Hollywood visions of AI: Friendly, then deadly, then everywhere

Now, as AI barrels into everyday life, stirring fascination and alarm, Hollywood’s stories about it are multiplying and changing. No longer relegated to science fiction, such plots are turning up in daytime soaps, sitcoms, animated tent poles and medical dramas. That shift matters: Hollywood has long helped shape how Americans see the world and live their lives, including what to embrace and what to fear.

Here’s a look at Hollywood’s evolving vision of AI.

Early Hollywood depictions often fell into the cool, fun and desirable category – among them Robby the Robot, a plexiglass-domed helper and companion in Forbidden Planet (1956). He could talk, think, drive and make bourbon by the gallon.

Looking back across decades of plots involving AI, depictions have been less bleak than you might think, according to Andrew Maynard, a professor at Arizona State University who studies how technologies emerge and how society responds. He built a database to analyse how AI has been portrayed over the past century in American and foreign films and found that fewer than one-third of the depictions imagined a dystopian future.

In the animated series The Jetsons (which debuted in 1962), Rosie the Robot was drily funny and part of the family, even if she was the one stuck cleaning up.

The long-forgotten CBS sitcom My Living Doll (1964) starred Julie Newmar as Rhoda, a gorgeous robot who learns, one pratfall at a time, how to be the “perfect” woman. (Shocker: Its credited writers, producers and directors were all men.)

R2-D2 and C-3PO were full-fledged characters, not just machines, in Star Wars (1977). Loyal, lovable and comically mismatched.

“KITT, I need ya, buddy!” A bouffant-haired David Hasselhoff fought crime alongside an artificially intelligent Pontiac Firebird Trans Am in Knight Rider, an NBC hit that debuted in 1982. The series was a live-action cousin to the era’s Transformers cartoon – machine intelligence as wish fulfilment, whether a talking sports car or a big rig that turned out to be a crime-fighting alien.

As America trudged through the Cold War era, a technological paranoia increasingly found its way on screen. Was AI friend or foe? Depictions also reflected unease about the rapid spread of computers into government, business and eventually the home.

“These stories have an incredibly important place in terms of alerting us to what possibly might go wrong,” Maynard said.

Take machines that decide we’re the problem: Skynet, which sent a cyborg assassin back through time in The Terminator (1984) …

… or the Cylons, artificial beings bent on exterminating humankind in Battlestar Galactica, which arrived in 1978 on ABC.

Not all AI was homicidal. The WOPR supercomputer in WarGames (1983) is given enormous decision-making power without sufficient understanding of the real world.

And in Demon Seed (1977), a supercomputer becomes self-aware and traps Julie Christie in her home in order to make a human-AI baby. “The impregnation scene is disturbing,” Paula Murphy wrote in her 2024 book “AI in the Movies,” putting it mildly.

In 1999, The Matrix represented a watershed in the depiction of AI. The machines were no longer merely trying to destroy humanity; they had already won.

AI was also becoming morally complex onscreen – capable of consciousness and emotion, and sometimes given good reason to resent its creators. And that raised a more unsettling question: do humans deserve to remain in control?

The 1973 movie Westworld is a machines-malfunction story, but the 2016 HBO series flips it. When the AI becomes conscious, it realises humans have been abusing it, and fights back.

Artificial beings became recognisably human in their contradictions. In the Blade Runner franchise, replicants could be violent and vengeful, but also capable of love, fear and mercy.

Since his debut in 1999, Bender in Futurama has embodied human messiness: he’s selfish, dishonest and forever chugging malt liquor – but he’d do almost anything for his best friend.

Some stories went further, asking whether AI was something more than a machine. In After Yang (2022), the malfunction of an AI forces a family to reconsider what he meant to them. Her (2013) explored similar terrain through romance, while Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) examined whether a robot child could experience love, and what humans owed him if so.

In the 2020s, as AI became commonplace, something new happened: AI plots spread across genres.

The technology has shown up in hospital dramas like The Pitt, which wove AI into a story about the drudgery of medical charting and the false promise of easy fixes. Comedies have got in on the act. Hacks featured a tech billionaire asking Jean Smart’s horrified Deborah to train QuikScribbl, an AI tool designed to mimic her comedic voice. On The Comeback, Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish learned that her new sitcom would secretly be written by AI.

With M3GAN, horror made AI an everyday presence; the killer doll is a prototype for a mass-market product.

Even the soaps have joined in. “It didn’t seem that far-fetched,” said Josh Griffith, who devised the Victor Newman storyline while serving as head writer of The Young and the Restless. “I was reading about what AI could do in a business setting. The more I read, the more it became, ‘What couldn’t it do?’”

AI is no longer “an oddity to be enamoured with or scared of,” Maynard said, but rather “something that is part and parcel of our lives.” That’s why Woody and Buzz have to compete with a smart tablet for kids’ attention in Toy Story 5.

As the technology becomes increasingly ordinary, Hollywood will have to come up with ever more complex scenarios to keep AI stories compelling. The next crop suggests that writers are trying.

In the Disney+ series VisionQuest (October 14), AI wrestles with memory, emotion and identity – and with other AI.

Arriving in theatres October 22, Klara and the Sun follows an AI companion to a sick girl who develops a kind of religious faith. Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, the story ultimately asks whether AI can learn enough about a person to take her place if she dies.

Cupertino, from the smart-drama maestros Michelle and Robert King (The Good Wife), debuts in the US on October 8. It explores once-unthinkable AI innovations while skewering Silicon Valley’s culture of money and power – and its tendency to leave the consequences to someone else.

“There are very few issues that the entire country can agree upon,” Michelle King said. “But one of them is that these tech giants are peddling things that are scary.”

In Cupertino, two lawyers wronged by Big AI join forces to help others caught in its path. The Kings named episodes for underdog clients – a pointed reminder that the intelligence may be artificial, but the drama remains distinctly human.

This article originally appeared inThe New York Times.

Written by: Brooks Barnes and Matt Stevens

©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES