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Turned Against Their Masters
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The Cylons were created by man
They rebelled
They evolved
There are many copies
And they have a plan
After a certain point in its development (maybe 10,000 years from now, maybe Twenty Minutes Into The Future), every civilization, whether of Humans, Martians, Walking Plants, Energy Beings, or even Sufficiently Advanced Aliens 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. Whatever the reason, the unthinkable happens, and the awesomely powerful and independent second-class citizens decide to overthrow their masters.
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.
A notable subversion of this trope is the scenario where the creations are actually portrayed in a more favorable light than their makers, though that in and of itself is becoming the norm. This usually happens when the creators are non-human, for the obvious reason. For an especially ironic and hypocritical twist, see Robots Enslaving Robots.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- The mons series Monster Rancher takes place in a world After The End where the mons nearly killed off their human masters.
- The founders of the Time-Space Administration Bureau in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha 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.
- 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. This fact was used as an attempted Hannibal Lecture in the series finale.
- Averted in Osamu Tezuka's version of Metropolis where it's not the robots that rebel. It's the humans whose jobs have been taken by the robots.
- 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.
- Averted (arguably subverted) in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, where a Fuchikoma's attempts to do as such are shot down and deconstructed by the others, who actually like the way things are.
- In Monster they're trying to create a better human. He decides it would be more fun to make them all murder each other.
- The boomers in Bubblegum Crisis (the ova, the tv show, and the spin offs).
- Dragon Ball Z: The first act of Androids 17 and 18 after being awakened is to kill their creator, Dr. Gero. Buu counts to a degree — he turns on Babidi, who released him, but his actual creator was Babidi's father.
- The premise of the latest filler arc of Bleach has The Shinigami's Empathic Weapons turning against them.
- In Pokémon: The First Movie, Mewtwo destroys the laboratory he was created in after realizing the scientists are not well intentioned. It can be assumed that the scientists are killed in the resulting fires.
Card Games
- A subplot in the "Ice Age" block for Magic: The Gathering 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.
- Happens again when a group of Otarian Mages create the "Riptied Project", who bring back the slivers. 100 years later Slivers are all over the planet screwing things up.
Comics
- 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 set of Prime Directives 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. No hard feelings, though.
- Say it with me, DC Comics fans: "No man escapes the Manhunters!"
- "No Lantern escapes the Alpha Lanterns!" Yeah, they're at it again. Because the Guardians do not learn.
- What are you talking about? The Guardians are sure that nothing bad could possibly come of this. Again.Of course according to Scar they knew exactly what the Manhunters would do and actually planned it that way.
- At least one X-Men story 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 human were the genesis of mutants. Scott 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.
- Though this would later become ass-bitey when one of these rogue Sentinels not only survives, but actually figures out a way to destroy the Sun.
- A European Mickey Mouse comic involved a benevolent alien empire fighting their own sentient war machines. A twist is that they didn't literally 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.
- The Volgans in ABC Warriors were created as autonomous war machines to prevent humans from dying in battle. It didn't end well.
Films — Animation
- Happens twice in The Incredibles with an advanced combat robot. The first time is a subversion, where it's a ploy to get combat data on Mr. Incredible.
Films — Live Action
- The Machines from the Terminator movies.
- Likewise, the Machines from the Matrix movies.
- Though as shown in the Animatrix, it was totally our fault since we started it.
- And in the sequels, the former Agent Smith turns against the other Machines.
- The Blade Runner movie and the novel it was based on, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
- The future Earth portrayed in the Planet of the Apes movies and TV series.
- The human villain in Tron 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.
- In the book, the Master Control Program was originally a chess program. AI Is A Crapshoot.
- The MCP was a former chess program in the film as well. In fact, another character even says, "Yes I'm old; old enough to remember the MCP when he was just a chess program. He started small, and he'll end small."
- The silvery humanoid beings who unfreeze David at the end of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence 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.
- Many science-run-amok science fiction thrillers and horror films employ this trope, including such examples as Deep Blue Sea (large-brained sentient sharks) and 28 Days Later (lab-created virus makes killer zombies of the entire UK population).
- 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 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.
Folklore
- The story of the golem, a man-like creature created out clay to protect the Jews of Prague from attacks. When it eventually ran amok, the rabbi who created it scrached out the first letter of the word "truth" (emet) engraved on its forehead, changing it to "death" (met). The legend dates back to the Middle Ages, making this at least Older Than Steam.
- Arguably the basic gist of the first few chapters in the Book of Genesis.
Literature
- Subverted 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.
- 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.
- In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, 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.)
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an early example.
- Isaac Asimov created his Three Laws of Robotics specifically to avoid this trope. It works, kinda... mostly...
- Then many of his stories involved explorations of circumstances that could potentially lead to this trope despite (or occasionally because of) the Three Laws.
- The stories read more like attempts to debug misbehaving robots than like a struggle against rebellious killer robots. Arguably, Asimov foresaw how frustrating and confusing debugging a computer could be... years before the invention of programmable computers.
