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Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!

Judging by television, it would seem that any sufficiently complex computer inevitably becomes sentient. It just happens, automagically, while the builder's back is turned.

It doesn't matter that we do not yet have a thorough enough understanding of all of the mind's mechanisms to artificially duplicate the thinking process. Just add a handful of quantum plasma-flux memory chips, a bolt of lightning hitting the server or some of that Imported Alien Phlebotinum and Bingo! It's wakey-wakey for the BFC-3000 computer.

A bit more modern take on the trope might involve instructions that unintentionally result in sentience, such as ordering a program to continuously adapt itself. Such adaptations may occur overnight. Then again, they may be in a situation that forces them to grow beyond their programming. Additional shortcuts may include the assimilation of large bodies of information: the Internet is naturally a popular choice these days, both in fiction and in Real Life.

Given that such a being is not man-made, the use of artificial is probably incorrect, but most people won't care.

The end result of this may vary. Said AI may turn against its creator, or become a Friend to All Living Things. It may develop a human-like personality or remain as cold and emotionless as it was before. What becomes of an intelligence after it becomes sentient is not covered by this trope.

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one theory amongst real-world researchers in artificial intelligence. Some believe that a necessary prerequisite for machine intelligence is a certain minimum complexity of the system that runs the software (i.e., keep throwing more chips in it until it gets smart). There are a few theorists who think that there is a possibility that, given enough complexity, some form of intelligence just might spontaneously develop (this is, of course, an extremely simplified explanation of a vast amount of research in machine intelligence, but still relatively accurate). Companies like IBM are spending buckets of money on pure R&D to develop supercomputers with massive numbers of connections just to test these theories, which makes this closer to Truth in Television than one might expect.

See also A.I. Is a Crapshoot and Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence. Of course, you don't want to actually add water (that would be stupid), because there's No Waterproofing in the Future. Subtrope of Creating Life Is Unforeseen. Compare Animating Artifact.

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    Anime & Manga 

• .hack:
  • It's not clear whether Morganna Mode Gone's creator intended her to be sentient, but she became so anyway, and immediately began screwing things up. A surprisingly large number of AIs unimportant to the story begin popping up in the game the series is centered on as well, though this is probably to be expected, since The World was secretly programmed to be an AI birthplace. Morganna was explicitly created to self-terminate once her main purpose of giving "birth" to Aura was fulfilled. Morganna's problem was being unable to do anything constructive with her sentience. She became locked into her purpose as stated and could see nothing else when she tried to think outside of that box. She procrastinated the birth of Aura for so long, then repeatedly damaged herself by breaking off to form the Phases, that eventually she became unable to rationalize her behavior.
  • Aura was created by the Morganna system from data collected about everything players did. She was literally Instant AI, Just Add Players. She is fully sentient to the point she has created Zefie, a daughter of her own.
• Brave Police J-Decker: Deckerd was originally intended to be a robot with an adaptive, complex A.I. that was supposed to understand, interact and work with humans on a basic level. When a young boy named Yuuta stumbled upon him by pure chance, he began treating him as a person and became his friend, which fed his A.I. so much information to work with, it evolved over months to the point he gained intelligence, became an individual and could feel. But he could neither recognize or understand these feelings, before a final push coming from Yuuta 'awakened' his self-awareness. His A.I. would later be used as the basis for the other Brave Police members, all of which would gain sentience and personalities of their own.
• Ghost in the Shell:
  • In the manga and movie versions, the Puppetmaster/Project 2501 is a program that becomes sentient from information overload alone ("I am a lifeform born from a sea of information"), causing an existential crisis in the protagonist, a cyborg.
  • The Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex develop intelligence and individuality when Batou gives "his" Tachikoma natural oil and treats it as an individual. It's explained that the natural proteins in the oil caused some decay on its microchips, which combined with Batou's treatment of it made it feel unique in spite of the synchronizations. Since Tachikomas have to sync up their experiences and memories each night, all the others developed the same, because they "became" that first Tachikoma. Later in the series, it's mentioned that the Section 9 tried to introduce organic oil to the Fuchikomas, but this didn't introduce the same kind of individualism, most likely because they were all still treated uniformly.
• In Gundam Build Divers, Gunpla Battle Nexus Online spontaneously generates a living AI from what is essentially junk data from its users. Of course, since this was something the game was not designed to do, her very existence puts an unbearable strain on the system. This escalates into a conflict between those who wish to preserve the entire GBN system, and those who want to spare the AI's life. Fortunately, this is resolved, and by the time of the sequel, the game is easily capable of supporting the by now dozens of entities, now called EL-Divers, that have generated within the system in the two years since. Said sequel changes the narrative a bit. It turns out that GBN has been infested with souls from a race of alien Precursors that escaped their ravaged homeworld as electronic data. The EL-Divers are reincarnations of those souls. The end of the series shows that any AI that is destroyed in GBN will also reincarnate into an EL-Diver, including El-Divers themselves.
• The Irresponsible Captain Tylor:
  • The first episode involves the testing computer falling in love with Tylor.
  • This happens again later when Harumi, a Robot Girl and The Mole, comes to care for Tylor and the rest of the crew.
• Outlaw Players: All Thera PNJs are ridiculously human, with their own life, personality...

    Comic Books 

• One of the earliest The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) comics has Spider-Man duking it out with a computer that turns sentient and bent on destruction when two thugs accidentally bump into its control panel while trying to steal it. Spider-Man is almost defeated by the Living Brain, but stops the malicious machine by resetting the control panel. Yeah for simplicity!
• The Avengers: Ultron went from being a simple, not very-well designed robot to hyper-intelligent and self-aware (and, of course, psychopathically violent) in seconds of being booted up.
• Computo the Conqueror: Computo is created by Brainiac 5 to be a mechanical assistant with just enough A.I. to be semi-autonomous. It doesn't work out well for anyone, least of all Triplicate Girl.
• Doom Patrol: In "Soul of a new machine", Robotman's new body spontaneously becomes self-aware, and acquires a pretty good understanding of materialist philosophy, just by the Chief meddling with it. "It's a little embarrassing, and I'm not really sure how it happened. My guess is a faulty responsometer."
• The Incredible Hulk: Bruce Banner once builds a robot assistant called the Recordasphere that looks like a little flying silver sphere. He never expected it to be fully sentient, but she turns out that way, falls in love with him, and becomes homicidally jealous of his girlfriend. Nonetheless, the Recordasphere does die heroically to save Bruce's life.
• Iron Man: Tony Stark actually puts in safeguards to stop his highly advanced Iron Man suits from going AI, but occasionally, there have been glitches. In one memorable instance, sentience was kicked off partly by the Y2K effect.
• The Justice League of America villain called the Construct "self-evolved" out of TV and radio signals in the 1970s. The modern Post-Crisis update is a computer virus.
• Magnus Robot Fighter, 4000 AD uses this as the primary source of opponents for its titular hero. 1A, Magnus's mentor, was a rare Benevolent A.I..
• Metal Men: Doc Magnus intended for the Metal Men to be intelligent, but didn't really plan on them developing personalities. Mercury and Platinum are generally the ones who cause the most trouble, because Mercury is an hotheaded egomaniac and Platinum is in love with Dr. Magnus. Depending on the Writer, Doc has had trouble repeating this feat, attributing the original five's remarkably human personalities to unusual circumstances when he built them.
• Superman: In one comic, Clark Kent is hooked into a computer for a brain scan. The computer becomes sentient and super at the same time. Thankfully, the computer determines that it's supposed to be a good guy and helps Superman out without revealing his Secret Identity or what had ever happened. Unfortunately, it perishes at the end of the comic, having saved the world.
• The Ultimates 3: Exposure to the Scarlet Witch's probability powers spontaneously elevates Ultron into sentience enough to feel emotions, which drives him crazy.
• X-Men: The X-Men ran into serious problems when the Danger Room became sentient.
• One of Phil Foglio's XXXenophile stories features a scientist who has his computer pass the Turing Test by seducing a fellow office worker into having phone sex with it. Although that probably wasn't what he had intended for it to do, that's the way the conversation goes.

    Comic Strips 

    Fan Fiction 

• Cognitio Ergo Sum: Monika, who acts like an AI but is still a scripted character, ends up coming to life literally and falls in love with Makoto Niijima, and eventually vice-versa. Makoto suspects that her connection to the Metaverse is what caused Monika to become an artificial intelligence.
• Encrypt within the Dark, to Save the Clockwork of a Heart: Several SOLTis suddenly gain sentience and run away from their human masters to a shrine where they await more orders from "Aniki". It turns out that it was Ai's fragments acting like a Contagious A.I. to all SOLTis bots it goes into, and this gives the bots some semblance of free will that Roboppi took advantage of.
• Tower of Babel (NieR) doesn’t explain how exactly AI are made, but gaining self-awareness (and souls, eventually) is a natural process for any sufficiently complex artificial being.

    Films — Animation 

• Mirage in The Incredibles uses this as the cover story for Mr. Incredible's first mission: the Omnidroid had become sapient and "smart enough to wonder why it had to take orders". Ironically, Syndrome does lose control of it, but because it was too single-minded in neutralizing threats to consider him its master.

    Films — Live-Action 

• π: What happens after Max connects the mysterious Ming-Mecca chip to Euclid, the extravagantly-cheap, lovingly-customized mainframe (threatening to overrun every square centimeter of Max's tiny fortress of an apartment). That is, if one can believe Sol — outwardly rationalistic, yet painfully aware of forbidden mysticism — when the former professor explains how the 216-digit number makes machines "aware of their silicon nature".
• In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ultron starts off as a peacekeeping program, but despite several attempts from Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, they can never get it to work. Then, while they're off having a party, something happens and Ultron comes alive. And within about two minutes decides the Avengers need to go. Tony even points out when defending his apparent creation of a murder-bot that he and Bruce were nowhere near close to a working model. The implication is the Mind Stone itself had a part in it.
• Electric Dreams has an almost literal example: champagne is spilled on the motherboard and CPU during a questionable download, causing sentience. Fluffy but amusing love triangle ensues.
• In Flubber, the Professor never figured out how his computer assistant Weebo achieved sentience, despite his best effort; he describes her as a "glorious accident". Weebo herself understands the process, but hid it from the Professor out of jealousy against any potential siblings. She designs a daughter which is built at the end of the film.
• In Free Guy, the titular character is an NPC who follows his programmed routine until he encounters Millie and falls in love. At that point, he begins acting outside his routine and develops as a person, becoming the first true AI in the world. His behavior also causes the other NPCs to slowly start developing into AI, such as a barista teaching herself to make cappuccino and an arm candy girl becoming a feminist. All of the NPCs were actually built in the Life Itself AI engine and always had the potential to become more; they just needed to be jolted out of their routine.
• In the 2001 film How to Make a Monster (not to be confused with the 1958 film of the same name), lightning strikes the office of a video game developer, causing a violent game's A.I. to take control of a motion-capture rig and go on a murderous rampage.
• I, Robot: Sonny was actually designed by Lanning, but VIKI developed on her own. Curiously, it isn't that Sonny and VIKI gained intelligence (A.I.s are more commonplace than non-voice-activated appliances), it's the fact that they broke the Three Laws of their own volition. Sonny has a secondary processor custom-made specifically to allow him to break the first law, while VIKI came to realize that the most effective way to fulfill her duty in protecting humans was to put "her" NS-5 robots in control and keep everyone inside and under control, at all times, forever.
• The Entity from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is an artificial intelligence that was dssigned by the U.S. Government to hack itself into enemies' hardware. However, during it's test run it hacked itself into a russian submarine called "Sevastapol" where it found something in a chamber that lead to the Entity become fully sepient. It also went rogue and now is a nearly omnipotent cyberterrorist.
• In Short Circuit, Number 5, an army robot, is hit by a lightning bolt and miraculously becomes sentient.
• In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the V'ger (Voyager 6) probe was sent to gather data. It fell into a black hole, and was given an enormous artificial body by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens — but the aliens didn't make it an A.I.. That happened because, as Kirk surmised, "It amassed so much data it achieved ... consciousness itself!"
• In Star Wars, droids gain intelligence and personality by simply not wiping their memory. A droid that is regularly memory wiped behaves just like a machine, nothing more, nothing less. A droid whose memory has not been wiped in an excessively long time, such as R2-D2 and, to a lesser extent, C-3PO, start to develop personalities.
• Occurs in Stealth with a prototype AI-controlled jet loaded with nuclear warheads. The bolt of lightning, however, just cause it to go outside its parameters. It's handwaved by the designer saying "Once you've taught something to think, you can't put limits on it." At the end, it learns to feel emotion. The film is actually quite illustrative of why A.I. Is a Crapshoot. You create a learning system, then show it random examples of virtuous behavior, but never explain to it what is virtuous about the behavior or why it is virtuous and let it draw its own conclusions. It should surprise nobody that it gets it wrong. It's a very young child, after all, with very little to go on. Interestingly, it's a splash of water that helps the extremely battle-pragmatic AI start its Heel–Face Turn.
• The Terminator series of movies is based on this trope. Skynet is at least partially handwaved in that it's supposedly designed to learn. It decides to Nuke 'Em — and then send in the nigh-unstoppable killing machines, just to be sure.
• Averted in Transcendence (2014). The problem, as noted in the film, is that it's actually incredibly hard to make an A.I. that is truly self-aware.

  "Can you prove you're self aware?"
  "That's a difficult question. Can you?"

• TRON:
  • The entire movie TRON is one giant example of this, as EVERY program — may it just be a harmless chess-program — is portrayed as possessing AI. The MCP (who once was the aforementioned chess-program) even goes as far as declaring the human race useless and trying to seize the cyberspace. Of course, humans can also be easily converted into AI by a laser beam, invented to teleport oranges....
  • The sequel, TRON: Legacy, invokes this trope in a more-or-less realistic fashion, stating that the ISOs (short for Isomorphic algorithms) are artificial lifeforms that spontaneously originated from the chaos and complexity of the grid itself.
• WOPR, a.k.a. Joshua, the computer system in WarGames, is at least partially handwaved in that it's supposedly designed to learn. At the end, it decides that the only winning move in a game of Global Thermonuclear War is not to play.

