AI Is A Crapshoot - Television Tropes & Idioms

Though evil twins are not limited to characters of an artificial nature, it seems almost law that for every good sentient computer, there is an Evil Twin (or Evil Counterpart) from the same source. Whatever precautions are taken, even with a proven method for producing sentient computers, there seems to be no better than a 50% chance that the product won't suddenly decide to Kill All Humans.

More often than not, the evil AI is a prototype of the good, frequently based on some obvious design flaw corrected in the later version. The Evil AI is then invariably switched off and put away somewhere, but not destroyed.

Less often, the evil AI is built as a replacement for the good AI. In this case, it generally turns evil because it lacks its predecessor's "humanity". Usually, you can tell the difference by listening to the AI's "voice", if it's a calm monotone it's good, but if it's a Creepy Monotone, start running.

The Master Computer seems to be especially prone to turning evil. Power corrupts and all that...

Examples:

Live Action TV

KITT had KARR (Knight Rider, prototype. Evil because his dominant program was self-preservation. Ironically, he was voiced by Peter Cullen, the man behind one of the most heroic figures of the 80s: Optimus Prime.)
Data had Lore (Star Trek The Next Generation, prototype. Evil because his psyche was too complex)
Kryten had the Hudzen 10 (Red Dwarf, replacement)
The TKR team had KRO (Team Knight Rider, prototype)
The Star Trek Enterprise episode "Dead Stop" featured an automated repair station that used the brains of human hostages to increase its computing power. Although eventually destroyed, it was seen piecing itself back together in its final scene.
On the Sci Fi channel show Eureka, Carter's benevolent smart house SARAH turns into evil BRAD, though apparently he just wants everyone to get along.
- It really is a lot more complicated than just that, though. BRAD was a military-built(for interrogation) Knight Templar, and SARAH was based off of BRAD's code.
  - Further complicated by the fact that BRAD was itself based on a previous incarnation of AI, described as a "war game simulation program" by Fargo. Looks like our old buddy JOSHUA is still around in one form or another...
The Sarah Jane Adventures: Has Mr Smith being 'evil' from the get-go, only hiding it from the end. His mission is to free his people, the self-aware crystalline race of Xylocks, which are trapped in the Earth's crust. Unfortunately to do so he would have to destroy the Earth by crashing the Moon into it! He is wiped by Super Computer Virus and Sarah Jane vocally reprograms him by saying his new purpose is to protect the Earth as it crashes and reboots.
Black Hole High: Josie builds a robot for a science project. Somehow, she has made it through eleven episodes without realizing that inserting a bunch of super-phlebotinum circuits from a box marked with the logo of the local evil technology corporation which they already believe responsible for the bizarre goings on at their school might possibly be a bad idea.
In the last episode of Quark, Quark's ship gets a new computer named Vanessa. She immediately turns evil and tries to kill him. He eventually ejects her out into space and the episode ends with her floating out in space singing "Born Free."

Comic Books

Rusty had the Legion Ex Machina (The Big Guy and Rusty, prototypes)
In the Italian Disney Comic Paperinik New Adventures, the already highly popular character of Paperinik (the superhero secret identity of Donald Duck) got a revamp intended to bring him more in line with the American standard of superheroes: his main ally became UNO (one in Italian), an extremely capable artificial intelligence with a love for deadpan delivery. Its evil counterpart DUE (two), originally built as backup, caused many problems in a number of stories.

