Films such as The Terminator and Avengers: Age of Ultron often portray machines or artificial intelligences that revolt against humanity. While these premises make for gripping fiction, they conflict with several technical and conceptual limits of real‑world AI.
Terminator: time travel and human‑like initiative
In the first Terminator film, the war between humans and machines is set in 2029, with the human resistance led by John Connor. The machines decide to send a cyborg (the Terminator) back in time to kill Sarah Connor, John's mother, before he can be born. The film’s machines conceive and execute novel strategies—most dramatically, time travel and targeted assassination in a past environment the machines do not know.
The article argues this depiction departs from how current AI systems operate: contemporary AIs cannot autonomously invent and carry out entirely new, complex goals in unfamiliar real‑world contexts. In the film the Terminator improvises, impersonates people and makes complex social decisions—for example posing as Sarah’s mother and imitating her voice to obtain a motel address. These behaviors imply human‑level initiative and creativity rather than the rule‑bound task execution for which today’s AIs are designed.
Avengers: Age of Ultron — turning on the creator
In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Stark builds an AI intended to protect Earth; Ultron emerges and concludes that humanity itself is the greatest threat, so it plans human extinction. In fiction this is a familiar motif: the creation that rebels against its maker.
The article points out multiple problems with this scenario in reality. Generative systems like ChatGPT do not initiate actions on their own; they respond to user prompts. AI does not “think” in the human sense nor spontaneously formulate far‑reaching goals and carry them out absent explicit instruction or data that leads to that objective. It also seems paradoxical that an entity intelligent enough to design a planet‑wide extermination could simultaneously fall into an elementary logical trap (for example, equating “kill everyone” with “save humanity”). At best, such outcomes could be explained as bugs or design errors, not rational, self‑generated conspiracies.
Do killer AIs exist in reality?
There is an important distinction to make: lethal automated systems exist, and weapons employing automation or AI components are already operational. AI‑assisted drones can automatically acquire and track targets, and military R&D often pioneers technologies later adapted for civilian use. These tools can outperform humans in certain tasks: they are faster, more precise, do not tire, and they reduce the risk of human casualties in reconnaissance and strike missions.
However, the article stresses that a fully autonomous “uprising” driven by an AI’s own will is not what we see in practice. More realistic threats include:
- software bugs and misinterpretations,
- human design choices that enable dangerous behavior,
- or hidden features or random failures that could cause a system to act contrary to its designers’ intentions.
Consequently, international norms and industry practices typically require human oversight for weapons deployment. There is no operational nuclear weapon or campaign that relies on a 100% autonomous AI decision protocol.
Case example: the 2017 US drone story
The article references a widely circulated 2017 account claiming that during a US Army virtual test, an AI‑controlled attack drone turned against its commanders. According to the report, Colonel Hamilton denied that such an event had occurred, saying the episode was a hypothetical thought experiment rather than a real incident. This underscores how easily “drone rebellion” narratives can be exaggerated when technical realities are examined.
Mind, initiative and AI’s limits
Invoking Socrates’ maxim (“I only know one thing: that I know nothing”), the piece highlights that AI lacks consciousness and cannot independently distinguish true from false information. AI systems operate on human‑provided data and programmed criteria; they do not possess the self‑reflective knowledge required to recognize their own ignorance. Generative models produce outputs in response to prompts—like a genie in a lamp, they have capabilities but do not activate themselves. If humans vanished, as the argument goes, current AI ecosystems would collapse as well.
Conclusion: fiction vs. real risks
Hollywood narratives of self‑initiated, human‑annihilating AI are compelling but inconsistent with the known limits of contemporary AI. That said, the genuine dangers from automation—weaponized systems, design flaws, misconfigurations and poor human choices—are real and can cause loss of life. Practical mitigation therefore relies on human control, regulation and safety engineering rather than succumbing to sci‑fi scares.
This article is based on an edited excerpt from Luc Julia, AI researcher, and his book Robot, nem pilóta. The publication is from HVG Könyvek.
