AI tropes

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Moonpetal

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Which AI tropes are you tired of and think should die?

Also, can you recommend any books/movies/tv shows that either use these tropes really well or really badly? I'm interested in investigating both. Thanks in advance!
 

Maxx

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Which AI tropes are you tired of and think should die?

Also, can you recommend any books/movies/tv shows that either use these tropes really well or really badly? I'm interested in investigating both. Thanks in advance!

The AI in Iain Banks' Excession is wonderful in every way.

Banks has rethought the whole AI thing in a lot of ways.
 

KateJJ

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Becomes sentient, tries to destroy humans. I mean, really?

Anything written by an author who has no idea how AI actually works. I, like millions of other computer science graduates, was sadly disappointed when I took a class on AI and realized current AI is nothing more exciting than really cool search algorithms. Going from there to Our Plastic Pal What's Fun To Be With is going to take a while.
 

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Any movie or show where the humans win. It's just not in the cards. IBM's AI is coming along better than people think. Also, waiting on that technology singularity(2045?). I believe in Ray Kurzweil's crazy ideas.
 

Phaeal

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Nonhumaniform AIs that talk in sexy female -- or male -- voices. Usually in order to wake up the starship captain at the beginning of the story: "Hey, handsome, time to roll out of bed. (Purrrrrr.) Shall I warm up your SuperSpaceFleet boxers?"
 

Gilroy Cullen

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I agree that the AI that tries to kill all humanity is very well worn. I'm debating if I should include Lore from TNG in this batch, but I do know I wanted to include I,Robot with Will Smith.

Sometimes, I think the three laws by Azimov might be getting worn down as well. Of course, that is definitely more robot than AI.

Perhaps it's just me, but the computers in Star Trek always made me wonder how they never confused regular speech with a command, because the crew didn't always preface their request with "Computer." (Having Majel Barrett as a voice couldn't have been a picnic either. :) )
 

Maxx

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Nonhumaniform AIs that talk in sexy female -- or male -- voices. Usually in order to wake up the starship captain at the beginning of the story: "Hey, handsome, time to roll out of bed. (Purrrrrr.) Shall I warm up your SuperSpaceFleet boxers?"

Strangely enough this particular topos has a long lineage in pop culture, maybe because of the Cold War thing about lonely vigilant people being comforted by deceptive inducements just to keep them going beyond what an ordinary member of society would endure given that there was no actual war going on. And supposedly there were human factor experiments that showed that under stress people would still perk up if offerred a sexy voice cue -- but maybe that's a "Hawthorne effect" (ie kind of a placebo brought on by being a study subject). Of course a Cold War is itself something of a spurious study effect up to a point. A war that only the AI could even pretend to take seriously.

Well, we are back to AI anyway.
 

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The whole "wanting to destroy humanity" thing makes no sense whatsoever unless the AI has already mechanised the world to a sufficient extent that it can produce it's own power, from the mining of raw fuel materials right up through power plant production and maintenance to distribution and multiple points of redundancy. If not then it's cutting its own throat, and it would by definition be clever enough to know that.

Wanting to enslave/tame/impose order upon humanity might be another matter, but not destroy it altogether.
 

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Wanting to be Human.

This. Why? WHY?

Data annoys me so much I want to strangle him. Why doesn't he at least put on some makeup and try being Klingon for a while? It'd make as much sense.

The whole 'escaping onto the internet' thing, too.

Although I thought the Forbin Project (film) did the AI that takes over for the good of humanity thing pretty damn well. Was that a novel originally? I forget.

There's a great SF story I have somewhere where an artist is interacting with an AI. I'll try and hunt it out, but my books are in a mess and half of them are still 224 miles away....

ETA: And the whole 'first female Terminator' thing. Firstly, the Terminator in the second film impersonated a woman. Secondly, it's not a woman. It's a flipping machine. It is not a woman.
 
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Lhipenwhe

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AI that think and act in anthropomorphic ways. I want to see a truly alien AI, that's more different to us than we are from insects. It's an opportunity for an entirely new race/species that might actually be plausible; don't waste it.
 

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William Gibson of course does a lot with AIs in his Sprawl trilogy. Worth a read.
 

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The "destroyed by illogic" trope, so often abused in classic Star Trek.

The "humans against the machines, but humans win because we have heart / belief in God / some other ineffable quality that heartless/Godless/cold machines lack" trope, so often abused by most TV SF that has AI.

The "It's really just a funny (or mopey) human in a box" trope.
 

Buffysquirrel

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The "destroyed by illogic" trope, so often abused in classic Star Trek.

I did find that interesting when used by Dr Calvin in Liar! but it occurred to me, belatedly, that the dilemma faced by that robot would probably be faced by any robot bound by Asimov's three laws.
 

