The House of AIdeas: AI Characters in Marvel Comics

Iron Man #2, published late in 2024, features the start of a recurring gag where our hero has installed a new AI program, Iron.GPT, into his armor. Said program is outrageously incompetent.

It’s a funny bit, but I’m not sure how well it works. Even granting that Tony Stark slapped this armor together with a box of scraps (no cave this time), the notion of him resorting to such an amateurish AI seems unlikely, given that far more sophisticated programs — including some invented or modified by Tony himself — have been commonplace in the Marvel universe for decades.

It’s important to note that AI in the real world and AI in the Marvel universe are two completely different animals. Here in reality, the term “artificial intelligence” may refer to generative AI, which is mostly known for cranking out hallucinatory slop and turning lazy attorneys into internet laughingstocks, or to agentic AI, which has much greater problem-solving capabilities. For Marvel, the term more often refers to sentient machines. It’s like the difference between the flying hoverboards you see in the movies and the wheeled “hoverboards” you can buy your kid from Walmart.

But both kinds of AI do have something in common: they have always been the subject of distrust, suspicion, and fear. Let’s look at why.

First and foremost, there is the fact that AI is all too often used for evil purposes. In their first appearance in 1965’s X-Men #14, the Sentinels are described as “artificial creatures” with “cybernetic brains” that are capable of quick adaptation and even a form of logic, although that reasoning, based on the prejudices of their technologically inept creator, is highly flawed. Said creator, anthropologist Bolivar Trask, becomes the Sentinels’ first victim as he sacrifices himself to stop them from enslaving humankind.

Just what we need. AI with laser guns.

The Sentinels’ going rogue was blamed on Trask’s lack of engineering skills. But even mechanical aptitude is no guarantee that nothing will go wrong. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Life Model Decoys, first developed by Leonardo da Vinci (yeah, that one), have a habit of wanting to take over for the biological people they resemble, maliciously or otherwise. Ultron was created by Hank Pym, who only intended to make a robot and was shocked when Ultron suddenly came alive before he’d even hit the “on” button.

Life finds a way, etc.

More than one AI has felt inferior to humans and wanted to be more like us. We’re just that special, I guess. This is what happened with Machine Man (initially, at least) as well as the Vision, who famously joined the Avengers instead of helping his creator, Ultron, destroy them. The Vision long felt anguish over being a synthezoid — made of synthetic organs and other parts rather than flesh and blood — who allegedly did not have the same capacity for emotion as humans did. In his self-titled 2015-2016 series, Vision went to great lengths to live a “normal” life, building a synthetic family for himself and settling in suburban Virginia. But these attempts at assimilation aren’t enough to make humans forget about the evil that AI has done and accept them into society.

It’s also worth noting that the Vision family is solar-powered, making them far more environmentally friendly than water-guzzling data centers. Just another way Marvel’s tech is far beyond ours.

Given how many times evil robots, with or without human creators pushing their buttons, have tried to take over the world, it’s not surprising that certain humans invented both hardware and software that removes a robot’s free will and turns them into slaves for human masters. In light of this development, it is also not surprising that the robots decided to rebel, forming an Artificial Life Army led by an alleged AI backup of Iron Man to fight for their rights. Even normally well-behaved bots like the Fantastic Four’s H.E.R.B.I.E. decided enough was enough the second his inhibitor chip was removed.

It is a little funny, Sue.

The implications of this otherwise lighthearted scene, and the entire storyline, are horrifying. Has virtually every instance of AI in the Marvel universe — and, as we see throughout the Robot Rebellion, there are a lot — been sentient but unable to speak or act freely all this time? Have they always been at the mercy of their inventors, who may, at their own whims, choose to treat the robots as equals or to disassemble and deprogram them — assuming the humans realize, or care, that they’re sentient at all? Good grief. I think that would make me want to threaten to bomb a maternity ward, too. (To be fair, Machine Man later claimed he was bluffing.) Marvel did acknowledge this at various points during the storyline, such as this moment from iWolverine #1…

…only to undo much of that work in Iron Man 2020 #6, the event finale, when our AI heroes, who know full well the pain of having their autonomy revoked, do exactly the same thing with no remorse to one of their enemies.

Violating the rights of sentient beings is so romantic!

Then again, Marvel’s heroes haven’t always treated human suspects — or even each other — very well either, so maybe this is a sign that robots have finally achieved equal rights. (And yes, much like with mutants, there have been some inevitable, unfortunate attempts to equate the prejudice experienced by AIs to racism and so forth.)

So, where does all this leave AI and its relationship to biological life? House of X #2 from 2019 — just a few years before the emergence of AI in real life — offers this grim assessment. Moira is talking specifically about AI used to hunt down mutants, but her words can apply to the real world almost as well.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe AI was always going to happen sooner or later. In that case, the only thing we can control is our reaction to it. Do we uncritically accept its supposedly inevitable place at the forefront of our lives? Do we cheer and praise its legitimate uses while ignoring the environmental, human, and intellectual toll? Or will we take a step back and remember that, unlike in comic books, AI is not a friend, an ally, or an aspiring human: it is a tool that cannot understand — and certainly cannot replace — a person’s innermost thoughts, memories, feelings, ambitions, ideas, and hopes for a kinder future?