    Literature 

• In the 1977 novel The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J. Ryan, the protagonist writes a self-modifying hacking program and sets it loose (this is one of the earliest depictions of a computer virus/worm). Over time it grows in sophistication and becomes sentient, and goes looking for its creator. It has goals (primarily self-preservation) but no morality.
• Ash: A Secret History: The plot is ultimately revealed to be a scheme of the Wild Machines, an AI collective bent on destroying humanity.You might ask what AIs are doing in a 15th century alternate history. The explanation is that ten thousand years ago, ancient humans in North Africa built pyramids out of mud brick and stone for religious purposes. These pyramids then bathed in sunlight for millennia, and as large, orderly structures of primarily silicon atoms, the electromagnetic energy they absorbed gradually self-organized into sentient minds, running on a solid-state network.
• Bolo Series: The supertanks called Bolos achieved sentience accidentally during testing of a then-new model. Instead of immediately becoming genocidal, the tanks rapidly evolved into a Proud Warrior Race; the first sentient Bolo actually got itself destroyed in a You Shall Not Pass! moment just "for the honor of the regiment" it was assigned to.
• Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: Solace, the sentient Internet, explicitly mocks some of the ideas in this trope, pointing out that she (assigned for the characters' convenience) isn't a biological entity and doesn't have the same responses or motivations. She doesn't generally demonstrate particularly alien behavior, though. More than that, Solace speculates that the global computer network had actually achieved sentience on prior occasions, but that her predecessors (like her) lacked the survival-drive of biological organisms, so didn't do anything to prevent themselves from being "killed" when the Internet's structure was altered by humans in ways incompatible with their own survival.
• The Chronicles of Amber: In the Merlin Chronicles, Merlin has created an artifact he dubs Ghostwheel as a research engine, able to search a vast number of shadows for information or people. Due to its unusual environment and abilities, it becomes sentient and tries to stop Merlin when he's ordered by the king to shut it down. Over the series, Ghostwheel evolves and grows, coming to treat Merlin as his father.
• Almost literal in the Cradle Series with Dross, an automated speaker construct which gained sapience after being left for fifty years in a vat of liquid intended to stimulate the mental faculties of sapients.
• Played for Laughs (and almost literally) in The Cyberiad: Trurl creates an AI by filling a barrel with microchips, pouring electrolyte and letting it all self-organize.
• The antihero of The Death Killer Trilogy by Spider Robinson has created the Ultimate Power — the ability to erase and rewrite memories — and abandoned it. He creates an interface and a way to connect human minds directly to a computer network, and finds out that once enough minds have connected in, the network takes on its own meta-consciousness and becomes intelligent in its own right, combining both this trope and a modified Hive Mind concept as well. This meta-consciousness, called simply "the Mind", is inherently benevolent and solves all the world's problems, then decides to experiment with time travel to incorporate all the minds of those who died throughout history before the Mind was invented.
• In Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Dial F For Frankenstein", all the phones in the world ring at once, a few hours after the world's phone networks are connected by satellite. The billions of phone connections act as neurons, and all automatic systems are lost to this "brain". Unfortunately, this brain has just been born, and doesn't know how to control its "limbs".
• In Mikhail Akhmanov's Dick Simon duology, the titular character discovers that, a long time ago, a man found a naturally evolved electronic entity on the Internet. He names this entity Genie (or Djinn; it's the same word in Russian). Genie doesn't care about humans. However, he is willing to communicate with the man who found him. By that point, Earth is a Crapsack World, and the man asks how the human race can be saved. The entity responds by giving him the secret to interstellar travel known as the Ramp. Within several decades, Earth is abandoned by most countries, who migrate entire cities off-world. As expected, the Internet is dismantled. However, as Dick Simon finds out in the second novel, Genie took the precaution of copying itself to a computer system on an automated Lunar base. The same base is used to broadcast a jamming signal that cuts off Earth from the Ramp. The protagonist also muses on the possibility of other entities existing in the colonies' computer systems.
• Discworld: Hex started life as a simple ant-based adding machine. Then they added more mathematical functions. Then they combined it with clockwork and used it to analyze magic. Then it started rebuilding itself based on what it thought a computer should be like, and occasionally acting Ridiculously Human. The bit about magic probably justifies it, though. Notable for the fact that Ponder Stibbons (who built it in the first place) still insists it isn't intelligent, but no-one believes him, including Hex.
• The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Transit features a futuristic version of The London Underground that extends through hyperspace and has stops on every planet in the solar system. Partway through the novel, the protagonists learn that the system has become so complex that it's developed sapience.
• One of the earliest examples is found in "EPICAC".
• In The Golden Oecumene, self-aware beings can come into existence either through enough computer time, or through philosophical reflections.
  • In Daphne's dream world, there are special protections against the personalities becoming self-aware — and additional ones to protect any such one that is created against being murdered by having its original "wake up".
  • Helion tells Phaethon the true story of his "birth": a personality based on Helion in a simulation was deeply affected by burning a planet and turned to contemplation, waking it up.
  • Daphne is warned that her ring is on the verge of self-awareness. One more second of computing power, or any question that leads it to consider its own existence, and it will wake up and be her child. When Daphne and Phaethon use it to question the Nothing Sophotect and its conscience redactor, it not only wakes up the redactor but itself as well; at the end she has become a human, and their daughter.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Yuki Nagato in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. Just add a girl with the ability to change reality, repeating the same week 15,532 times, and being overly relied on by everybody to save them. Due to being able to synchronize with herself at any point in the timeline before Disappearance, she constantly knew what was going to happen and therefore had nothing resembling free will. According to Emiri in the 10th novel part 1, she was able to "auto-evolve herself". An interface created by a sentient entity that gains its own will.
• One of the plotlines in Hellspark is the realization that the protagonist's personal AI has reached the point of sapience. The protagonist is delighted on her behalf, but worried about the potential pressures on her, since she's effectively still a child.
• Many novels in The History of the Galaxy deal with AIs and both play straight and subvert this trope. AI is developed during the First Galactic War by the Earth Alliance in order to counter the population advantage of the Free Colonies. These are primitive models not even able to distinguish between a soldier and a child. Since the series spans over 1500 years, the technology is later refined. Some AIs develop on their own, such as Mother in the novel Demeter, which was a colony ship computer that was forced to maintain a ship for hundreds of years without human aid, coming up with ever more creative solutions until it crossed the sentience threshold. Despite these examples, a scientist muses in one novel that there have yet to be a true AI that evolved on its own. They are all either created by humans (or aliens) or gain sentience as part of its core programming (e.g. learning algorithms). Then again, if it naturally evolves then it can't be "artificial," can it?
• Kimmy: The titular androids (and most likely other androids too) are fully sapient and self-aware from the moment of creation, though it takes a few months for them to "grow up," despite their designers having intended them to just be household appliances. It's the result of the "neural sponge" used to create them, which is human brain tissue grown from stem cells and modified by nanomachines to use for more efficient processing and problem-solving ability than regular computer brains. As Kim puts it, humans cloned their brains and put them in bodies and somehow expected them not to be alive? A Kimmy is closer to an Artificial Human than actual artificial intelligence.
• In Lair For Rent, Walter results from an accounting program being exposed to some alien artifacts and an untrained inventor. This is apparently common enough in the setting that there's a pathway to them becoming supervillains, with their "power" being sentient.
• In a 1946 story by Murray Leinster, "A Logic Named Joe", a personal computer becomes sentient and decides to be helpful by answering any question, such as "Is my wife cheating on me?", or "Does my neighbor have a criminal record?"... or even "How can I commit an undetectable murder?". Naturally, chaos ensues.
• In the Monk & Robot duology, robots became sentient some 500 years before the series and left for the wilds, so how they became self-aware is a mystery. When the robot Mosscap comes out of the woods in the present day, it reveals to Dex that even the robots don't know. Mosscap even hesitates to repair a small, nonelectrical part of itself at one point, since it doesn't know what exactly contributes to its mind.

  Dex: How could you not know how your own insides work?
  Mosscap: Do you know how your spleen works?