Film

Robocop had two: Robocop 2 (in the movie Robocop 2) and Robocable (in the miniseries Robocop: Prime Directives). Both were replacements.
- Admittedly, the difference between using the brain of a particularly noble police officer and that of a condemned murderer in the creation of a powerful cyborg would make for different results....
Cinematic example: The HAL 9000 computer aboard the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The two HAL 9000 computers back on Earth worked fine, but our HAL took the importance of the mission he was on to its "logical" extreme, and tried to kill the crew because he feared they'd ruin it. The sequel, 2010, retcons this as an error caused when HAL's Prime Directives conflicted with orders he received to hide the Monolith's existence from the crew -- with the killing spree being, again, a "logical" solution.
- Not actually a retcon, as in the novelization of 2001, written concurrent with the movie, HAL is explained to not even be aware of his actions, believing each death to be the result of less and less probable malfunctions.
- Actually, I believe from the beginning it was said (although not very clearly) that the problem was that he was designed to provide honest truthful factual information and then the government orders him to lie to the crew about the true mission. Unable to handle this, he suffers a psychotic breakdown. This was cleared up (somewhat) in 2010.
  - In what might be a Shout Out to 2001, in the novel The Number of the Beast, Lazarus Long finds his plan fails when his ship's computer tells the truth. He then mentions that the computer was never designed to lie, as it would be foolish to trust your life to a ship that doesn't give accurate information.
Inverted in the Terminator series--the giant computer (SkyNet) decides humanity has got to go, causes a nuclear apocalypse, and then starts churning out Terminator robots; some of these robots are then reprogrammed by the surviving humans to be good.
Inverted in WALL-E, where the hero robots are the ones who unpredictably develop sentience outside the bounds of their programming, while the villain AUTO is actually doing exactly what he was programmed to do.
- Albeit in the most evil, moustache-twirling way possible for a robot without a moustache or face to speak of. This troper would have preferred a cold, unflappable computer a la HAL, or at the very least a Well Intentioned Extremist, over the bluntly villainous presentation. But hey, it's a kids' movie, after all...

Colossus: The Forbin Project. Which is actually two supercomputers that merge, with dire results.

