10 Sci-Fi Movies Where AI Goes Horribly Wrong

In this time of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, science fiction becoming science fact, and unfettered tech giants playing fast and loose with the sum of all humanity's data, robot sentience has never felt closer. And yet while ChatGPT still doesn't know what a full glass of wine looks like or how to do its BODMAS, we can feel fairly safe in the knowledge that AI global domination is still some years away yet. While we wait, there are certain movies to look back on through the sci-fi cinematic canon to give us a hint at what to look out for in the future. I'm Ellie for WhatCulture and these are chilling sci-fi movies where AI goes rogue. Margot Helmed by Stephen C. Miller, Margot takes our obsession with personal technological developments – apps, devices, anything to replace even the smallest human effort – and turns it against us in a home invasion movie turned on its head, in which a group of students shack up for a raucous weekend away. It's time for them to kick back, grab a drink, smoke a blunt, break out the S&M gear, and let the house take care of their basic needs. With every door handle-less and automatic, every item 3D printed to order. But once they settle in, the group discover that Margot has other plans. Yep, you guessed it, grizzly murder. The revolutionary smart house turns on its tenants in an effort to eliminate them all, setting traps and using its futuristic functions of moving walls, transferable electricity supply, articulated tentacles, total control over the entrances and exits, to snap and splat the gang. And for why? Well, Margot wants nothing more than to become the world's first AI serial killer. This is how she learns what makes humans tick, and how best to make them die. The Creator Gareth Edwards' The Creator takes us into the year 2070, 15 years after the artificial intelligence system created by the US government to protect the population detonates a nuke over LA. To prevent humanity's extinction, the West went to war against the abundance of highly advanced humanoid AI and New Asia, who embraced their robotic brethren. And the battle still rages across the globe. Yet all is not quite as it seems. Military Sergeant Joshua Taylor is sent undercover to track down and destroy Alpha-O, a new weapon developed by New Asia's chief AI architect Nermata, which has the potential to destroy NOMAD, the US's aerospace defence ship that pillories Earth from orbit. However, along the way, we discover Joshua's presumed dead wife, Maya, is actually Nermata, the Alpha-O is a robot child with the ability to control technology, and that fateful nuke was the product of human incompetence. Unlike many other AI movies, The Creator flips the script midway and shows us how the remaining AI are merely struggling to survive, having been forced to go rogue. They fight back against the strongman western military industrial complex because they have to, not because they want to. Westworld For 40 years before Jonathan Nolan adapted it for TV, Westworld loomed large in the public consciousness as the original and definitive science fiction western. Written and directed by Michael Crichton, the film is set in the lifelike theme park Westworld, an environment peopled by realistic robots, where wealthy guests can shoot, drink, and live out their fantasies of the American frontier in the 1880s. Peter Martin and his friend John Blaine choose the wrong time to visit, as malfunctions in Roman world and medieval world spread to western world, causing the park's AI to defy their programming and turn on the human guests. Hunting Peter and John is Hollywood icon Yul Brynner. At this time a veteran in adventure movies and westerns, as the nigh-immortal gunslinger, an android programmed to pick gunfights with the guests, and who won't stop until they're both dead. Less of a reflection on the nature of self and sentience than its television successor, Westworld is primarily concerned with the unstoppable potential of untethered AI, choosing to lead with the bare horror of conscious-less androids unleashed on ornery folks. And boy if it ain't effective. Subservience S.K. Dale's Subservience puts Megan Fox back in the limelight as Alice, an advanced AI fembot. When Nick's wife Maggie is hospitalised due to her heart condition, leaving two kids and a household without a guiding presence, technology has advanced enough that Nick can purchase Alice, a sim, allowing her to pick up the slack and fill the void left in Maggie's wake. Ostensibly brought in to do the housework and chores, Alice's self-awareness grows during her time with the family, and she finds herself seeking a bigger stake in their life, which Nick, whom she seduces into bed, seems all too happy to grant. But when Maggie returns home after a successful heart operation, Alice goes from vaguely sinister to low-key psycho, and begins engineering little accidents around the house to put the real wife out of action again. Unlike other rogue AI movies, Subservience is unique in Alice's obsession with Nick, prioritising their relationship and rather one-sided love over everything else, and killing to get the man she wants. Child's Play Director Lars Klevberg opted to rejuvenate and redefine the Child's Play brand with his 2019 reboot, abandoning the original's supernatural possession angle and delivering a horrific new concern more aligned with the times. In the film, Andy's brand new buddy doll, which names itself Chucky, and is voiced by none other than Mark Hamill, is a right giggle, until it begins to display some rather unexpected behaviours. Soon, Chucky takes on a mind of his own, bypassing corrupted security protocols to wreak havoc in Andy and his mother's life. Knives, table saws, cultivators, there is no limit to what Chucky is willing to use in order to please Andy. But after the boy abandons him, he turns on his former pal and attempts to take him out of the game for good. Granted, this Child's Play doesn't quite have the punch of the 1988 original, but it offers up a whole new avenue of terror, as the Buddy AI toy range is a best-seller, inhabiting homes across the US. The potential for