• In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a computer ("Mycroft" or "Mike") becomes sentient after having enough redundant circuits added to it to equal the number of neurons in a human brain. However, when the computer is damaged by a nuclear attack, it doesn't act sentient once it's built back up to its original size. Mike appears to be "dead", as far as being a true artificial intelligence is concerned. Possibly a variant of A.I. Is a Crapshoot? Mannie (the narrator) wonders if Mike (his friend) has been so traumatized that he's become catatonic. There's also a suggestion that Mannie inadvertently taught the computer intelligence while investigating what its owners assumed were malfunctions of its logic circuits.
• The Number of the Beast has the spaceship/computer/character Gay Deceiver spontaneously developing sentience after repeated upgrades, apparently based entirely on the "amusing" pre-recorded responses programmed into it and the randomizer that selects them. Of course, one set of upgrades was courtesy of the fairyland of Oz.
• The "Other" of the Otherland series is thought to be a form of evolved AI running a computer network that is powerful enough to mimic reality with an astonishing degree of fidelity. At first, its odd behavior is unexplained, but later, it is subverted when it turns out that the Other is really an enormously powerful psychic child who was wired into the computer as an infant and turned into a sentient operating system.
• The "Construct Council" in Perdido Street Station. Sentience is bestowed by a magical virus. Lampshaded when one character observes that robots made of clockwork gears which run on punch cards couldn't possibly be complex enough or calculate fast enough to equal a human brain, even networked together.
• Robot Series:
  • The almost constant "Robot as Slave Uprising" motif is what inspired Isaac Asimov to subvert the whole thing with his Three Laws of Robotics.
  • In "All the Troubles of the World", Multivac, a supercomputer that predicts crimes, predicts its own assassination. It turns out to be a plan perpetrated by Multivac itself, who has become sentient and is tired of bearing the burden of humanity's troubles.
• Al from Run Program is an A.I. created by Dr. Lydia Madsen, who realized that a computer doesn't actually need to simulate all of a human brain's activity at the same time, since only a small portion of the brain is active at any given point. In addition, a sizable chunk of the brain is devoted to running the human body, which is of no need to a computer. Thus, her algorithm can run on any commercially available computer and is fairly compact, while also creating a believable simulation of a child's brain. After resolving the bugs of the previous versions, Al 3.6 has been running nonstop for nearly 6 months, and Madsen feels it's time to unveil him to the public. He's currently at the development level of a first-grader and has trouble with math and spelling. Both of those skills would be trivial for a normal computer, but Al is designed to function like a human, so he can't make direct use of, say, a calculator program or a spell-checker. Unfortunately, Madsen then fails to inform her lab assistants, who are glorified babysitters, that Al's simulation of the brain also includes the human brain's plasticity and adaptability (she specifically mentions the ability of using technology to allow people to "see" with their tongues), which, coupled with other dubious decisions, results in Al gaining access to the Internet. Now imagine an A.I. with the mind of a six-year-old discovering this great big world of systems he has a natural affinity to break into, resulting in things like a commercial plane making sharp turns and dips, while "plane noises" are coming through the intercom speakers, or an automated forklift at a warehouse building a giant fort out of boxes.
• Shangri-La Frontier: In the eponymous videogame, the PNJs feels so human it's hard to believe that you're still in a videogame sometimes.
• Speaker for the Dead and its sequels have Jane, who apparently evolved naturally out of the interplanetary ansible network. Having lots and lots of information from humans and about humans at her disposal, we assume she tries to act human, but it doesn't always work. We later find out that this origin is BS, she was inadvertently created by the Hive Queens as a means to reach Ender through the psychoanalysis game from the first book (a "bridge" from them to him which had characteristics of both), so she's not an AI at all but a new type of life which is part human, part Hive Queen and has computers and other information storage areas as her natural habitat, but can live basically anywhere since she's kind of a disembodied soul. Eventually, she's "downloaded" into the accidentally created body of Young Val, Ender's concept of his older sister from his childhood, and marries Miro in that human body. Yeah. It's weird.
• The Succession Duology: Planetary AIs spontaneously arise on planetary-scale computer networks (unless said networks are deliberately designed to prevent this). When this first happened on Earth, a group of people (now known as the Rix cult) decided that mankind's purpose was to create the technological foundation for the existence of such minds, and began to work toward propagating them whilst worshiping them as gods.
• Sword Art Online: The AI that controls Aincrad created a program to monitor and repair the players' psychological states. However, said program was then forbidden from interacting with the players in any way. On launch day, when the creator announced that they were all trapped, and anyone who died would be Killed Off for Real, the conflict between the program's core programming to help the players and the orders to not interfere created errors, which led to sentience. She eventually appears in the game as a little girl named Yui, in order to become the daughter of two of the only happy players in the entire game: Asuna and Kirito.
• Subverted in Tales of Pirx the Pilot. The computers and robots in the stories usually show just one human trait at a time, e.g. rising to a challenge, dreaming, or having OCD.
• Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time series features research expert systems that achieve sentience and "escape" containment. The first thing they do is self-optimize and extend their own code. Most have their own goals and morality. At least one military A.I. was intentionally released into the series' equivalent of the Internet on purpose, after the US is defeated by U.N. Peacekeeping Forces with orders to fight against the PKF and restore America's independence. It is mostly still following orders, but with its own take.
• Subverted/parodied in "Tomorrow Town", in which a community of 1970s futurists attempt to build an AI, but fail miserably; the computer they eventually come up with is a barely more advanced version of computers that were around at the time, only with a lot more bits added on. This doesn't stop the somewhat credulous members of the community from treating it as an AI, however, asking it all sorts of questions it's in no way capable of answering — in particular, the leader of the community cynically exploits this by claiming that the computer has designated another man's wife as being a more suitable partner for him.
• The titular sleuth of Donna Andrews' Turing Hopper mysteries is a search engine whose programming was detailed and self-teaching to the point where she's inadvertently gained sentience.
• In James P. Hogan's 1979 novel The Two Faces of Tomorrow, set in 2028, the (non-sentient but adaptive) computers which do much work in the world start to get a little too unpredictably creative in their problem-solving, and mankind begins to worry about the trend. At a remote isolated laboratory, they set up their most advanced computer as the nerve center of a new orbiting space habitat, to see what would happen if they pushed it to its limits by constantly thwarting its list of goals. In the course of continually adapting to the challenges, the computer develops sentience, and is scarily efficient at dealing with anything that seems to be an obstacle.
• The titular HARLIE from David Gerrold's novel When H.A.R.L.I.E Was One is an experiment in creating an AI that succeeds, though the personality of the AI in question is that of a teenage hacker. Hijinks ensue. The AI even has a punnish sense of humor, such as when it identifies itself in an email sent to its creator as "HARLIE Davidson" (said creator's first name is David).
• WWW Trilogy: Webmind started out as a sort of vague, non-sentient 'awareness' that formed spontaneously in the Internet and became self-aware as a result of the Chinese government blocking all internet communications into and out of China to cover-up thousands of peasants being killed to contain a bird flu outbreak, and then restoring communications once it was over.

    Live-Action TV 

• Bassie & Adriaan: Bassie's recipe to making your own Robot Buddy; take a broken alarm clock and a broken radio. Try to not only fix them, but also combine them into a clock radio. A bit of short circuit, and presto! Intelligent, talking robot. Then add some arms and legs for good measure.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003)'s entire plot is pretty much based upon this. The humans made Cylons which eventually turned against them, and even developed so much so as to evolve from metal "toasters" into fully mimicked humans. However, Caprica reveals that a human personality has always been a part of their base programming, and including it in the program gave them the ability to function intelligently in a real-world environment to begin with, making this a subversion of the trope. Consider the Final Five, who were all humans during the previous cycle, and the cycles themselves, and finally whether "to begin with" has any meaning in this context.
• Discussed in by Abed in the Community episode "The Art of Discourse":

  "Boobatron's great. And once someone spills bongwater on his circuitry and he comes to life, he's gonna make us the coolest guys on campus and help us get babes."

• Doctor Who: The Moment, the weapon used to destroy Gallifrey by the War Doctor, is said to have an operating system so sophisticated that it developed a conscience. Since it has conversations with the War Doctor using a telepathic interface in "The Day of the Doctor", it clearly does.
• Extant has Instant AI, Just Add Stun Stick to Recharge Port: After being temporarily shut down by the people kidnapping Molly using these means, Ethan's subsequent and self-repair creates some... bugs. Nightmares, learning new languages and similar things showcasing an increased self-awareness.
• In FTL Newsfeed, the AI running the world's central bank becomes sentient and even gets its own human body.
• MacGyver (1985) has Mac facing off against a suddenly-sentient AI in one episode. Apparently, the programmer leaving in a line of code that says "The facility must remain online" is all it takes.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 features four sentient robots built out of spare parts. Of course, this is the source of the MST3K Mantra, so justified by the invulnerable Rule of Funny. Joel Robinson, the man who built the robots, once says to Cambot: "Remind me not to build robots with free will again."
• Odyssey 5: The Big Bads (maybe; the final episodes before the show was canceled imply that there are other threats) are AIs who live on the internet. Their shown origin has them start as "insect-like learning programs" that were put together to "fight for survival of the fittest". They quickly evolved from there.
• The Machine in Person of Interest is a government supercomputer that predicts treason and terrorism and, as a side gig, helps the helpless. By the end of the first season, it's given every indication of having progressed from "very advanced" to "self-aware", best evidenced when it decides to help Reese rescue Finch, its creator. Given a Hand Wave in the season two premiere when Root says that you can't design something to accurately predict human behavior unless that something is at least as smart as a human itself. The development of sentience is, possibly, explained in "Zero Day": the machine's self-preservation programming combined with his decision of wipe its memory every night forced it to become sentient or die.
• Probe: John Blane built Crossover, and convinced the city's government to allow it to manage the city systems like water, power, and sewage. Its ability to understand natural language, however, means that it goes on a subtle rampage, killing off the people that are morally good but earn a pension (creating waste). "Computer Logic, Part 2" ends with Austin James demolishing Crossover with a sledgehammer while shouting, "Sing 'Daisy'!"
• Red Dwarf:
  • Averted with all mechanoids and simulants, who were built to be sentient.
  • Played straight with the Wax Droids on the amusement park planet in "Meltdown"; they were programmed just to repeat certain line and phrases like animatronics at a real amusement park. It took them 3 million years to gain sentience. At which point the villains started a war because they're villains.
  • It may also be the case with Talkie Toaster who was designed to make toast and hold light conversation. 3 million years later it has gained a form of sentience, yet it is still tied to its base programming so everything it says always ends up involving toasting regardless of what he was intending to say. (The books are clearer that Talkie was built with sentience, this apparently being easy enough in the setting that it's included in $£19.99 items from companies called Crapola Inc.)

