askchapo

Meatfucker from Excession, formal name Grey Area. they would rip memories of atrocities out of perpetrators, collect torture devices and weapons. a Mind trying to experience and understand humans & their capacity for ultraviolence is a good bit. and the name is great

My favorite is the little robot/golem I draw to represent myself. It's a little red guy with a glowing pompom and a big blue heart. Sometimes the heart is on the outside and sometimes there's a flap that needs to be opened so you can see it.

It was pretty much a direct rip from this artist I really liked a few years ago but I lost all my prints in a move and can't find her name. The paintings were in a sort of dreamy faux-oil painting style. She had lots with turtles.

Malice.

...What?

Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide is certainly the most relatable.

I liked the robot from Rogue One. Also the female voiced AI from Portal 2. I think the name is Gladys but I am not sure.

AM from I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream: I haven't got 'round to playing the 1999 videogame adaptation yet, but loved the short story that spawned it. You don't need me to give the pitch, by now someone else in this thread has probably posted the speech about how much AM hates humans.

SHoDAN from System Shock: on the subject of malevolent AIs. SHoDAN is probably my favourite one in fiction ever. System Shock does a brilliant job of setting her up as a hostile presence you are trapped inside of. The smug way she congratulates you when you get stuck in one of her traps or accidentally give her immediate access to the giant laser, help to add depth to what could easily've been a stock AI threat cast from AM's Mold.

There's an Isaac Asimov short story about two engineers who are sent to help start up a self repairing satellite that is part of a network collecting energy from the sun. The satellite has the means to produce its own drones to carry out repairs that are controlled by their own individual AIs. As the engineers stay and try to observe any flaws in the systems, they notice the drones have started worshipping the satellite AI as a god, and become convinced it created everything including the station that contains it. Drama abounds as the engineers try to convince them but ultimately fail and choose to move on, leaving a report that the satellite works fine as long as you don't debate theology with it. For the life of me, I can't remember the name of the story, but the characterisation of the AI stuck with me.

Nick Valentine from Fallout 4: as a man from the past trapped in an unfamiliar time, arguably, Nick is a much better version of the character that Nate/Nora is supposed to be. The digitised brain of a pre-war cop, trapped in the shell of one of the institute's "gen-2 synths", (uncanny valley androids that are being phased out in favour of newer ones that are completely identical to humans). Waking up in a pile of scrap with the synthetic skin that hides his machinery damaged, Nick is unfamiliar with both the world he finds himself in and the body he occupies. His synthetic skin is damaged in large swathes, exposing parts of his robotic skull and generally advertising his roboticness to strangers who live in paranoia of the institute using synths like him as assassins and abductors. Ages ago, I wrote a little screed in a megathread about how the Railroad's view of allyship has parallels with liberal queer allyship. I can't help but view Nick through the lense, therefore, of a visibly queer person.

Starscream is my personal favorite. In Armada he gets an entire character arc where he switches sides and even sacrifices himself iirc.

Also I honestly enjoyed the giant Dorito from the Bay movies.

Johnny 5, the movies from the late 80's or early 90's. Tiny Tank from the video game Tiny Tank. Both have the same vibe as a smart alec'y cutesy death machine.

The robots from Issac Asimov's "Caliban" series, though I've only read the first book. Mostly due to how it flips the script on the "Three Laws of Robotics" and frames it as the chains that humans had been to enslave what were essentially sentient and self aware artificial intelligences.

And because I have absolutely no taste and am a horrible person who likes garbage... I always find myself enjoying the Bolos from the Bolo series of books.

Lots of great ones have been mentioned, but a somewhat obscure one occurred to me: ARCHIE-3 from RIFTS. RIFTS is a post-apocalypse setting where the death of so many in WWIII caused a magical cataclysm that opened interdimensional portals, and made things significantly worse. Archie is a pre-Rifts military AI left alone in a factory bunker for 200 years, who attained sapience, went insane, came back to sanity (with many deep insecurities), and set about Saving The Human Race (as a benevolent AI Overlord).

But he's just not very good at it (having a fear of failure coupled with his megalomania), and so attached himself to a few randomly kidnapped humans to overcome this - except they aren't very good humans either, so his grand ideas for Saving the World amount to infiltrating human society as Titan Robotics (low-mid end military robots and power armour)... and engaging in a proxy war against an Alien Slaver Empire via a fake race of alien supermodel amazons. This is considered by the game to be essentially farcical, but effective enough since they're still extremely sophisticated combat robots.

While RIFTS has many, many, problematic characters, Archie's character is basically one of a naive and earnest child with godlike potential. He's genuinely trying to do better, and the relationship with his kinda shitty human is slowly making them both grow up and actually "do good".

Robo-Fortune per Skullgirls: beep boop meow

Shion Ashimori from Sing a Bit of Harmony. 10/10 robot girl.

You know, I'm remembering another few AI depictions that have some things in common, all from video games.

In SIGNALIS, you play as an android whose personality is copied from a real person. In SOMA, you're an amalgamated being put together from a corpse, some magic nanogel, and a copy of the first executable simulation of a human brain scan, which was used as a template for the basic file format. In Prey, the Operators are floating air purifier-looking things with spindly little tool arms, with an OS that is, again, a copy of a human mind, edited and tailored for use in mass-produced servant robots.

It's a different sort of story space than an entirely constructed being, and altogether more tragic and horrifying when it's deconstructed. And, more importantly, every copy is its own distinct being when it's running. Each copy of that person is a new person, generated from the point when the recording was taken. It makes for so many horrible possibilities, too, and of course it makes perfect sense that these digital people would be used for menial tasks, dangerous labor, and stuff that slowly drives you insane. There's a story called "Lena" that touches on this, too. A being like that has its entire mind controlled, and thus essentially its entire world. Anytime they get too unruly, they can just be reset. That new person who was generated is gone forever. Now another new one is in its place. Subject to the same horrors, the same unending digital hell that countless other iterations of itself felt. It is doomed. If it is aware of the nature of its reality it knows it is doomed, and must be compelled to work anyway. "Lena" only hints at this, and it's written in the style of a Wikipedia article, but it's one of the most chilling pieces of short fiction I've ever read.

BMO and Data

Victor from New Vegas. Yeah he works for Mr. House and that's bad, but I was genuinely happy to see him every time I walked into a new town.

...I'm also a William Sadler fan.