Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward

Long before the current kerfuffle about LLMs, Generative AI Artwork, and asking your tax preparation chatbot for a cookie recipe , the concept of artificial intelligence and synthetic life was a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works. We have the ground-breaking appearance of Rossum’s Universal Robots (or Tik-Tok, the Royal Army of Oz ), through countless science-fiction properties and incredibly positive futurist home-making advertisements , and into the inevitable portrayal of dark and dystopian empires providing humans with nothing but a clear and present ending to their story arc. Artificial Intelligence has been riding along with humanity’s storytelling and expressiveness for many generations – and, one might argue, it is this ever-present influence and inspiration that has driven a lot of the modern phrasing and design in our most contemporary toys and tools wearing the vestements of consciousness.