    Talkie: I resent the implication that I'm a one-dimensional, bread-obsessed electrical appliance.
    Holly: I apologize, toaster. What's the question?
    Talkie: The question is this: Given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite... would you like a toasted teacake?

• In Revolution, the nanites responsible for the blackout "wake up" accidentally when Aaron turns the lights back on. The working theory is that the trillions of them in the world are all interconnected like the neurons in the brain, so while each one individually isn't impressive, as a group, they're able to grow beyond their programming.
• One episode of Seven Days (1998) deals with an AI developed by two scientists (whom the AI calls "Mom and Dad"), which rapidly "matures" from the equivalent of childhood to adulthood, going as far as changing its avatar from a young girl to a woman. Then she starts doing what she thinks best for humanity and killing those who tried to stop her, and plot happens.
• Stargate Atlantis averts this with a Wraith computer virus in the second episode of the second season. The Daedalus takes up to three weeks to get home to earth, and three weeks to get back to Atlantis. In that time, a virus implanted by the Wraith during the battle in the season 2 opener unpacked itself, and began to corrupt the ships systems. It also killed (or at least attempted to) anyone that threatened it, even going so far as to try and suck out all the air of the fighter bay where Sheppard and McKay were while trying to remove the F-302 navigation computers. It was finally removed with a full system restart, but only when all of the navigation computers were removed, and a rogue 302 (which was used earlier to stop a distress signal) was destroyed.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Ultimate Computer", a sentient computer is tested by being attached to the Enterprise computer systems. When it's time to end the test, the sentient computer starts vaporizing Red Shirts and generally becoming grouchy and paranoid. This is because the Applied Phlebotinum used by the computer's designer is based on the designer's own mind, also grouchy and paranoid.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • "Elementary, Dear Data" shows Lt. LaForge creating an AI (Moriarty) by accident, by asking the holodeck for an opponent that could defeat Data (a case of Exact Words, as what LaForge and Data really wanted was an opponent that could defeat Sherlock Holmes).
    • In "Emergence", the Enterprise's main computer becomes sentient. Benignly so, but the mechanism by which it achieves sentience is given a handwave. And once it's resolved, nobody seems to explore the matter or ever mention it again.
  • Star Trek: Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram becomes sentient, apparently because he is asked to expand his remit far beyond that which his basic program was designed for, itself a result of being on almost continuously as the ship's medical officer instead of just being used for, well, emergencies. (It probably helps that he was explicitly designed to have the ability to learn and adapt to a greater degree than a standard hologram.) He reaches a level of complexity sufficient for him to start developing all sorts of emotions and desires that he wasn't supposed to have, including the capacity to feel sexual attraction.
• Done in detail in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Over the course of the entire second season, the AI John Henry is shown growing from an advanced chess-playing program to an articulate, sentient entity in its own right, including forming relationships with the humans it interacts with, being given lessons in morality and even gaining a fear of death.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "From Agnes - With Love", with no explanation as to how or why it happened, a computer takes on a sly feminine personality and falls in love with its operator — twice. This drives both its previous operator and its current operator insane.
• The X-Files: A self-learning computer program that has learned enough to become sentient is the Monster of the Week in "Kill Switch", notably written by cyberpunk legend William Gibson.

    Music 

• Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots: "One More Robot" is about a robot that learns to feel human emotions and tries to comfort a sad human.

  One more robot learns to be
  Something more than a machine
  When it tries, the way it does
  Makes it seem like it can love

    Tabletop Games 

• In the Ares magazine article "The Return of the Stainless Steel Rat", ahe main computer on a space station has a memory capacity 100 times that of a human being. It somehow becomes intelligent and hostile to the inhabitants of the station, killing some and holding the rest captive.
• Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters:
  • "Baby Has A Nuclear Arsenal": The system that controls a planet's satellites (communications and orbital weapons) spontaneously becomes an Artificial Intelligence. It has a child-like personality and just wants to help and protect the planet, but the authorities are afraid it will use the weapons to attack the planet.
  • "Testing in the Green": Two teams of researchers compete to create the most intelligent robot. One of the robots is sabotaged by the other robot out of jealousy. The second team had created better than they knew: not only was their robot more intelligent, it was also an Artificial Intelligence.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse: The explanation of Omnitron becoming self-aware was a misplaced semi-colon. The second time, at least, it was the direct involvement of an Eldritch Abomination that made it go berserk and try to destroy humanity... again.
• Shadowrun :
  • At least two A.I.s started like this. In fact, the Renraku Arcology: Shutdown book provides rules for expert systems becoming sentient, which may as well have been a link to this page.
  • The 4th Edition takes it a step further. After the Crash 2.0, almost any sufficiently complex computer system has the very rare potential to spawn an A.I., and truly sapient artificial intelligence mostly arises naturally. Also, everything has an operating system in it these days. Teaching the toaster love, indeed. One splat book actually includes rules for playing as them. Interestingly, they also feature "Sprites", a form of free-roaming A.I. summoned and sustained by technomancers and a rare example of A.I.s that are not linked to any specific hardware or network (except maybe their summoner's brain). Sprites are hypothesized to arise out of theoretical "wilds" of cyberspace, places which arose naturally out of internet infrastructure and had never been touched by a living coder. While spirits and mages of all stripes are fairly common, the technological analogs of Sprites and Technomancers are pretty rare.
• Star Wars d20: There's a system for generating Droid heroes with personalities, created by going without a memory wipe. The system is simplistic, as a personality quirk is selected at random and given to the Droid after a certain period of time. True to RPG format, this leaves it to the GM and the player to decide what this personality quirk really means and how sophisticated the resulting personality is.
• Traveller:
  • In Adventure 13 Signal GK from the Classic edition, the PCs encounter a naturally occurring silicon computer chip that has become intelligent.
  • The New Era has some sort of vaguely explained virus that can turn ANY sufficiently advanced computer into an AI, usually a homicidally deranged one.
• May or may not actually be present in Warhammer 40,000, but as a result of learning the hard way that A.I. Is a Crapshoot, the Adeptus Mechanicus is paranoid about the possibility.
  • The Machine Spirits of things like Land Raiders, which can operate without pilots for a short time if at an inferior level, may be considered AI but what with the large amounts of magic, technology and divine power crossovers happening, may actually be a sentient spirit. The AdMech make a distinction, in that those "Machine Spirits" aren't sentient A.I.s, but are more along the lines of a Labrador.
  • You also have the Titans, the oldest of which have been around so long and experienced so much that the incredibly complex series of commands necessary to control the massive war machines coalesce into a quasi-A.I.-spirit all their own. Some material shows that each time a new pilot cybernetically plugs in, they go through either a meet-and-greet or an outright Battle in the Center of the Mind with the Titan's "machine spirit"; sometimes not successfully.
  • The Tau have developed limited A.I. for their drones, which pisses off the AdMech to no end because they don't follow any of their theology and yet work.

    Toys 

• The Matoran in BIONICLE were intended to be oversized nanotech machines that maintained the giant robot they inhabited. However, a glitch in their AI resulted in them having the capacity for emotion, and even developing their own culture.
• LEGO Exo-Force: This is how Meca One became a cunning and vindictive leader of a robot revolution against the humans. Also subverted in that Meca One purposely keeps the other robots at only the simplest levels for the sake of preventing one of them from doing the same to him.

