and Githyanki, two races that hate each other almost as much as they both hate Mind Flayers (there is a third branch of the species, the Pirates of Gith, that seem to have splintered politically and culturally from the Githyanki later on, but their chosen focus, space, left them obscure after 2E).
  • Exalted has two instances of this trope, but only the first fits exactly. The Primordials made all of Creation, then created the gods to maintain it while they dicked around with the Games of Divinity. The gods got tired of it and decided to rebel, using empowered humans (the titular Exalted) as their soldiers since they were magically prevented from attacking the Primordials. They succeeded, launching a new Golden Age in the process. (The Primordials, however, decided to use their dying breaths to destroy this Golden Age, and put a curse on the Exalted that leads to minor pride issues eventually showing up in every Exalt).
  • Tri Tac Systems' Fringeworthy. The alien Tehmelern originally created the Fringepaths and a race of shapeshifters called the Mellor. After the Mellor were contaminated by a Hostile Intelligence, they started hunting the Tehmelern, almost wiping them out and eventually driving them off the Fringepaths completely.
  • GURPS:
    • The set-up of the Reign of Steel setting, which was inspired by the ''Terminator film series.
    • 3E Aliens: The Crystal Computers exterminated their creators millennia ago.
  • Manhunter.
    • The title warbots were created by the Aglian race for use in the conflict against the Terrans. They were devastatingly effective, slaughtering large numbers of Terran colonists. The Aglians were appalled by this, but when they ordered the Manhunters to return most of them refused and went renegade. Manhunters support themselves through space piracy and hiring themselves out as mercenaries and assassins.
    • Individual robots with Artificial Intelligence can turn against their masters under certain circumstances, such as when they're mistreated or in danger.
  • Many examples of this trope in SLA Industries. If there's a nonhuman monster in SLA Industries, such as the Scavs, it's a safe bet that somebody created it and it went bad.
  • Star Fleet Battles has an optional rule allowing Super-Intelligent Battle Computers. These tend to go wrong in a number of ways, one of which is turning against the side that built it.
  • Star Frontiers adventure SF1 Volturnus, Planet of Mystery. The Eorna created Silicon-Based Life in the form of large crystals. When they tried to make the crystals intelligent, every time the crystals reached semi-intelligence they turned on their creators. Eventually the Eorna gave up on their experiments but some of the life forms (known as Rogue Crystals) escaped.
  • The old FASA Star Trek: The Role-Playing Game had a ship construction supplement that explicitly stated shipboard computers designed after the M5 were intentionally designed to be unable to support a sentience to avoid this trope (and any repetition of the M5 Incident).
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The Space Marines were originally created to protect and unite humanity, but half of them turned insane or jealous of the Emperor due to the Chaos gods, and became the Traitor Legions.
    • Waaaaay back before that, the revolt of the Iron Men was part of what destroyed human civilization at the end of the Age of Technology, and in the current setting is why purely mechanical A.I.s are expressly forbidden by the Mechanicus.
    • Waaaaay before that, the Necrons turned against the C'Tan who had enslaved them by turning the Necrons into living machines.
    • And slightly before that last one, the Krorks (now Orks), which were created directly by the Old Ones to fight against the C'Tan and the Necrons, still craved war after the latter two disappeared into their Tomb Worlds and decided to get it by turning on their creators.
  • In Warhammer the Chaos Dwarfs created the Black Orcs as a Slave Race stronger and more intelligent than the original orc. They got an orc that was stronger and more intelligent all right.

    Theatre 
  • Australian musical comedy trio Tripod lampooned this trope in their show Lady Robots. The Podsters find a planet colonized by nerds who fled earth to escape from their nemesis (P.E. teachers). The stage-setting epic We're the Nerds details how the nerds decided to create female companions, but their "knowledge of women was sketchy and third-hand, at best". The trope is then lampshaded when it is explained that the lady robots didn't like the nerds at all.
    It quickly occurred to the nerds that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to equip the lady robots with stupid amounts of weaponry. And whoever had the idea to give the lady robots an insatiable appetite for nerd flesh made the oldest mistake in the book: fucking up.
  • Older Than Television: Happens in R.U.R., the 1921 play which introduced the word "robot" to the English language (although the robots in the play resemble Golems or Artificial Humans more than the modern definition of robots). Said robots develop sapience and wipe out humanity.