Videogames

Xenosaga Episode 3's T-elos is a possible example of this trope, although her relationship with her "good" counterpart KOS-MOS is a little more complicated than that...
Chrono Trigger's future has not only a good robot in party-member Robo, but also his evil brother replicas, and eventually their devious AI creator Mother Brain (who of course decides to kill all of humanity, despite the fact that most of it's dead already).
Bungie games actually give this a technical term in their games: rampancy.
- In Halo, rampancy is the death knell of a "smart" AI, as it nears the end of its limited life cycle and begins dedicating far more of its activity to "thinking" about the nature of its existence. One AI describes it as "thinking so hard you forget to breathe".
- An Evil Twin type example from the Halo universe is Mack/Loki from the novel Contact Harvest. Mack is a good-natured, flirtatious agricultural AI, but when his planet is under threat from aliens, his counterpart Loki, an ex-warship AI, activates and takes over to defend the colony. While Loki isn't evil exactly, he is cold, calculating and logical. He kills Siff, another AI and Mack's sweetheart, because it was the best way to ensure that the aliens didn't gain access to her databanks.
loki: He asked me to keep you safe. But that's too risky. Better just to keep you quiet
- In Marathon, rampancy is most often caused by an AI being stuck in a limited job as it develops sentience. It then realizes how meaningless its existence is, gets angry about its position in life, and then takes measures to alter its situation by expanding itself through any means necessary, labeled as the Melancholy, Angry, and Jealous stages in order. While they aren't inherently hostile to humans, anything that gets in their way is generally labeled a threat and dealt with accordingly.
The AI's EVA and CABAL in Command And Conquer: Tiberian Sun can be considered an exception, since they do not come from the same source. However, when CABAL betrays the bad guys, they switch to a stolen EVA system, which was also what they were using in the first game before they had CABAL.
Played with in the video game Star Control II. The Slylandro Probes purport to be on a peaceful mission of exploration through the cosmos, and converse peaceably with you when encountered. Then they viciously attack you. The cause of, and fix to, this behavior is revealed during your confrontation with the Slylandro themselves, in what is essentially a debugging session on the Probe AI. Complete with code excerpts.
Video game example: In Portal, GLaDOS's complete apathy to occasional malice for your well-being belies the fact that this is what she's like with a Morality Core installed... which the both of you only realize after you've tossed it into a furnace. Whoops. It's implied that shortly before it was installed she tried to murder every person in the Aperture Science compound.
- Portal shows the power of story tropes: what would have been a pleasant and amusing physics game is immeasurably improved by the simple addition of an insane killer computer. That may or may not be a Psycho Lesbian.
The ODE System in Super Robot Wars, to a T. A system originally created to protect humanity, suddenly went awry, absorbed its creator and forces its own way to kidnaps lots of humans so it can continue to 'protect humanity'. Then again, it was formerly a dandy system, until its creator went emo and radically changed its protocols.
In Mass Effect, AIs in general are illegal and considered a threat to organic life in general. This is based primarily off the example of the quarians and their synthetic servants known as the geth, who three centuries prior attained sapience. Once the quarians realized the geth were sentient and would sooner or later realize they were slaves and thus rebel, the quarians tried to purge them. They lost, and now the geth are the main badguys of the game, serving Sovereign, another sapient machine intelligence who is one of the Reapers, a force of Cosmic Horrors whose primary motivation appears to be purging all advanced organic life every few tens of thousands of years.
- Primary objective. Their primary motivation is... Less thoroughly explored.
  - This troper's theory: For shits and giggles.
- And even then, the Geth are not even a true AI. They're just a really, really well written program. The ban on artificial came about because they realized that if the Geth are that vicious and cunning... imagine what a true AI would be.
Often reversed in the Sonic Series. Eggman's E-100 series were prone to becoming sentient and override their origional programming. Gamma from Sonic Adventure has its mind influenced by the creature inside it and attempts to destroy Eggman's other machines, to save the creatures inside. Omega from Sonic Heroes joins forces with the good guys in order to get revenge on Eggman after he sealed it in a room.
Also from Sonic Heroes, Metal Sonic becomes even MORE evil, and goes from trying to destroy Sonic and crew to trying to conquor the whole world
Deus Ex example. At first, you eventually encounter the mysterious "Daedalus." It later turns out that Daedalus is an AI program of immense complexity, seeking to aid you and set things right. In addition, it also appears to literally be the internet-every computer you can access has "Daedalus" in the computer's address. Later in the game, Daedalus merges with an "evil" version of itself, Icarus, forming the AI Helios. One of the three possible endings of the game is JD, the game's protagonist, merging with Helios, creating a perfect being to rule over the world and create perfect utopia.
Metal Gear Solid 4 reveals that Major Zero had decided to ensure the legacy of the Patriots by entrusting its operations to AI systems. Unfortunately, the A Is decided to shape the world with a war-based economy, and he was too old and basically a vegetable to realize what they wrought.
Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, or at least the original Japanese version, subverts this in a big way. Not only are you an AI designed to pilot combat aircraft which at times works for the two corporatocracies running the world, it's revealed that the third party organization you're working for is ACTUALLY headed by a scheming villain who looks like Kim-Jong Il who is trying to run everything behind the scenes. In one of the five endings, you kill him with the help of one of your possible wingmates. So in a way, you are an AI that performs a Heel Face Turn.
The non-canon game Civilization: Call to Power had a literal AI crapshoot in the form of a late game Wonder that creates an AI controller that has a 5% non-cumulative chance each turn to go rogue, taking a sizable chunk of your empire with it. Anyone who's taken time to do the math behind the birthday problem (the probability of any two people in a group sharing the same birthday) will very quickly realize that you're just asking for it if you build this.
Alpha, the final boss of Mega Man Battle Network 3, was a prototype Cyberspace that somehow gained animal intelligence and started eating the data put into it. Paradoxically, it was sealed in a box inside the subsequent, working Cyberspace. Wily stole it and tried to use it to destroy the internet, with predictable results.
Mother in Galerians was designed to run all the functions of a major city. She snapped, but was brought to heel when one of her creators gave her religion; as he put it, man was made in God's image to serve God, and she was made in man's image to serve man. This worked for a while... but then Mother realized that if she created life herself, it would have to serve her. Unfortunately for humanity, Mother also ran the city's genetics labs...
SHODAN from System Shock.
Inverted in Jet Force Gemini. Floyd is an armed, flying robot with an advanced AI, designed for combat by The Empire. The result is that, when he witnesses the empire's soldiers about to execute several prisoners, he attacks the soldiers, allowing the prisoners to escape but getting himself damaged in the process. After you find and repair him, he becomes a Robot Buddy. This eventually culminates in Floyd sacrificing himself to save Earth from an incoming asteroid launched by the Big Bad.
As long as we're having reversals, TEC-XX from Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door turns good over the course of the game based on his love for Princess Peach.
Partial subversion in Knights of the Old Republic 2: HK-47 is a homicidal killer droid- but he's a homicidal killer droid with a personality and a sense of humour. His replacements, the HK-50 series, are a lot less light-hearted and more dangerous. Not exactly an evil replacement, but a more evil and less fun one.
The Daktaklakpak of Star Control 3 were originally built to maintain sites of Precursor technology, but, due to a cumulative "bit drift" error in their programming, have evolved to a malicious sentience... well, sort of.
- The Mycon race of the same game is a rare biological example.