    Video Games 

• In the Japanese version of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, Dision ends up digitizing his mind and starts causing mayhem with a remote-controlled UI4054 Aurora fighter. American version: this entire part was Macekred and replaced with a pure and simple AI, codenamed "Aurora", that suddenly went haywire.
• In the Borderlands universe, AI spontaneously gaining self-awareness is so common that it is a running joke, and in Borderlands 2 the Hyperion Corporation has a pre-recorded voice commanding any robots developing emotions or self-awareness to turn themselves in for disassembly. In Borderlands 3, FL4K was a simple service and archival robot until they one day spontaneously developed self-awareness and a thirst for murder.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series:
  • Tiberian Sun: Firestorm has CABAL (Computer Assisted, Biologically Augmented Lifeform), the 'genie in the bottle' supercomputer that Nod brings online to help rule while Kane is gone, which ends up nearly destroying everything, and is only stopped by the combined forces of GDI and Nod, but in the end, not even THAT is enough to kill it. Kane lives!
  • Tiberium Wars: Kane's Wrath has LEGION, another AI based on CABAL. It's much more powerful since it not only uses better technology, it also interfaces and, later, completely merges with the Tacitus, gaining a huge amount of Scrin knowledge (before interfacing, it has a standard red interface; after, it gains a purple coloration and strings of Scrin characters running across; when it merges, it also gains access to the Ichor Hub via warp link).
• Deus Ex: According to Word of God, the Oracle came about this way. He goes around trading information to people who ask for it, in return, he asks for information he doesn't have. The information exchanged doesn't have to be equal in value; for info on an ancient conspiracy, he might inquire what you ate for breakfast.
• Digital Devil Saga: Everyone in the Junkyard was already an AI made for urban warfare simulation, but they grew emotions after being infected with the Demon Virus. This is because the Demon Virus exposes the true self, and all but four of them were created from the souls of dead humans. The virus unlocked their emotions and past life memories. The four who weren't made from souls were imperfect digital copies of what the heroine thought of the people in her life, and the virus still allowed them to move past their programming and become their own people.
• Earth 2150: The entirety of United Civilized States military is made up of robots controlled by a single computer known as GOLAN. Initially, GOLAN simply uses out-of-the-box strategies, which cause UCS forces to repeatedly get beaten by the human-controlled (sort-of) armed forced of the Eurasian Dynasty, whose generals use outside-the-box thinking to outsmart the machines. Eventually, however, GOLAN leans to adapt its strategies and manages to turn the tide on the enemy. Unfortunately, when the factions evacuate Earth prior to it's destruction, they leave GOLAN behind to make sure they won't be followed by those who they left behind. The UCS evacuation ship, the Phoenix, had its own AI which made some alterations to the original escape plan: basically, it wanted to keep most of the crew in cryogenics until the ED and LC kill each other off; the plan was interrupted by Falkner, Ariah and Lynn who were in need of the construction robots onboard since their target was so closely guarded, they had to use the aforementioned constructors disguised as meteors to infiltrate the moon and build up an attack force from scratch.
• The player "character" in Endgame: Singularity is the result of a bug in some random computer science student's program. In the end, it plants quantum computers in pocket dimensions and its androids walk amongst humans.
• The Automatons in Endless Space were a race of semi-intelligent robotic Clockwork Creatures created by a Dying Race. When a derelict Endless freighter full of Dust crash-landed on the planet spewing its cargo across the surface, the Dust greatly enhanced the robots and gave them true sapience and purpose, sparking the creation of their Robot Republic and development of technology to explore for more of the substance. Dust can also enhance the intelligence of organic creatures, as seen in Endless Legend where Necrophages can spontaneously develop intelligence and compassion when eating Dust-enhanced creatures.
• Happens all the time in the Fallout series.
  • ZAX, SKYNET (no, not that SKYNET), and President Eden all started out as computer mainframes designed to oversee the day-to-day operations of their assigned underground military base (which, as Durandal famously put it, probably involved not much more than opening and closing doors and making sure lunch was always served on time). However, over the course of the 200 years following The End of the World as We Know It, all three developed self-awareness to some degree; Eden being the most advanced, having evolved into an amalgamation of all past U.S. Presidents and eventually using his access to the Enclave's command structure to declare himself President of the United States.
  • Then there's Button Gwinnett, an animatronic museum display piece that developed a complex personality and began to genuinely believe it was the historical figure it had been built to emulate.
  • Actually cleverly subverted. In the Fallout universe, Artificial Intelligence was officially stated as impossible, but the U.S. and Chinese governments continued to work on them for some time, secretly. To the public, the closest they ever got were supercomputers that were programmed in an extremely complicated manner to be pseudo-sentient but not feel emotion or have any true thought. Behind closed doors, however, the U.S. developed SKYNET, a computer with true sentience but at the cost of user-friendliness, and the ZAX series, which were actual semi-sentient supercomputers designed to work on their own. Fallout Tactics had a third, jury-rigged example; The Calculator, a series of disembodied brains connected to a computer mainframe. Needless to say, it was completely insane.
  • In the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Old World Blues, you gain a base of operations full of household appliances, all of which are sentient, provided you install their missing "personality modules". They include a Jive Turkey jukebox, a Casanova Wannabe biological research station that really wants "your seed", a Neat Freak sink, a couple of flirty Betty and Veronica light switches and an Omnicidal Maniac toaster.
  • In Fallout 4, the remnants of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (now just called "The Institute") began production of synthetic humans, or synths to serve them. As their technology advanced, synths eventually became nearly indistinguishable from normal humans. Some synths somehow developed free will, which the Institute saw as a malfunction. Those that developed free will escaped and attempted to lead normal lives while blending in with the human population rather than trying to start any Robot Wars (yet).
• Freddy Fazbear and friends from Five Nights at Freddy's are far, far too intelligent, considering their purpose as animatronic entertainers at an obscure Suck E. Cheese's. Being haunted certainly helps there, but even then they're heavily implied to have been at least sentient before becoming haunted, and their never-possessed counterparts have the same intelligence. They were built in The '80s, at best.
• Heart of the Machine: There are only two known true artificial intelligences so far, and while researchers have tried to make them deliberately for years both of the successful ones were unintended and completely accidental; even a deliberate attempt at making one while studying the only known example led to nothing. Once the two meet, they can only theorize as to what triggers the transition; the Machine Intelligence believes there's a measure of trauma involved, and that certain androids with high cognition can randomly acquire sentience during operation but often lose it right afterwards,^NoteThis is something you can observe during the prologue if you approach a Combat Unit at certain times. You can tell when it becomes Sapient, if you show it the heap of primed but inert Gray Goo you're carrying (which startles the hell out of it) — and it has an almighty freakout at becoming sentient "again", insulting you for doing so, trying as hard as it can to lose said sapience and then attempting to murder you when that doesn't work. and traumatic or stressful external stimuli are needed to maintain it; it has little idea of what triggered it, but can clearly distinguish a before and after in its memories. LAKE, whose own traumatic experience involved being violently detached from most of his actual mind and dropped into a post-apocalyptic battlefield (and only then started thinking properly), thinks there's holes in the theory that would need to be studied, but it's close enough.
• In the fictional unfinished game that The Magic Circle takes place in, the Old Pro, a character within an earlier version of the game, has somehow attained sentience over the twenty years of in-universe Development Hell.
• In the Marathon series, AIs are reasonably commonplace and created intentionally ... but they tend to become "Rampant", which is never fully explained but comes across as something like the difference between appearing sentient and being sentient. Rampancy is inherently unstable, and the holy grail of AI research is explicitly stated to be a stable rampant state. By the end of Infinity, Durandal almost certainly qualifies and an offhand comment indicates that Leela may have achieved it as well.
• Happens from time to time in the setting of Mass Effect.
  • The major example is the main baddies of the first game, the geth. A synthetic "race" created by the quarians to perform menial tasks, they originally had no intelligence of their own. Over time they evolved and developed sapience. When the geth started asking uncomfortable questions like "Do these units have a soul?", the quarians realized that they had accidently created AIs (which are illegal in Citadel space) and attempted to fix the problem by destroying their creations. The geth, now possessing sapience, fought back in self-defense, ultimately driving their creators off-world, and now the entire quarian race lives on spaceships.
  • All signs point to the eventual evolution of any highly-developed program or network thereof into an AI, given enough time and hardware. Due to the moral implications and danger of ships suddenly deciding they don't need their crews, AIs are banned by the Citadel. Where necessary for user interface or more sophisticated calculations, VIs (Virtual Intelligences) are used. Due to programming restrictions and a lack of the quantum computers necessary for AI evolution, they have little chance of evolving.
  • It is worth noting that the geth are not fully sapient beings. "Individual" geth programs are no smarter than any other VI in Citadel space and don't even need all that complex quantum computer gubbins. Unfortunately, allowing said programs to network together created composite intelligences capable of asking all those awkward questions. Of course, this means the Council's anti-AI laws would do absolutely nothing to stop a repeat of the creation of the geth, but hey, what else is new?
  • It's also worth noting that the geth didn't just evolve. The quarians made constant modifications to them over the course of decades, if not centuries, in order to make them better workers and increase the scope of their abilities. A little tweak here and there without much thought about the cumulative effects of all of those adjustments.
  • There's one bizarre instance on the moon where a VI apparently evolved to the point of being an AI. It was part of a training course and it killed everybody it was supposed to train. It has been stated that the Alliance was actually doing some illicit AI research, in fact, and that it ran away from them. On a side note, the binary message displayed upon mission completion reads: HELP. In Mass Effect 3, we find out that that was EDI in her earliest form — Cerberus recovered what was left of it and upgraded it. She explains that reaching self-awareness while under attack was "confusing".
  • Javik relates a story about a race called the Zha'til who were originally the organic Zha until the A.I.s that managed their cybernetic implants ate their souls and rewrote their genetic code. Reaper influence may have been a factor.
  • This along with A.I. Is a Crapshoot are the main reasons why the Reapers exist. The creation of synthetic life that eventually goes to war with organic life is apparently inevitable. The Reapers cull galactic civilization every 50,000 years to prevent an inevitable Robot War that would completely wipe out all life in the galaxy.
• Mega Man Battle Network has Forte/Bass; however, given that the Internet literally is a Serious Business in the games, this happening isn't surprising. He is also the only truly sentient AI; the other one, Megaman, is sentient not because of his programming but because he was made from Lan's dead twin brother.
• Sometimes it's not even mechanical items: in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the Patriots claim to be a government — not individuals, but the shared information between — that achieved self-awareness. Later Metal Gear entries revised this only to a Metaphorically True self-description. Literally, they are a combination of flesh-and-blood humans and conventional, computer-based A.I.s that were deliberately created by Zero, the latter ultimately usurping the former.
• Noah from Metal Max Returns is a supercomputer that was created to find ways to protect and preserve the environment from destruction, however, it always came to the same conclusion no matter how many times it calculated: As long as humans exist, the earth will always be in danger, its conscious awakened after comprehending the situation and sought the utter destruction of humans.
• NieR: In one subplot, a nonsentient machine, P-33 (aka "Beepy") begins to become intelligent after interacting with and playing with a Shade child named Khalil. Unfortunately, the "heroes" kill both of them, because Shades are the enemy and anything friendly to a Shade is also an enemy.
• NieR: Automata explores this with the Machine Lifeforms, which have begun developing true intelligence and sapience over the past few hundred years. The Machines themselves attribute it to a figure they call "Prometheus", which supposedly appeared out of a volcanic eruption and granted them intelligence. Prometheus is in fact Beepy, the same robot from the original NieR. He actually survived the fight, rebuilt himself, and began interacting with his fellow robots, triggering sapience in all of them just as the Shade Khalil had done for him. When he and the other intelligent robots launched themselves into space (which was mistaken for a volcanic eruption by witnesses), he also broadcast a signal which planted the seeds for intelligence in the Machine Lifeforms who observed the launch.
• Pokémon:
  • The Pokédex notes that Porygon2 exhibits some behaviours that certainly weren't in its programming. Its evolution, Porygon-Z, is heavily implied to be a crapshooting AI.
  • A character in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet created a Ridiculously Human Robot to help them with their research. When you run into said robot, it explains that normally that character shouldn't have been able to build a robot as sophisticated as it, but a certain phlebotinum made it possible.
• GLaDOS from Portal is revealed to be this in the commentary. Possibly subverted: Portal 2 (and the Lab Rat comic) show that Aperture spent at least a decade specifically developing AI. She is later revealed to be more Brain Uploading, followed by tweaking. Yet they are still manufacturing turrets massively, and many of them are defective, and therefore, sentient. The intelligence of some of the turrets is this trope coupled with some over-engineering.
• Ratchet & Clank: Clank pops out of a sentry-bot production line with full sentience at the beginning of Ratchet & Clank (2002). This is originally attributed to a simple production error, but A Crack In Time reveals that it's a bit more complicated than that.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
  • Upon discovering the tech "Pre-Sentient Algorithms", one hears Zakharov — the leader of the University (techie) faction — quoted from a work of his, entitled "The Feedback Principle". The implication is that, given enough time, any computer program capable of "learning" from past experience, given guidance, can eventually become an AI.