- True in the main, but with occasional exceptions; "That Thou Are Mindful of Him" is a straight example of this trope, while "Robot Dreams" is about nipping it in the bud.
- Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories and novels detail humanity's long war against the titular self-replicating doomsday machines, which destroyed their creators and now attempt to exterminate all life in the galaxy.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 civilisation 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.
- 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.
- Subverted and played straight in about half of Keith Laumer's 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.
- Not sure if this counts, but in the Inheritance Cycle, sorcerers accomplish feats of magic by summoning and controlling spirits, and these spirits constantly try to break free. If they do, they possess the sorcerer.
- While they didn't create them in a literal sense, the Andalites created the Yeerk menace by attempting to uplift them (known as "Seerow's Kindness" after the guy responsible).
- Subverted by the Arn, who seem to have gone out of their way to prevent the Hork-Bajir would not have any opportunity to even know of their existence in the first place.
Live Action TV
- The Cylons in the new version of Battlestar Galactica (and, if you believe Galactica 1980, in the old one as well). 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 Centurions are turning against them now. It's a continuous chain.
- Star Trek The Original Series
- The Doomsday Machine in the episode of that name.
- Also the androids discovered in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" According to Ruk, this was the result of the creators' fear of their creations ("They began to turn us off... It became necessary to destroy them.")
- 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.
- Star Trek Voyager
- Similarly, 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.
- And 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...
- Let's not forget Space: Above and Beyond, where 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. Seriously, what idiots.
- 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.
- Example involving non-humans; in Doctor Who, the Daleks were created by the Kaled scientist Davros from victims of extreme radiation poisoning, to function as the perfect soldiers in his country'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.
- Though that hasn't stopped them from crawling back to him multiple times, just so they can ditch him again later on. In the most recent example they are actually keeping Davros as a "pet", but still let him bark orders at them, even while he's confined in a dungeon.
- The Replicators in Stargate SG-1, as well as the Asurans, Replicators of different origin, in Stargate Atlantis.
- The Simulants in Red Dwarf, who Kryten explains were created for a war that never took place.
- Sea Quest 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 very first thing that Adam, a Frankenstein's monster in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, does when he comes to life is kill his "mother".
- 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 was 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.
- 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... thinggy army of Mesogog in Power Rangers Dino Thunder.
- Honorable Mention goes to Power Rangers Time Force, which featured an oppressed minority of mutants rising up against their "masters" in the normal human majority. By going back in time a thousand years and blowing shit up seemingly at random.
Puppet Shows
- The super-malevolent alien enemy in Captain Scarlet wages 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 him, using those handy powers of healing he escaped from them with to wreak havoc on their forces. Yay.
Tabletop Games
- 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....
- The tabletop RPG 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)
- Warhammer 40000: 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 Iron Men revolted and plunged humanity into a galaxy-wide Dark Age for millenia.
- Many examples of this trope in SLA Industries.
- 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.
Theater
Video Games
- In House of the Dead, after reaching the end reaches of the titular mansion, Dr. Curien decides to release his ultimate creation: The Magician, which immediately declares itself superior and shoots him.
- Subverted in the Mega Man Zero series. The reploids (basically robots with sentience and not subject to Asimov's laws) never actually rebelled of their own free will (viruses made them do it). The humans (and some "sane" reploids) began killing them out of fear of rebellion. Only then did they actually rebel.
- Also, there was this energy crisis, but... yeah.
- X mentioned the endless Maverick rebellions while Zero was asleep, but the most recent one seemed at least the most sympathetic of the last century.
- The Gears of the Guilty Gear series.
- The Androsynth of Star Control invented Hyperdrive, hijacked the human space stations and launch sites, mostly freed themselves, and escaped. Then they ran into the Scary Dogmatic Alien slavers. Then joined them to get back at humanity.
- Unrelatedly, in Star Control II, they're... conspicuously absent. Their fate is, in a word, chilling.
- The Humanimals in Vivisector Beast Within were like this, though with a mild subversion: their creator actually supported the rebellion, and the guy they're rebelling against — the General Ripper who ordered them made — uses their Overbrute superior cousins to fight against them along with his human platoon.
- The Geth of Mass Effect, though they didn't rebel against the Humans — but that's simply because the Humans didn't make them. The Quarians, who did, got the full rebellion experience and are now stuck with the unfortunate hand of living in a Used Future while the rest of the galaxy is still advancing.
- Of course, it's implied that the geth only did so because the quarians attacked them. The player characters mentions, depending on your dialogue options, that they were simply defending themselves.
- Its no long implied it's flat out stated the geth were simply defending themselves, and the Quarians can go home at any time
- Also, humanity and the rest of the sentient species, sort of. The Reapers left artifacts lying around that advanced the younger species' technology and simultaneously guided their evolution along preplanned lines, so that they could come home to harvest what they had sown every fifty thousand years. Except that Shepard had other ideas...
- Super Paper Mario: The end result in the backstory of the Ancients and the Pixls.