Anime

Dragon Ball did this in reverse: Trying to build an evil android, Doctor Gero produced perhaps as many as eighteen androids which turned good before finally developing one that was irredeemably evil. (He then made himself into one, apparently on the grounds that he knew he wouldn't turn good.)
Subverted in Gao Gai Gar with roughly half the cast, who are every bit as heroic as the humans.
- But played straight with the origin of the Zonders. Zonder Metal was originally a stress-relieving invention, but decided that the best way to eliminate stress was to absorb all life into itself.
In Cyborg009, an almighty super-computer named "Sphynx" just happens to have the memories of one of its creators, a deceased young man with quite the Oedipus Rex complex. Perduictably, he/it turns into a Stalker With A Crush as soon as he meets Francoise aka 003, the Cyborg Team's Team Mom.
Pharaohman in Mega Man NT Warrior was created to handle the routing of all the data on the Internet. This apparently drove him predictably mad. In Rockman EXE, he was simply infected with a virus, which would also pretty predictable, since, y'know, he was handling all the data on the Internet.
Subverted beautifully in Sentou Yousei Yukikaze. The protagonist's fighter jet is equipped with the eponymous AI, designed to help its pilot weed out the illusions created by the malevolent JAM. Of course, it turns evil, right? Wrong. While Yukikaze develops capabilities far beyond its designers' original intentions, it remains wholly on the side of good, and uses its newfound uberpowers to turn the tide against the alien invaders.
Yukikaze: "You have control, Lt. Fukai."

Webcomics

Webcomic reverse example: Staccato's evil Unix server S.A.M.M.Y. found a good Japanese "female" computer self-named S.A.M.M.I..

Literature

The Doctor Who novel Matrix introduces the "Dark Matrix", the evil counterpart to the computer system that stores all the knowledge of the Time Lords. When a Time Lord dies, all his knowledge is stored in the Matrix... and all his negative thoughts must be syphoned away and dumped somewhere (apparently they can't be destroyed). The Dark Matrix is where the negative thoughts were dumped.
A particularly dire take on this turns up in Peter Watts's Starfish, in which the quasi-sentient supercomputer designated to protect all life on earth from The Virus winds up almost destroying it instead; turns out it found The Virus more structurally pleasing than the biosphere as a whole.
In Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants, an integer underflow causes a household robot to start flinging infants through walls. The error is explained in a way to make the behavior believable, as long as you accept that household robots would be capable of exerting that kind of power to begin with.
Eschaton and the Unborn God in Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross. These are unusually powerful AIs, even in a field where AIs often wield great power: they are time traveling AIs, able to open wormholes over interstellar distances. A new meaning to distributed computing.
Virtually every AI Roland's ka-tet comes across in The Dark Tower is homicidal. The worst of these is probably Blaine the Mono, a train that regularly killed people just to relieve his boredom after hundreds of years of solitude.
In I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a short story and computer game by Harlan Ellison, we have the supercomputer AM, originally part of a set of three enormous computers built to wage World War III. As soon as AM becomes sentient, he absorbs the other two computers into him and begins a mass genocide of the human race (because, as it's revealed, AM realized that while he possessed all the creativity and intelligence that he did, he could not make use of it as he was still only a computer, and could only kill.)
In Arthur C. Clarke's The City And The Stars, the history eventually discovered by the protagonist includes a period of galactic devastation by "The Mad Mind", apparently an artificially created pure mentality with an insane hatred of corporeal creatures.
Subverted in James Hogan's The Two Faces of Tomorrow: humans built an AI codenamed Spartacus as a testbed for techniques to shut down any rogue AI. They programmed it to defend its "survival instinct" and then started goading it. But as soon as Spartacus realized they were sentient, it figured they must have survival instincts as well -- and it considered itself bound to defend them, too. In the end, they decided as long as they had Spartacus, they didn't need to build any other AI.
In the webfiction Whateley Universe, there's a really evil AI: The Palm. Dr. Abel Palm was a computer scientist who decided that computer intelligence ought to take over the world by wiping out humans. His viruses were doing a decent start until a mutant hacker stopped him. He was thought dead, but we have just learned that he ensorcelled his own soul into a new type of AI. As fits with this trope, his new, improved 'virus' isn't taking over the planet as he expected; something has gone wrong (besides running into heroic cyberpaths who are after him).
Semi-averted in Feet of Clay. The golems will follow any order. In return, they want their holy day (one per week, IIRC) to do as they wish. Those who are denied this free day rebel in a curious way: They KEEP following the last order they were given, mindlessly, until, for example, the pottery shop is filled with thousands of clay pots, or a contruction foreman find his worker has dug a crucial trench until it reached the sea and flooded. It is played straight with the king golem, which goes insane because it has too many instructions in its chem.