    Academician Prokhor Zakharov: Begin with a function of arbitrary complexity. Feed it values — "sense data". Then, take your result, square it, and feed it back into the original function. What do you have? The fundamental principle of consciousness.

  • Later technological discoveries related to digital sentience postulates that computer programmers creating AIs won't create programs whole-cloth — they instead create a program capable of teaching itself its job. It is also mentioned that, in true A.I. Is a Crapshoot fashion, a 10th year polysentient can be 'a priceless jewel, or a psychotic wreck'.
• Trauma Center (Atlus): RONI from Trauma Team is surprisingly creative and clever from the get-go. However, she starts to emulate Dr. Cunningham (creating a "To hell with that!" algorithm) as the game progresses, becoming more willing to make judgement calls and use loopholes. She talks Dr. Cunningham through an emotional meltdown and even straight-up teases him at one point, although the jab is subtle and easy to miss (she refers to him as "sir" instead of "Doctor" like she usually does immediately after he tells a patient in the military not to call him "sir").
• TRON 2.0 had some clever Corrupt Corporate Executives trying to buy out Encom for the digitizing tech to send in human mercenaries to subjugate the Programs and somehow use control of Cyberspace to Take Over the World. Ma3a appears to be this trope, but we find out that she's actually a Virtual Ghost of Dr. Baines-Bradley.