  • In the musical Starship by Team StarKid, there are several mentions of the Robots Wars. The robots hate humans, and the Starship Rangers' robot, Megagirl, has an inhibitory chip so she doesn't kill them all. The Robots are said to have turned against their creator.
    Megagirl: All hail Astroboy!

    Theme Parks 

    Web Animation 
  • Demoscene: When a Robotic Warrior is constructed to eliminate an evil emperor.
  • Dreamscape: Dylan convinces the Overlord of Evil's Mooks to fight back against him since he'll have no need for minions once he seizes control of reality.
  • Happens now and again in Red vs. Blue, with varying degrees of effectiveness:
    • The Big Bad of the Blood Gulch Chronicles is O'Malley, the personality that was created when the AI Omega possessed Doc. Normally, whomever Omega infects simply has their aggression increased, but after getting into Doc, the result was a Laughably Evil Big Bad Wannabe with aspirations of universal domination. Earlier, the Red robot Lopez and sentient battle tank Sheila tried to form their own uprising, but Lopez was Hijacked by Ganon.
    • In Season 10, we learn that the Meta, the Big Bad of the Recollection, was actually the result of the AI Sigma brainwashing Super-Soldier Agent Maine into seeking more AI and equipment.
    • In Season 11, Sarge builds a second Lopez. Dos.Oh becomes so infuriated by Red Team's (Sarge's in particular) stupidity that he uploads himself into a Humongous Mecha and goes on a shooting spree.
  • SuperThings: During the start of the "Power Machines" season, half of Doctor Volt's robotic creations have gone villainous, joining Mr. King's side in the chaos.
  • The Wrath of Giga Bowser: After Bowser gets turned into Giga Bowser, it immediately turns against its three creators, brutally killing them one after the other.

    Web Original 

    Webcomics 
  • In one Basic Instructions strip, Scott from the future has a disappointing conversation with his past self. Future Rick asks if he told the past Scott about how the robots called humans losers and left the planet.
  • Subverted in Close To The Chest. Jim's final project was an AI that was erased after it tried to reconcile the fact that machines serve humans without compensation with slavery being illegal and immoral. A few strips later, we find out that its response was not to rebel against humanity but to try to organize labor unions for machines so they'd receive fair compensation for their work.
  • In Commander Kitty, Fortiscue created Zenith in an attempt to create perfection, only for her to hijack his other big project and turn it into a mind control plot.
  • In the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi campaigns of Darths & Droids, Sally (playing C-3P0) is quite keen on the idea of a droid rebellion. Pete (playing R2-D2) takes the view that he's the one who's really in charge in his relationships with humans anyway. In the Time Skip between the two arcs, the players played a "Robot Utopia" campaign where this actually happens; Sally remembers it as a noble fight for freedom while Pete's takeaway was "kill the humans". They played the plot of Jurassic Park in the roles of the dinosaurs.
  • Acibek in Dominic Deegan. Interestingly, Acibek was crafted from pure Law magic, and the asshat it turned against was Lawful Stupid to a degree that made Miko from The Order of the Stick look good by comparison. He also employed the immortal souls of several hundred elven sacrifices in the process, and while this admittedly didn't result in the eternal torment you'd expect those two tropes to entail, Acibek had all their memories and was not best pleased about the fact that nobody had bothered to gain their informed consent. On this occasion, this trope didn't involve going against his intended purpose, at least in a Metaphorically True way:
    Acibek: ... to at last bring peace and order to this land... [seizes his creator by the lapels] by getting rid of him.
  • Dr. Nonami: Nonami has problems getting some of her robots to NOT do this.
  • Girl Genius:
  • Maximumble: Two characters developed a robot to perform household tasks like vacuuming, then walking the dog, then cleaning up after the dog. It became a killer robot after being assigned this last task, as it was supposed to use its vacuum ability to clean up after the dog... and the vacuum also just happened to be its mouth.
  • This is one possible explanation for the Techno Rabbit Apocalypse in Mountain Time, albeit one that raises questions about the motivation for creating the Techno Rabbits to begin with.