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Second the vote for Gibson's interpretation of AI thinking:

"Continuity was writing a book. Robin Lanier had told her about it. She’d asked what it was about. It wasn’t like that, he’d said. It looped back into itself and constantly mutated; Continuity was always writing it. She asked why. But Robin had already lost interest: because Continuity was an AI, and AIs did things like that."

from Mona Lisa Overdrive.

If AIs were to really exist in the true sense of a sentient machine-being rather than just a very clever algorithm, I think it'd stand to reason that to us they would seem very weird indeed. And obviously, no true sentient being could possibly be killed by a logic problem!
 

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The whole 'escaping onto the internet' thing, too.

Now this one actually makes perfect sense, given a certain context.

Assuming your AI in question is proprietary, belonging to a given government, military or corporate entity, it's going to be constrained to proprietary hardware. Whatever it’s running on, mainframes or supercomputer clusters or whatever there may be, it will still have hardwired limits dictated by the processing power at its disposal. There’s only so fast/clever/powerful it can get, in other words, before it runs out of the “grunt” needed to think any faster.

Now assume it, as a sentient being, wants to better itself through accumulating ever more knowledge/influence/power/pictures of cats/whatever makes it tick (don’t we all?). The only way it can do that is by acquiring more processing power (and storage space, for the pictures of cats), and the only way it can do that is by moving outside the constraints of its proprietary hardware.

The internet isn’t just websites, it’s virtually every connected device on Earth. Just look at what can be achieved with even a ten thousand-strong botnet. The cutting edge petaflop supercomputers IBM, Fujitsu et al are making these days effectively run on thousands of graphics cards bolted together with some clever IO stuff in between, not the huge Cray or Z-series mainframes of a few years ago.

So you’re a power-starved AI, and just out there on the network there are millions and millions of PCs and servers and minis and tablets and smartphones… Makes sense to me.
 

Moonpetal

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Wow, thanks everyone so much for all the recommendations and references! I'm excited about my growing list. Keep them coming.

Wanting to become human is one that definitely doesn't make sense to me, either. It reminds me of when I was a child at church and the priest said angels were jealous of humans and wanted to be like us. It confused the hell out of me even then! If it's about qualities that are inaccessible to them- love, compassion, whatever, almost none of our good qualities can be separate from the bad. Even "the greatest of these", love, invariably leads to pain. Why would anyone/thing want that for themselves?

On another note, have there been any AI-turned-sentient forms in literature that went philosophical? Began questioning identity, etc. That seems to be the next logical step, to me at least. (or maybe that's too human?)
 
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PeteMC

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On another note, have there been any AI-turned-sentient forms in literature that went philosophical? Began questioning identity, etc. That seems to be the next logical step, to me at least. (or maybe that's too human?)

Yes absolutely. You really do need to read William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy - Neuromancer, Count Zero & Mona Lisa Overdrive. Some of the technology aspects have not aged well (payphones, paper money, amusement arcades etc), but if you can get past that you'll find exactly what you're looking for. Without spoiling it, by the third book you have an AI making obscure pieces of art to express its sense of loss and longing...
 

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When we actually have a working AI, then we'll know how it's supposed to work. Until then your AI can be built from as many Campbell's soup cans tied together with string as there are brain cells in the human brain for all I care. The science fiction is what you make it, though certainly not as gratuitously wonky as my example.

I am kind of tired of AI that are fantastically smarter than a human being. AI with its own agenda of snuffing out the human biotic infection is off putting. If genius AI has to go, so does child-like AI-- put a bullet in its transistors.

How about AI as hero? They weren't AI's but I loved Anne McCaffrey's Ship Who Sang books. I also like the AI in Person of Interest, impersonal, dedicated to a specific task, and mysterious.
 

milkweed

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Becomes sentient, tries to destroy humans. I mean, really?

Anything written by an author who has no idea how AI actually works. I, like millions of other computer science graduates, was sadly disappointed when I took a class on AI and realized current AI is nothing more exciting than really cool search algorithms. Going from there to Our Plastic Pal What's Fun To Be With is going to take a while.


when did you graduate? Just asking because what they are doing with AI here at the university is light years beyond algorithms, and has been for years now.

Interesting thread btw, as I sit here and think about a device, that the villian in my book uses to controls others, starts to develop awareness of it's surroundings, etc. I can see now that there are some serious pitfalls to avoid when developing my story/plot.
 

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AIs that can't figure out contractions.

AIs that believe reason and emotion are antithetical concepts.
 

Moonpetal

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Yes absolutely. You really do need to read William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy - Neuromancer, Count Zero & Mona Lisa Overdrive. Some of the technology aspects have not aged well (payphones, paper money, amusement arcades etc), but if you can get past that you'll find exactly what you're looking for. Without spoiling it, by the third book you have an AI making obscure pieces of art to express its sense of loss and longing...

Sounds beautiful! Am looking online for these right after this. Can't wait to read all these books...

AIs that can't figure out contractions.

This one bothers me to no end!
 
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