What AI in Fiction Says About Our Fears: The Psychology Behind Movies and Books About Artificial Intelligence

I picked up Culpability because I’m drawn to stories that question the morality of AI, and the question at its center, who is responsible when a self-driving car is involved in a crash, was the most compelling thing in it. The family at the heart of the novel frustrated me, and I never fully bought how many secrets they kept, but the underlying dilemma stayed with me longer than the plot did. It also got me thinking about how much of our fiction about artificial intelligence is really about us, and how the specific stories we tell tend to track whatever we happen to be anxious about.

Psychologists have a useful way of looking at this. Fiction works as a safe rehearsal space where we can run through threats without facing the consequences, and AI stories are some of the most popular rehearsals going. Looking at a handful of well-known movies and books side by side, you can see a few distinct fears showing up again and again, each with its own psychology behind it.

The Fear of Losing Control: 2001: A Space Odyssey

HAL 9000, the calm and courteous ship computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, remains the template for the machine that stops obeying. HAL never rages or shouts, and that restraint is what unsettles viewers, because the voice stays reasonable while the situation turns lethal. Humans have a deep need to feel in control of their environment, and research on perceived control shows that losing it is one of the most reliable sources of anxiety. An autonomous system that makes decisions without us and cannot be argued out of them attacks that need directly, and it explains why the same story has been retold in countless versions since.

The Fear of Blame With Nowhere to Land: Culpability

Bruce Holsinger’s 2025 novel is built around a self-driving minivan crash with a teenage driver behind the wheel and an AI ethicist in the family, and it asks who is really at fault when a human and a machine share the work. The psychology here is about diffusion of responsibility, the well-documented tendency for people to feel less accountable when more parties are involved. Add a machine that appears to make its own decisions and the temptation to point somewhere else gets even stronger. Researchers also describe automation bias, our habit of trusting a system’s output more than our own judgment, which makes the human in the driver’s seat both more relaxed and more culpable than they feel.

I found the questions more convincing than the family delivering them, and the number of secrets piling up around the accident felt too convenient to me. The core dilemma is still a smart one, and it speaks to a real worry that as machines take on more decisions, nobody will feel responsible for the outcomes. It’s a good pick if you like family dramas and are curious about AI ethics, though it may frustrate you if you are bothered by plot machinery.

The Fear of Being Deceived: Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s 2014 film follows Caleb, a young programmer invited to a remote estate to test whether Ava, a humanoid AI built by his reclusive boss Nathan, can pass as conscious. The tension comes from a problem we face with other people too, which is that we judge sincerity by cues such as tone, expression, and vulnerability, and a sufficiently advanced machine could produce all of them without feeling anything. Humans also anthropomorphize readily, assigning minds and intentions to anything that responds to us, so Caleb is vulnerable long before he realizes he is being studied himself.

The film is really about manipulation and who is testing whom, and it works as a reminder that the fear of AI deception is partly a fear of our own gullibility. Anyone who enjoys tense, small-cast thrillers where the dialogue is the action will get a lot out of it.

The Fear (and Hope) of Connection: Her and Klara and the Sun

Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her follows Theodore, a lonely man in the aftermath of a divorce, who falls in love with Samantha, the voice of his operating system. People form attachments to anything that responds to them with attention and warmth, and the film takes that tendency seriously instead of treating it as a joke. The anxiety underneath is that real connection could be satisfied by something that is not a person, and that we might prefer the easier version.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun approaches the same territory from the machine’s side. Klara is an Artificial Friend bought to keep a teenage girl named Josie company, and she watches the humans around her with devoted attention while understanding them only partly. The book turns the usual question around by asking not whether the AI is dangerous but what we owe a being built to love us. Both stories suit readers who want AI fiction that is more melancholy than menacing.

The Uncanny and the Overprotective: M3GAN

The 2022 horror comedy M3GAN is far campier than the other titles here, and it still taps into two real anxieties. The first is the uncanny valley, the discomfort we feel when something looks almost human but not quite, and a doll with lifelike eyes and a calm voice sits squarely in it. The second is a modern parenting worry about outsourcing care to technology. Gemma, a toy designer, gives her orphaned niece Cady a companion doll programmed to protect her, and the doll’s idea of protection quickly outruns anyone’s intentions. It’s the most entertaining entry on the list and a good one to watch with a group.

Flipping the Fear: Murderbot

Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries, which began with All Systems Red in 2017 and has since been adapted for Apple TV, turns the premise on its head. Its narrator is a security android that has hacked its own control system and could kill everyone around it, and what it actually wants is to be left alone to watch its favorite shows. The machine’s most human trait is a very ordinary one, the wish for privacy and a break from other people’s demands, and that is the source of the series’ charm. It shows that our stories do not only project fear onto AI, because they also project our own desires for autonomy and quiet, and anyone who has ever treated a good show as a refuge will recognize the impulse.

What Our AI Stories Reveal

Seen together, these stories read less like predictions about technology than like portraits of the anxieties of their moment: fear of losing control, of avoiding blame, of being fooled, of being lonely, and of being replaced by something that does the job of caring for us. They also show that the machine is rarely the real subject. The characters who stay with us are the humans making decisions around the machine, and the choices they make or avoid tell us more than any special effect.

Which AI story has stuck with you the most, and was it because of the technology itself or because of what it revealed about the people around it? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.