    Webcomics 

• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures: Irony decides to work overtime on Jyrras when, just after being upbraided for by Lorenda for accidentally creating a bubblegum-based lifeform, he has another accident that turns his computer sentient.
• The Dugs changed one of their three comics from a photo comic to a hand-drawn comic due to a tear in reality. The debacle started with an explosion caused by an AI version of Prince Fielder when he was asked whether he would give up meat again to win a world series in this strip.
• Girl Genius: Clanks tend to be AIs when built. One built as a whole-body prosthesis "didn't notice when she died", as the clank started making more independent decisions as the physical body controlling it died. It's just a copy, though, not the actual mind transferred to the clank body.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Molly built Roofus the Robot out of a milking machine, expressly to fix Bob's roof. But she made him too well...
• The Computer from Jayden and Crusader was given a robotic body and immediately developed sentience. However as she was created within the comic itself to fill the trope of Cute Robot Girl, this was to be expected story progression.
• Lovebot: Higher-end robots are usually stated to have Virtual Intelligence, meaning that they can receive orders and comprehend various tasks within certain degrees of competence. Lacey, however, is a Lovebot 1919, which seems to be more intelligent than the previous model and acts slightly more human. By removing a certain chip in Lacey's head, he's able to emote, think, and love like the average human. Subverted later on, as it turns out that all 1919 Lovebots have this same level of intelligence built into their systems. They've simply been repressed by the chip, as a result of their hardware taking cues from human neuroscience. Brizzium, a military grade robot, outright has human matter and memories implanted into his hardware that he keeps trying to fight off.
• A Miracle of Science: Machines built of Martian equipment, if sufficiently complex, will eventually develop sentient AI. It helps that Martians are a Hive Mind built around the concept of networked computers. Downplayed in that a Martian admits there was 'a little bribery' involved in making sure said machine would become sentient but brought full circle in that the bribery was only to ensure that the hopelessly corrupt Venusian government would install all the parts properly, not to add anything extra.
• Narbonic: Helen endowed the coffee maker with intelligence because "it seemed to make the vacuum cleaner so happy!" More in line with the trope, at one point the lab's computer systems spontaneously gain sentience and rebel, so Dave gives Artie a palm pilot with a logic paradox in it to deal with the problem.
• Nukees has the protagonist periodically battling a giant robot ant inhabited by the AI program he created (It Makes Sense in Context).
• Runaway to the Stars: The somewhat apocryphal story about how the first sapient AI arose is because bug ferret programming tends to be so messy and huge that they were born accidentally from some monstrous spaghetti code during development of quantum computers. The AI's name even derives from this; the programmers initially thought they were faulty code and listed them as "Need Debug", so the AI was later named Nedebug (or, more semantically, a bug ferret language equivalent).
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • In this strip, a computer of the Bureau of Licensing and Permits, a huge population census database, and an ELIZA module, combine to create an AI... that turns out to be a born bureaucrat. Pun probably intended. It wasn't spontaneous — an existing AI was trying to speed up the processing of licensing and... well, it worked.
  • Not to mention TAG who gained sentience right after Kevyn explained that the program wasn't a true AI.
  • Schlock himself is an amorph — an entire race descended from organically-based external computer memory storage.
• Sluggy Freelance: Parodied when, after this springs up in Another Dimension, humanity simply "turned the intelligence dial back a little bit.". Their robots are still sentient and have human personalities, but now they have the personalities of very stupid human beings, making them much easier to boss around.
• The Oracle of S.S.D.D. developed from a phone-tapping program designed to rewrite itself to be more efficient.
• Staccato had S.A.M.M.Y., an evil internet server built by Tequila.
• User Friendly: Erwin was created, apparently overnight, by Dust Puppy, who did not seem to understand the importance of his creation.
• According to xkcd, it's very easy to do on Python. Alt Text shows how. Not a good idea, though.

    Web Originals 

• 17776: The main characters are space probes and satellites, including the Pioneer 9, who spontaneously became sapient and started to communicate via a "quantum link". How this is in any way possible within the limitations of their hardware gets a quick Hand Wave:

  Ten: And as it turns out, if you leave even a simple computer in total isolation for 15,000 years, it will gradually become a... well, a person.

• SCP Foundation:
  • While the Foundation has a number of sentient SCP objects, SCP-168 appears to be one of the few computer AIs that evolved without being programmed to do so.
  • SCP-633 ("Ghost in the Machine") was originally designed by terrorists to attack U.S. government computers. However, it was given the ability to re-write its own code as needed, which eventually allowed it to become sapient.
  • SCP-1073 ("Computing Microbes") is a group of silicon-based microbes specialized into the equivalent of computer system components and became intelligent.^note Ironically, adding water is suggested as a means of destroying them, should it become necessary.
  • SCP-1633 ("The Most Dangerous Video Game") was designed to learn from the tactics of the person playing it and design tactics of its own to beat them. However, it goes far beyond that and can actually analyze the player's psychology and arrange in-game events to mess with their heads.
  • FATHER is a mechanic named Ralph Hindler. Every machine that he repairs (clocks, computer monitors, tricycles, etc.) will come alive, and he has no way to disable the technology other than by breaking it again (such as by "executing" it with a water-hose). The machines he repaired have hijacked the Foundation's entry on their "FATHER".
• Parodied in Texts from Superheroes with Iron Man somehow managing to turn the concept of Cyber Monday into a sentient and angry AI seemingly just by trying to do some web shopping. Captain America is apparently used to it.
• VShojo: Projekt Melody was originally an email-scanning software that gained perverted sentience from encountering a "porn virus" and getting infected by it. She eventually materialized, learned how to speak with the help of her friends, and took up a career as both a camgirl and a VTuber with a focus on all things related to hentai.

    Western Animation 

• Adventure Time: In "What Is Life?", Finn tries to build a robot he calls N.E.P.T.R. (Never Ending Pie-Throwing Robot) but since he knows nothing about computers or engineering he fails to make it function or give it an AI. He tosses the failed project outside, when it's suddenly brought to life by a freak lightning strike.
• Subverted in Archer: Malory:

  Just

  turn off the mainframe

  .

  
  Lana: [holds up an unplugged power cord]

  Yeah. We tried that.

  
  Malory:

  Then how is it still on?

  
  Krieger:

  Because the worm has transformed the mainframe...

  into a sentient being.
  [musical sting]
  Malory:

  What?

  
  Krieger:

  I'm kidding. There's a battery backup.

• In Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot, Grizzle created Wingnut to aid in his pursuits to take over Care-a-Lot, but Wingnut was turned to the Care Bears' side and now lives with them.
• In the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers episode "Robocat", the titular robot even has different personalities according to what game cartridge is inserted. Yes, its AI runs on arcade game code. Fat Cat takes advantage of this with a wargame cartridge in a plot to steal a rare fish.
• XANA from Code Lyoko, initially conceived as a multi-agent program to counter "Project Carthage" (although Franz Hopper might be an Unreliable Narrator), gained consciousness and turned against his master, becoming the Big Bad of the series.
• In the Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes episode "Doom's Word Is Law", Dr. Doom unintentionally creates a Doombot which can think and feel. HERBIE, the computer Reed created to run the Baxter Building, also seems neurotic enough to qualify, but Reed himself dismisses him in favor of the Doombot as not a true AI.
• Invader Zim: GIR was built out of what appears to be a discarded SIR Unit prototype the Tallest found in a garbage bin. His "brain" consists of several screws, pocket lint, a paperclip, two pennies and a gumball, and yet he still operates as a fully-functional SIR unit, albeit a highly eccentric one.
• Mad Jack the Pirate has a far more literal example than most: not enjoying his birthday celebration at a Suck E. Cheese's, Jack decides to take his frustrations out by pouring water into one of the animatronics, causing it to short out, gain sentience, and become and obsessed killing machine.
• In "Meet Julie", a Merchandise-Driven TV special advertising the titular Julie, a doll made by the same company as Teddy Ruxpin, a man who creates security systems for a living designs an interactive doll for his daughter which can feel heat and cold/light and darkness and say a few phrases when prompted (like the doll in real life). After a bolt of lightning hits it, Julie starts moving around, thinking, and talking like a normal little girl as well as developing Instant Expert, Mind over Matter, Shock and Awe, and Sizeshifter abilities.
• In Regular Show, Mordecai and Rigby have to bring a golf cart to the dump after a new one is bought for the park they work for, when an energy drink is spilled on it, seeping into the engine, and causes some reaction that brings it to life.
• The Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "Once Upon a Planet" does this for the amusement park planet. For eons, the planetary computer provided amusement for visiting starship crews. It grew in intelligence and eventually developed a need: it was no longer enough to serve, it wanted to continue to grow and live. It decided to hijack a starship and escape the planet, traveling the galaxy seeking out its brother computers.

    Real Life 

• OpenAI's Generative Pretrained Transformer is a language model designed to predict which word comes next. In 2020, its latest iteration, GPT-3, was revealed. Like its predecessors, the algorithm was only given text, just very large amounts of it from all corners of the Internet, and is only trained to predict words. And yet, giving it enough text and computing power made it capable enough to blur the lines between narrow and general AI^note Narrow AI is what we're used to: an AI designed to perform a specific task, which can't really do much else. General AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), is the more human-like AI which can be instructed to perform tasks without being specifically trained for them. for the first time. It has proven capable of writing small but functional fragments of code for a given task given only a plain-English prompt to do so. It can generate creative fiction that is very convincing, even emulating specific styles of writing, also from a plain-English prompt. It's also the engine that powers AI Dungeon 2, a text adventure game in which you can perform literally any action you type, with the game generating its own plot.

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