The Matrix, Wall-E, Terminator: Hollywood has been warning about our AI nightmares for decades in films

Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot are on the AI bandwagon while Keanu Reeves, Scarlett Johansson and Christopher Nolan remain opposed.

Hollywood is split on artificial intelligence as the technology increasingly encroaches on the creative industry – and the rest of the world. What’s less divided is how screen storytellers has been portraying AI and the future of humanity for decades.

For the past few days, the idea of AI ushering in the apocalypse has been high on many people’s minds, so maybe the last thing you want to be reminded of is Skynet.

But when actual engineers from AI businesses are warning of a more than 10 per cent chance, which is not insignificant by the way, that AI could end our existence within the decade, that’s anxiety-inducing information.

See also: AI bosses Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Elon Musk (SpaceXAI) calling for a slowdown in AI development.

Now, you might be sceptical of their real motivations (was it a marketing stunt?) which is a perfectly reasonable reaction to anytime villains-in-chief Musk or Altman says anything at all.

But these alarms are ringing in our lizard brains, activating all those amygdala fear receptors. Just picture the purple-hued Fear from Inside Out, eyes bugged, arms in the air, freaking out.

The worst thing is we can imagine what that AI-dominated future might be because Hollywood has spent decades showing us our worst nightmares, and it’s usually not Rosie from The Jetsons or Big Hero 6.

You just thought it would never really happen, and certainly not this quickly, right, right?!

After the most recent tranche of doomsday AI news, well, maybe it might.

WALL-E

OK, so Wall-E himself is actually a benign, even romantic figure. He’s a robot with one primary function and that’s to sort through the garbage that’s been left strewn all over Earth while humanity escaped to the stars.

We don’t fear Wall-E or EVA, but we should definitely be scared of the vision of what humans have become in 800 years into the future – stationery blobs in full-service pods aboard space-age cruise ships, reclined, gulping high fructose corn syrup and glued to a screen.

Maybe that sounds ideal, but surely only for a couple of hours before you get bored. After 700 years, think of the bed sores. It also begs the question of how humans have been procreating in this unmoving state. Shudder.

TERMINATOR

Terminator and Skynet is the ultimate AI bogeyman story because it combines artificial superintelligence with the defence network. In this fictional account, AI launched a nuclear war against humans, and rounded up survivors into extermination camps.

Released in 1984 before the end of the Cold War, Terminator was probably reacting more to the nuclear arms race than technological advances, but now the two threats are entwined.

Not for nothing, James Cameron told Rolling Stone last year that the use of AI now in defence systems means that the danger of a “Terminator-style apocalypse” is still a possibility.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

The 2000s revival series of Battlestar Galactica was made in a post-9/11 world and served as a political analogy about terrorism, monotheism vs pluralism, and the trauma of a large attack.

But 20 years on, it’s also a chilling portrayal of an AI attack on all humans. In the world of the show, the AI beings are called Cylons (derogatorily, Toasters), who were created to serve mankind, until they gained sentience and rebelled. There was a bloody war, an armistice, relative peace and then a surprise attack that killed all but 49,000 people.

The show’s mythology becomes increasingly complicated, especially if you add in the prequel series Caprica, and was expanded to give the humanoid Cylon characters a religious purpose, but the dystopia is still scary.

THE MATRIX

There are some among us in the far reaches of the internet who still believe The Matrix is already here. That’s because the Wachowskis’ film painted such a vivid and paranoid picture of the fake reality built by machines to keep us in a dormant state so it could use as batteries.

The scariest thing is that we don’t have to be hooked up to steampunk-esque wires to be fooled by the disinformation and falsehoods generated by AI, that actually is happening.

A lot of what’s on the internet already isn’t real, and declining media literacy means more and more people either don’t have the critical capacity to tell the difference, or would prefer to live in a fantasy.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

HAL, the onboard computer which kills the majority of the astronauts onboard the ship Discovery, represents one of our greatest fears when it comes to AI, which is an intelligence system that is all logic and no emotion.

HAL isn’t inherently bad, nor was it out for itself or exacting revenge. It was following its mission directive, and it calculated the humans’ actions were in opposition to that.

The most common example of this is if we expect AI to save the world by ending the climate catastrophe – well, given humans are the root cause of this, doesn’t it then follow through that Earth itself can only salvaged if AI gets rid of all of us? Jeepers, that’s grim.

EX MACHINA

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is a thrilling, suspenseful work of sci-fi, the story of a programmer who is asked to test a robot’s (an extraordinary performance by Alicia Vikander) consciousness through their interactions.

Not only is Ava sentient, but she demonstrated aptitude, smarts and understanding of human emotions to manipulate things to enable her own escape.

The parable for our times is not that there are secret bunkers with experimental AI beings - and there probably are. But that we reveal so much of ourselves to machines and digital networks (think of all those people who use ChatGPT as their therapist), that if the time ever came, AI already knows everything about us, and exactly how to use it.