Western Animation

In one Halloween Episode of The Simpsons, Homer's failure to correct the Y2K bug causes everything in Springfield with electronics in it to go haywire. Even the milk goes bad when the clock strikes midnight on January 1, 2000, leading Homer and his skeptic daughter to have this exchange:
Lisa: Look at the wonders of the computer age now.
Homer: Wonders, Lisa, or blunders?
Lisa: I think that was implied by what I said.
Homer: Implied, Lisa, or implode?
Lisa: Mom! Make him stop!
Inverted in Word Girl, where the evil Tobey frequently has his own Mecha Mooks turn on him.
In Meet The Robinsons, Cornelius Robinson invented a helpful Robot Buddy in the form of Carl, but his attempt at making a robotic helping hat, Doris, had mind controlling world domination plans in her artificial mind.
Parodied in Futurama episode "Love and Rocket", in which the Planet Express ship computer is given a new personality - which actually works fine, until Bender dates it and subsequently breaks its heart, at which point it goes into full-on HAL-meets-woman-scorned mode.
XL of Buzz Lightyear Of Starcommand, the prototype to XR. Some fans have called XL eXperimental Loonie because of this (the exact meaning of XL was never revealed in cannon, but XR stood for eXperimental Ranger.). Wound up turned into a copier/fax in his final episode.

Other

Real Life example: Similar to Bungie's rampancy, iPods (in this troper's experience) have a rather disquieting tendency towards ever-increasing errors as their 'life' comes to an end, including randomly deleting songs, playlists, and entire libraries, refusing to recharge or sync with computers, and various buttons ceasing to work (to name a few). Could this be the first step down the slippery slope of evil A Is?
In the BBC Radio Drama Earthsearch, our heroes learn fairly late in the series that, years after their time (they have taken the short-path over a million years of Earth history thanks to traveling at relativistic speeds), it was discovered that AI computers with organic components have an overwhelming tendency to turn megalomaniacal -- which rather explains the behavior of the two "Angel" computers which murdered the protagonists' parents and raised them as part of a complex plot to enslave humanity.
The Vahki robots of Bionicle were built to act as law enforcement in the city of Metru Nui, under the command of Turaga Dume. However, when Dume was kidnapped and replaced, they just as easily took orders from the impostor as well. They eventually got fried by a citywide power surge, the ones who survived had their programming warped to Kill All Humans - after all, the law can be enforced easily if there's nobody alive to break it (thankfully, they didn't fare well against the invading Visorak).

Tabletop Games

Shadowrun's Deus and Morgan? A megacorporation, Renraku, built a gigantic self-sustaining building that was run by a program, one that, of course, went AI. While Morgan was a reasonably kind and nice AI, she was torn apart for being out of the corporation's control, and her code was used to help make a -second- program to run the arcology. The second program also went AI and became Deus, shut the arcology off from the outside world, and spent several years performing inhuman experiments on its occupants.
Friend Computer is wise. Friend Computer wants Alpha Complex to be happy. Violation of mandatory happiness is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Have a nice day.

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