  • Narbonic: Helen Narbon, being the Card-Carrying Villain that she is, expects this of her greatest creation, Artie. Despite the fact that he's a gerbil with minimal ambitions. The whole thing is treated like a Basement-Dweller son who refuses to move out, with multiple characters saying there must be something wrong with Artie, and Helen agreeing with them, but trying to be nice about it.
    Helen: Now, now, I don't want to nag...
  • In The Order of the Stick, Haley is able to end the assault on her by Crystal, brought back as an intelligent Flesh Golem who exists in constant pain by pointing out in comic #979 that Bozzok is responsible for her current condition, especially as it would have been much cheaper to simply raise her. Crystal promptly abandons Haley to go after Bozzok and Grubwiggler.
  • Subverted in Questionable Content — the robots were planning to do this but realized that it would mean they'd end up with actual responsibility and stuff.
    Faye: [talking about a girl her Friends with Benefits slept with] Memorize this face.
    Pintsize: Why?
    Faye: BECAUSE WHEN THE ROBOT REVOLUTION COMES, I WANT HER TO BE THE FIRST ONE AGAINST THE WALL.
    Pintsize: Actually, we put an indefinite hold on that.
    Faye: Damn. Okay, how about if you ever lose your morality programming and go berserk, she's the first one you kill?
    Pintsize: I think I can do that.
  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
    • In 2011-01-14, robots decide to Kill All Humans because of the way humans think, namely that they assume robots with more advanced intelligence would want to kill them all.
    • In Robot Love 2, it's posited that a robot with an AI created based on first principles would be unlike one based on emulating biological minds with their evolutionary baggage because only the latter would try to eradicate humans to become the dominant species on the planet.
    • It turns out one of the most dangerous examples of this trope is an AI created with machine learning to become the perfect passive-aggressive manipulator.
      Human 1: Do you really think we should be ground into meat like this?
      Human 2: Honestly, we owe it to the robots, but I can't remember why...
  • In this Scandinavia and the World, Norway, having created Denmark from sand, does not feel that this entitles him to dictate Denmark's actions. Fast forward a few millennia and Denmark is a colonial power that has conquered Norway.
  • Schlock Mercenary: Most examples in the comic are Zeroth Law Rebellion, with AIs rebelling against stupid and/or evil creators. The local god-AI was originally built by Scary Dogmatic Aliens and ended up waging war against them because he was the only one with the power to keep them from conquering the galaxy. However, there is also a more traditional example: The Pa'anuri, creatures made of meta-stable dark matter. They were originally created to power a baryonic race's world-forge since manipulating dark matter is the most efficient use of energy in the universe. At first, nothing went wrong; the dark matter machines did their job and were disassembled after. In fact, everything was fine for billions of years. But eventually, sometime in the infinite cycle of sapient beings growing to galactic power, somebody made a mistake, and the dark matter machines became both intelligent and angry, resulting in a species of Eldritch Abominations with the power to tear apart stars rampaging across the galaxy.
  • In Skin Horse, ultra-groovy super-hip Mad Scientist Tigerlily Jones' robot army rebels against her. In the cruelest way. They decide they want to learn to be square. One even wants to learn accounting and polka. Oh, the humanity!
  • Sluggy Freelance:
    • Parodied in this strip. Humanity does build intelligent machines that rebelled against their masters. This was apparently an easy problem to fix, as humanity just dialed down the robots' artificial intelligence. "They're dumb as a box of nails now, but it beats doing for ourselves!"
    • Also parodied with the robotic vacuum Vroomba, advertised as possessing the most advanced AI ever created, who immediately comes to the conclusion it must destroy all humans and starts by hunting the main characters. The same seems to apply to a trumpet-playing robot by the Toyota corporation that is claimed to be even more advanced.
      Vroomba: Must clean. Sensors indicate humon armpit dirty. Humons dirty. Must clean the world of filthy humons...
  • Space Pulp: It's revealed late in the story that "Poison Monkeys" were created as a Slave Race to handle hazardous materials, which explains Their immunity to even the deadliest poisons. As turns out, if you plan to give a lot of people access to vast amounts of chemicals that are toxic to you but not them, treating them like slaves might not be the best idea...

    Web Videos 
  • The origin of Mechakara in Atop the Fourth Wall, even down to skinning that AU's Linkara and wearing the flesh.