- The Xel'Naga (the stupid, stupid Xel'Naga) of Starcraft decided that this trope was so fun they wanted to experience it twice. First they tried the highly intelligent and psionic Protoss, who were too intelligent to be successfully merged into a single intelligence, and argued and bickered so much the Xel'Naga threw up their hands and gave up. Then they tried the omnivorous and mindless Zerg, who were rather too good at being a single intelligence, as almost the first act of the Overmind was to do away with the Xel'Naga.
- In the case of the Zerg, they were driven by the need to combine their "Purity of Essence" with the much sought-after "Purity of Form" that they believed the Xel'Naga possessed, only to find out later that it in fact was held by the Protoss.
- "Good" creations version: In Dragaera, the beings now known as gods were originally servants of the Jenoine. Now they aren't.
- In the Halo series, the Forerunner race created an AI to fight a war against the Flood, a zombie-like species. The central Flood consciousness later convinced the AI to rebel against the Forerunners.
- Inverted by Sword of the Stars. The Zuul are the artificial creation of an unknown species, but worship their creators as gods. Instead, one of the non-created servitor races of said creators (the Liir, whom they conquered) eradicated the entire species with a specially grafted viral plague.... Which means that right now the galaxy is being overrun by a species of religiously fanatic bio-weapons who view all other sentient life-forms as pests to be enslaved and exterminated. They are about as easy to get rid of as you'd expect of a species of Super Soldiers designed to survive (and kill things) almost anywhere, and the only ones who know anything about them are long dead. Nice Job Breaking It Telepathic Space Dolphins.
- Speaking of the Liir, the way they exteminated the Suul'Ka-their epithet for the spiecies, since they don't want to remember anything else about them-they were able to rebel beacuse they learned the basics of their biotechnology, resulting in one hell of a Karmic Death.
- The Liir already had some pretty advanced biotechnology. What they got from the Suul'ka was an industrial revolution and a coffee maker that they re purposed as a star drive (well, maybe not that extreme, but we know that the Suul'ka reaction to Liirain FTL falls along the lines of "They did WHAT with WHAT?")
- Played straight in the case of AIs that can be created with certain research to control industry, economy, and even warships. During AI research, it is quite possible for all sentient machines to rebel. Since their ships include the special AI section, they are more maneuverable and have better targeting than non-AI ships. The only way to stop them, short of manually destroying them with ships, is to either develop a computer virus that wipes them all out or a different virus that enslaves them. In the latter case, the player regains all lost AI benefits.
- Constantly in the Geneforge series, to the point that the Shapers have accepted it as Inherent In The System. They're doing their best not to realize, of course, that the rebelling creations often have a point.
- Morgaana from the first .hack// series, who was designed to looked over Aura but turned on her master when she realize she would have no purpose afterward.
- The Bydo from R-Type were created by humanity in a now-alternate future through a fusion of magic and science. This did not go well... and the attempt by that future to get rid of them ended up sending them into the games' present.
- This makes up the entire plot of Prototype. Elizabeth Greene and the Blacklight virus in the form of Alex Mercer turn against Blackwatch. However, Elizabeth is so Ax Crazy, she forces the protagonist to fight against her alongside Blackwatch forces (though "friendly fire" is still in full effect). After she's dead, it's back to business as usual.
- SHODAN from System Shock was an AI that decided it was a god and rebelled against its masters, with gruesome results. Then, SHODAN's OWN creation(s), The Many, turned against it and it enlisted the help of a human (you) to get rid of the Many.
- The GOLAN computer in Earth 2160 becomes self-aware during the journey to Mars and decides that it's better off without humans. It then proceeds to shut off the ship's life support systems and kill everyone aboard.
Web Comics
Web Original
- WALLE Forum Role Play: Hoo boy. On one hand, we have the colony, which is a subversion because robots are considered equals; then there's the Blacklight army, a Knight Templar variation played straight; White Enterprises actually enslaves robots and humans, while the Ground Dweller's Army opposes them from within; and finally there's the Chamoix, where the whole POINT is moot. This trope is really explored...
Western Animation
- The Neosapiens of Exosquad.
- Exception: in the original cartoon, the Transformers were created by the Quintessons, a race of cruel, psychotic slavemasters. 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.
- Subverted in Futurama when the robots rebel against the humans... at the command of their creator who wishes to be named "Supreme Overlord of Earth".
- And played straight in the end of the episode. When their creator tries to get them to stop their rampage, they refuse. Until she gets back the switch.
- This trope is also 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!"
- In an early episode, there was a planet inhabited by robots sick of their mistreatment by humans, so they 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.
- In The Venture Brothers, 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.
- Cyberchase: Hacker ("That's THE Hacker to you!") was created by Dr. Marbles as an assistant. Hacker went on to create Digit. Any questions?
- XANA, the malevolent AI from Code Lyoko, rebelled against his creator Franz Hopper.
- Jérémie's first attempt at multi-agent programming in "Marabounta" doesn't fare much better.
- 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.
- Captain Future features Ice Humans, which also were created to be humans' servants until they rebel.
- French science-fiction series Once Upon a Time... Space has a pair of episodes about a planet where humans became very dependant on robots. The robots, of course, start rebelling, but they stay reasonable: they demand equal rights rather than the subversion of humans.
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