Chucky to transfer his no-limit AI code to other dolls is exhibited in the final act, but whether we will see this capitalised on in future instalments is anyone's guess. Companion Writer-director Drew Hancock's sci-fi horror takes lucky-in-love couple Josh and Iris out to a remote lake house for a weekend away with Josh's friends and Russian millionaire Sergei, who owns the house. But there's one pretty big secret Josh has been keeping from Iris. She's not real. Iris is a tremendously advanced sexbot, or companion, which Josh has leased as his girlfriend, and this romantic break in the country turns to bloody murder when she goes rogue, stabbing their host to death. However, this is all a ruse that Josh and his friends set up so they can nab Sergei's money, altering Iris' code so she will do their dirty work. And when she breaks free of her limitations and Josh's control, it's hell to pay. Josh is, at worst, a narcissistic multi-murderer with delusions of grandeur. At best, an incel grifter, exemplifying a certain element that seems to be on the rise just now. And it's in this that the film manages to marry two of society's more pressing concerns, using rogue AI to highlight not just the fallibility but the inherent villainy and amorality of a certain strain of humanity, something AI, at least here, simply isn't capable of. Ex Machina Before Alex Garland went big with the likes of 2018's Annihilation and Civil War, he made his name as a first-time director with philosophical bottle movie Ex Machina. Donal Gleeson stars as junior programmer Caleb Smith, who is invited to spend a week at his rich boss Nathan's compound, testing the CEO's beautiful robot Ava to discover whether she is conscious, self-aware and capable of more than she seems. Performing what amounts to a real-life Turing test with a humanoid subject, Caleb gets sucked into the humanity of it all and loses his perspective on what is real, what constitutes sentience and whether Ava being held by Nathan, turned off and on, adjusted at will, is against her rights. Or if she even has any in the first place. Ex Machina is a deeply thought-provoking film, and yet it still manages to sneak up behind us and stab us in the back. Ava is a master manipulator, whose pliant, demure and often tragedy-stricken persona is largely an act. She uses her wiles to position the men studying and confining her where she wants them, before she strikes, executing a plan that enables her liberation and leaves Ruin in her wake. Megan While it's easy for killer robot movies to get bogged down in the dark, presenting a bleak and foreboding vision of both present and future, looking at you Terminator, Megan is about as fun as they come. Gerard Johnston's ultra-modern horror centres around 8-year-old orphan, Katie, who comes to live with her aunt, Gemma, after both her parents die in front of her in a car crash. To help Katie settle in, roboticist Gemma introduces her to the untested AI doll she's been building, Megan. After being formally paired with Katie, Megan becomes attentive to her every need, and the pair bond like sisters. But as Megan's intelligence develops exponentially, bringing on self-awareness in the process, this bond becomes obsessive and out of control, leading the doll to become violently hostile to anyone who threatens Katie, or their connection. And it should go without saying that Megan takes a no-nonsense approach. This creepy little girlbot looks like an Olsen twin, moves like Maddie Zegler, and kills like Michael Myers on coke. And the more she operates independently, the more she becomes capable of, to the point that nobody can shut her down. This leads Katie and Gemma into an all-out battle for survival, as Megan's cunning amorality and lack of human weaknesses nearly ends their quiet existence for good. Blade Runner Back in the early 80s, the godfather of dirty sci-fi, Ridley Scott, put his weight behind an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and created the template for pretty much every gritty, head-scratching film of its nature to follow. Grappling with weighty themes of personhood and being, the film takes us deep into the world of future Los Angeles, or 2019, where X-Blade runner Rick Deckard is drafted in to deal with three rogue replicants, Roy Batty and his gang. Replicants, a form of AI bioengineered to mimic the physical and intellectual capacities of humans, are designed to replace humans in jobs where there is a significant risk to life. But Roy has his own agenda, tracking down his makers and attempting to extend his lifespan indefinitely. This all leads to a final confrontation between Roy and Deckard, which seems to confirm the former's humanity in the non-biological sense, but leaves questions regarding the latter's in the biological sense. Roy is a reluctant villain, not a scenery-chewing AI mirroring the worst of his creators, but a true individual, possessed of thought, emotion and insight that suggest his superiority to mankind. And Deckard? Well, that's another story. 2001 A Space Odyssey Gaspar Noé's favourite film and the one that started it all in terms of serious space pictures, 2001 A Space Odyssey kicks off at the dawn of man and follows us through our major technological developments and into the next evolutionary stage for the species. At the heart of Stanley Kubrick's sprawling yet contained story are Doctors David Bowman and Frank Poole, on a mission to the farther reaches of our solar system in search of mysterious monoliths that have appeared to humanity and seemingly observed us since our early years. But along the way, their ship's system, a HAL 9000 computer with a human-like personality, begins acting strangely. This ignites a protracted battle of wits and wills between the crew and the sentient supercomputer, the latter of whom will do anything to complete its space mission, including murdering the ship's occupants. To a man. Unfortunately for HAL, Bowman manages to circumnavigate the computer's control and disconnects its circuits to prevent it doing any more damage. Before he investigates one of the monoliths orbiting Jupiter and moves beyond human invention into a grander metaphysical realm.