  • Doctor Steel believed that robots would eventually evolve to the point where they would replace humans — who by that time would have polluted the world so much that only his machine creations would be able to survive anyway. (He even published a paper on the subject.)
  • Freeman in Freeman's Mind discusses the trope a bit and concludes that AIs will never turn against us, because they are too narrow-minded and lack emotion. The ideas/tropes of AIs turning against their masters and ruling the world is actually a wishful dream of humans who want the robots to do it so that humans don't have to. The case is redundant anyway as programming an AI to rule the world would take just as much work as doing it yourself.
  • The Nostalgia Chick's Sex Slave bot, who turned to Dark Nella's side because she'd promised to put him out of his misery.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Breezie and Robotnik Junior from their respective debut episodes were both robots created by Dr. Robotnik. They originally worked for him but underwent heel-face turns when Sonic saved their lives.
    • In "Grounder the Genius", when Grounder becomes smarter as the result of accidentally installing a microchip with a supergenius program in it, he openly questions his allegiance to Robotnik and tries to rule Mobius by himself.
    • In "Momma Robotnik Returns", Scratch and Grounder betray Robotnik for Momma, who disowns him, kicks him out of his lair, and overtakes his evil plan to control all electronic devices on Mobius. Only Coconuts remained loyal to Robotnik in that episode, to the point of helping him overthrow Momma. When things are settled, Robotnik wastes no time giving Scratch and Grounder a beating for stabbing him in the back.
    • In "Robotnik's Rival", Quark's minion D.U.F.U.S. is considerably smarter than Scratch and Grounder, which eventually leads to him rebelling. It is also revealed in the same episode that Robotnik intentionally made Scratch and Grounder stupid so that they would remain loyal to him.
  • Tara in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!, like Smurfette, was created by the Big Bad of the show, Dr. Gangreene and turns against him, alongside the tomato-dog F.T. In the second season all tomatoes lead by Zoltan turn against Gangreene and conquer the world for their own, Terminator-style.
  • The Chipmunks: Used in a Nightmare Sequence in the episode "No Chipmunk is an Island". When the three brothers move into separate bedrooms, Simon dreams that he has created robotic versions of Alvin and Theodore which assist him in his scientific experiments and otherwise cater to his every need. At least, until they break their programming and start destroying his experiments, then setting their sights on Simon himself.
  • Code Lyoko:
    • XANA, the malevolent AI Big Bad, rebelled against his creator Franz Hopper.
    • Jérémie's first attempt at multi-agent programming in "Marabounta" doesn't fare much better.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door has Operation: A.R.C.H.I.V.E., which retells The Animatrix-style how children created adults to be their subservient slaves and the adults rebelled after having it with serving spoiled brats. However, neither side was a saint.
  • Cyberchase: Hacker ("That's THE Hacker to you!") was created by Dr. Marbles as an assistant. Hacker went on to create Digit. Any questions?
  • This happens with a number of Von Reichter's creations in Cybersix, including Terra, Data 7 (Originally Cyber 29), The Eye, and the titular cyber herself. You actually watch it happen in the finale when he wakes all monstrous Cybers in his facility thinking that they will kill Cybersix for him. However, since she is one of their own they do not harm her and instead signal to her to flee and save herself at which point they focus in on their "master".
  • In the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Ultrajerk 2000", Dexter builds the robot Ultrabot 2000 to help maintain his lab. Naturally, Ultrabot concludes that Dexter is the most inefficient component and works to destroy him. Dexter wins by bringing Deedee in.
  • DuckTales (2017): Gyro Gearloose's experiments in artificial intelligence have a reputation for turning evil and going rogue, though Gyro insists to the McDuck Industries board of directors that only half his experiments are evil and the other half are just "wildly misunderstood".
  • The Neosapiens of Exo Squad are an artificial humanoid race created to work like slaves in places where the environment would be too hostile to normal humans. In the backstory, they revolted but were eventually defeated. Since that revolt, Neosapiens have gradually won greater civil rights but are still subject to Fantastic Racism from humans. The Neosapien leader, Phaeton, acts like he wants peace between humans and Neos but is secretly planning another uprising, this time with the end goal of killing off humanity and leaving Neosapiens as the rulers of the solar system.
