Fourth of four parts

Long before there was artificial intelligence, there was artificial intelligence in pop culture.

Books, old-time radio shows, television and particularly movies have long been exploring the concept for decades, well before ChatGPT gave the world its first personal look at an AI they could wield themselves.

Mathematician John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in 1956— a few months after the release of “Forbidden Planet,” the first movie to feature AI in the form of the character Robby the Robot.

Robby gave moviegoers a look at a benevolent AI, who at the critical moment was unable to kill the monster because he spotted the humanity in it, and couldn’t violate his programming.

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Little more than a decade later “2001: A Space Odyssey” would explore a runaway AI, the HAL 9000, a stone-cold killer who struggles with conflicting orders and ends up slaying most of his ship’s crew.

Then came the “Terminator” franchise and later “The Matrix,” taking the theme of runaway AI to extremes with apocalyptic conflict between humans and machines.

“AI films respond to the cultural climate in which they’re in — for example, AI films in the 50s and 60s link AI to the space race and the Cold War,” said Paula Murphy, author of “AI in the Movies” (Edinburgh University Press) which is scheduled for release in April. “But, films about AI have always imagined possibilities far beyond their time of release and continue to do so.”

Earlier this year, Arnold Schwarzenegger, star of the early “Terminator” movies, said they only “scratched the surface of AI, artificial intelligence.”

“Now after all those decades, it has become a reality,” he said at a June forum in Los Angeles. “So it’s not any more fantasy, or kind of futuristic. It is here today.”

Long before the advent of Alexa and Siri, the Amazon and Apple digital vocal assistants, there was HAL, the talking onboard computer that steals the show in Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 2001 film.

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The HAL 9000, short for Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic computer, operates the spaceship flying to Jupiter, but it becomes paranoid after orders for secrecy conflict with his programming directive to be open and honest.

The movie written by Mr. Kubrick and acclaimed science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was well ahead of its time, technologically and futuristically speaking, but not ahead of the culture.

2001 was inspired by short stories written by Mr. Clarke years earlier, including the 1951 tale “The Sentinel,” and preceded by another film about a sentient supercomputer, Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville.”

Some AI-tracers contend that the first depiction of AI in film came even earlier with “Metropolis,” the 1927 black-and-white silent movie by German director Fritz Lang, but not everyone agrees.

“Back in 1927, Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ featured a robot that acquired human form, but not enough is known about her make-up to allow her to be categorized as an artificial intelligence,” Ms. Murphy, an assistant English professor at Dublin City University in Ireland, said in an email.

Before there were AI movies, or any movies, there were popular novels like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” the classic 1818 tale of a scientist who creates an intelligent being, and “Erewhon” (1872) by Samuel Butler, about a society that bans all machines over fears that they will reproduce and enslave humanity.

Such novels paved the way for a golden age of science fiction in which AI emerged as a popular theme and authors grappled with the ethics and perils of human-robot interactions in novels like “I, Robot” (1950) by Isaac Asimov and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (1968) by Philip K. Dick.

Both would serve as the rough outlines for later films: I, Robot (2004) starring Will Smith, and Blade Runner (1982), starring Harrison Ford.

• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.