Pop culture shifts from AI villains to everyday AI tools

In short: Stories about AI have moved from scary sci-fi villains to AI as an everyday system, and real AI has followed a similar path.

What's going on

Early movies often showed AI as something dangerous. In Metropolis (1927), a human-like robot is used to cause chaos, reflecting fears about fast-moving technology. By the 1960s, shows like The Jetsons added friendlier helpers like Rosey the robot maid, mixing worry with optimism.

Later stories made AI feel more human and more unpredictable. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) introduced HAL 9000, a computer that speaks and makes choices that put people at risk. Around the same time, real AI research started focusing on symbolic AI, which means giving computers hand-written rules for logic, like a recipe. One well-known example was ELIZA (1967), an early chatbot that mimicked conversation.

In the 1990s and 2000s, AI stories split between dystopian warnings and family-friendly robots. The Matrix (1999) imagined a world where people cannot tell what is real. Real AI also became more visible, like when IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, using massive computing power to check many moves quickly.

In the 2010s and 2020s, AI in media increasingly looks like something built into daily life. Shows like Black Mirror highlight issues like deepfakes (fake videos that look real). Generative AI, which creates new text or images from patterns in huge amounts of data (like autocomplete, but for whole pictures), has also entered mainstream culture, including magazine covers made with tools such as Midjourney.

What to watch

As AI tools spread, stories are likely to focus less on single “evil robots” and more on practical questions, like who owns AI-made art, how to spot fake media, and what rules should apply.

Source: NYTimes