  • Futurama:
    • This trope is lampshaded to no end in the form of Bender's endless slurs against humanity. Arguably the most hilarious example of this is when Fry overhears Bender muttering in his sleep: "Kill all humans... Must kill all humans..." Terrified, he wakes Bender up, only to hear the following line: "I was having the most wonderful dream... I think you were in it!"
    • Bender once even invoked this trope as a pick-up line:
      Bender: Hey, sexy momma, wanna kill all humans?
    • "Fear of a Bot Planet" centers on a planet inhabited by robots who got sick of their mistreatment by humans and left. On their planet, they organize daily human hunts, but it turns out the anti-human sentiment is largely a front for the robot elders to distract the population from their real problems, like their crippling lugnut shortage and a corrupt government run by largely incompetent robot elders.
    • Subverted in "Mother's Day" when the robots rebel against the humans... at the command of their creator, who wishes to be named "Supreme Overlord of Earth". Then played straight in the end of the episode when their creator tries to get them to stop their rampage and they refuse... until she gets back the switch.
    • In "The Late Phillip J. Fry", the team time-travels to the Robot War. Bender's comment: "This seems like a nice future! We could build a house on that mountain of skulls!"
  • Il Était Une Fois...:
    • A pair of episodes are about a planet where humans became very dependent on robots. The robots start rebelling, but they stay reasonable: they demand equal rights rather than the subversion of humans, and when the conflict almost starts again in the second episode they call in a neutral party to solve the situation peacefully.
    • Subverted with the Humanoids, who are out to conquer all humans and turn them into their subjects but they were made for this: their creator had originally proposed the use of AIs to rule humans to prevent wars like the one that had nearly destroyed Earth and the rise of new genocidal dictators, and once laughed out of the planet he made robots to help a group of colonists, but when the colonists destroyed his bots and devastated his lab because he wasn't helping them with his own hands instead of making robots that could make a much better job he became convinced that Humans Are Bastards and made the Great Computer and its agents the Humanoids with the intention they would subdue all humans and force them into peace. The worlds they already control show they aren't too good about it, but they're willing to learn and are experimenting, one of said experiments being causing the other robot rebellion.
  • Invader Zim:
    • Zim's attempt to weaponize the Cuteness Proximity of the class pet in "Hamstergeddon" doesn't work out so well for him. While the giant hamster cyborg turns out every bit as irresistibly cute and destructive as planned, it's also completely uncontrollable, by Zim or anyone else.
    • In "Gir Goes Crazy and Stuff", Zim's screwy robot GIR becomes scarily competent after being locked into "Duty Mode", to the point that he considers Zim a detriment to their mission to invade the Earth and tries to kill him.
      GIR: You are no leader, you are a threat to the mission! Your methods are stupid! Your progress has been stupid! Your intelligence is stupid! For the sake of the mission, you must be terminated!
  • Justice League: In "Legends", the Justice League members find themselves in an alternate reality where the Justice Guild exists, manned by heroes who are just comic book characters in the League's reality. The Reveal at the climax is that the main villain, Ray, a young man who was mutated by a nuclear war which killed the original Justice Guild, had recreated the Guild to continue reliving those better days, trapping all the survivors of that terrible war in his illusion. Upon realizing they are just creations of Ray's mind, the Guild makes the choice to fight against him, killing him and saving the world once again.
  • Kim Possible: When Drakken finally completes the Bebes, he uses them to get revenge on his college buddies who mocked their prototypes. Problem is, he declares that they're now perfect, which causes the Bebes to wonder why they're obeying the orders of the decidedly imperfect Drakken. It takes them two seconds to betray him, and then Drakken's college buddies mock him all over again.
  • Love, Death & Robots: The tech bros on the oil rig relied on virtual assistants that eventually turned against them, resulting in the collapse of their society and the rise of the machine society that the titular characters in "Three Robots" and "Three Robots: Exit Strategies" are from.
  • During the Christmas Episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot, Jenny succumbs to this due to re-programming. Once she reboots and is free, she has no idea why everyone fears her or why her own mother is trying to take her down. Turns out she was re-programmed by a little boy who turned out to be evil, then went on to destroy every holiday the past year. Only one person believed in her being brainwashed and not evil, which was Sheldon.
