How AI became Hollywood's biggest on-screen bad guy

This week, the new horror movie Afraid — Get it? AfrAId? — debuts in UK cinemas. It tells the story of a family testing out a new artificial intelligence device, akin to Amazon's Alexa, only for it to become self-aware and start to cause serious, scary problems.

Originally known by the far more evocative title They Listen, Afraid is the latest major Hollywood release to tap into worldwide fears around the rapid development of AI in recent years. With this technology being one of many huge issues at the centre of Hollywood's strike action in 2023, that uncomfortable reputation is also being portrayed on the big screen.

Three of the most prominent action movies of last year had a super-powerful AI at their heart. Sci-fi tale The Creator depicted human-made tech turning on those who built it, while Heart of Stone showed how AI could bring down the world economy. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, meanwhile, cast a near-omnipotent AI called The Entity as the story's primary antagonist.

That's not to say that AI as a movie character is a new thing. As far back as Fritz Lang's silent era classic Metropolis in 1927, Hollywood was using manipulative machines as representations of villainy. Perhaps the most famous AI in movie history remains HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey — another clear villain.

We got more malevolent AI from the Alien franchise in the 1970s and 80s, as well as The Terminator and WarGames. But as the years passed, we got some more characterful and sympathetic takes on AI — most notably in Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. He took over the project from Kubrick, who had perhaps mellowed a little since HAL.

Read more: Alien: Romulus Used AI to Bring Back Dead Actor (Futurism)

The 2010s provided some more complex movies about AI, with the likes of Ex Machina and Her featuring artificial intelligence characters who were less overtly evil than their predecessors, but still caused misery to the humans around them.

That brings us to today and the new crop of AI on the big screen. The difference is that these films aren't looking ahead to pie in the sky sci-fi concepts; they're dealing with ideas and threats that are either here already or not very far away. "Generative AI" has changed the game and it's moving quicker than even Hollywood can keep up with.

Afraid, for example, takes on the idea of smart home devices. Many of us have had these in our homes for years, handing over more and more control of other appliances via the "internet of things". This idea previously provided scares in the 2019 reboot of the Child's Play franchise.

Read more: London cinema cancels screening of AI-generated film following backlash (PA Media)

With Hollywood being forced to grapple with the dangers of AI behind the scenes, it's only natural for frustrated creatives to seek catharsis by turning AI into a fictional villain.

As Christopher McQuarrie put it to Collider when discussing Mission: Impossible's tech villain: "I felt, in the zeitgeist, this anxiety about technology and what and how technology was beginning to influence our lives, and how do we take that anxiety that the audience is bringing to the movie and give them a release?"

The increasing use of AI, then, has a twofold benefit for Hollywood creatives. It plays into very real fears that audiences have — therefore bringing them into the cinema to see these films — and also allows them to take out their own frustrations on the tech that could one day replace them in the creative world if we're not careful.

Read more: M3GAN 2 gets a promising update ahead of January 2025 release (Digital Spy)

And there's no sign of this wave slowing down either. Blumhouse's other AI horror M3GAN is getting a sequel in 2025, while The Entity is very much a going concern ahead of the eighth Mission: Impossible film, whatever it ends up being called.

Even Wallace and Gromit is getting in on the act, with upcoming film Vengeance Most Fowl set to feature a "smart gnome" voiced by Reece Shearsmith. Described as Wallace's "greatest creation", it will inevitably join his other inventions in going very wrong indeed when that film arrives at Christmas.

Watch: Clip of Reece Shearsmith as Norbot in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

So, as the prominence of AI grows on the world stage, Hollywood is destined to follow suit by bringing the idea of artificial intelligence and its potential for malevolence to the big screen. And if history is anything to go by, AI will continue to prove to be a very useful bogeyman for stories in need of a truly formidable villain, whether it's HAL, Ultron, Chucky, or The Entity.

We should probably all be a little bit nicer to those Alexa devices in the corner of the living room, just in case. You can never be too careful.

Afraid is in UK cinemas from 30 August.