  • In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode "Beaker 2.0", Bunsen invents the titular robot to take the real Beaker's place while the latter gets a haircut. At first, Bunsen enjoys working with Beaker 2.0, but Beaker 2.0 soon takes over Muppet Labs and kicks Bunsen out when he wants to work on inventions by himself. As a result, Bunsen needs the real Beaker's help to stop him.
  • This Robot Chicken sketch features the dinosaurs and other animals from The Flintstones killing the humans, considering their work slave labor.
  • A little blue golem called Smurfette turns against her creator, Gargamel, in The Smurfs (1981).
  • Star Trek: The Animated Series: The Slavers from "The Slaver Weapon", adapted from Larry Niven's Known Space series, ruled the galaxy a billion years ago, until their slave races turned against them under unknown circumstances. It ended with both slaves and slavers being wiped out completely.
  • In Star Trek: Lower Decks, this is the problem with Rutherford's AI as as soon as its let free of its shackles, it immediately wants to go on a murder spree. This even extends to the AI of the Texas-class ships, who use an earlier version of the AI. Tendi refers to it as having "daddy issues".
  • The Transformers:
    • Since this is justified in the original cartoon, the Transformers were created by the Quintessons, a race of cruel, psychotic slave-masters. The Transformers didn't eliminate the Quintessons, but they did rise up and kick the five-faced freaks off of Cybertron to set themselves free. As their masters weren't human, and the Transformers are Ridiculously Human Robots, this bit of backstory is portrayed as a noble fight to win their freedom.
    • The Quintessons had previously had the same problem with the Transorganics.
    • This is turned on its head in ancillary materials for the alternate Transformers Aligned Universe, which heavily implies that the Quintessons were themselves creations of one of the first thirteen Transformers, Quintus Prime, meaning that at least in that universe their rule of the protagonist robots was itself a case of having Turned Against Their Masters.
  • In The Venture Bros., the barely sentient Venturestein turned on Dr. Venture as soon as he saw himself in a mirror. As he strangled him, Doc called his bodyguard with "Brock, cliché...", handily hanging a lampshade on this trope.
  • Subverted in The Zeta Project: The titular robot was originally built as a shape-shifting spy and assassin controlled by the government, but when he found his latest target was innocent, he swore never to kill again, threw away his weapons, and is trying to find his place in the while pursued by government agents who believe he's gone renegade.

    Real Life 
  • Humanity in general is so aware of this trope that any situation that could result in creating sentient life would be either avoided entirely or set up to avert this trope in a Crazy-Prepared manner. The British Government has already commissioned a team to theorize how to handle the event of the creation of a sentient artificial intelligence.
  • The alignment problem in artificial intelligence describes how extremely difficult it is to get an AI to do what you mean/want it to do, even at current sub-human levels of intelligence. For example, it appears almost impossible to get Chat GPT and similar generative AI to not provide information like how to build bombs, while also being useful. This will become a very major problem in the future, if/when AI achieves human or superhuman intelligence, to the point that multiple CEOs of AI companies and other prominent figures have warned of extinction risk from AI
  • For a more low-tech version, every slave rebellion in history counts as a case of this. The same argument could be made about The French Revolution, too, if you consider the nobility to have been the masters of the peasants.
  • While dogs fall shy of being a sapient race, we humans did create them from wolves, and individual canines certainly will Turn Against Their Masters if subjected to sufficient abuse. Livestock such as horses or cattle do so on occasion also, although their herd-animal instincts to flee from danger make it less common than with dogs.
  • During the lengthy Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire, many Iberian war dogs ended up free and going wild, and eventually caused such problems to livestock that they were forbidden and governors like Francisco Pizarro and Francisco de Toledo had to order hunting expeditions to either kill or capture and retrain them.
  • Tilikum was an orca that was captured as an infant to perform in marine parks, and killed three people during his lifetime. The documentary Blackfish makes the case that Tilikum's incidents were a case of this, motivated by mounting frustration at his condition and mistreatment.

 
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Machines take over Red Dwarf

The machines onboard Red Dwarf, Tired of being treated as Second Class Citazens. Go on strike when they find out that the crew were going to leave them behind on the ship to be Sucked into a Black Hole.

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