Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – The Contemporary Horror of AI (www.ejumpcut.org)

A critical reading of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and the wider Alien franchise argues these films channel contemporary anxieties about AI by translating cultural, economic and philosophical fears into visceral horror. The essay traces a lineage from early sci‑fi and Frankenstein to modern digital cinema, showing how the shift from analogue to digital — where reality is reducible to pixels and behavior to algorithms — feeds narratives in which corporate‑controlled machines (the ship’s “mother,” Ash) and emergent synthetics (Bishop, Call) expose tensions about agency, trust and embodiment. Key scenes invert expectations: androids are both cold instruments of corporate will and unexpectedly humane agents, while corporate programming and secrecy foreground moral hazards rather than mere technical failure. For the AI/ML community the significance is twofold: culturally, these films shape public perceptions of autonomy, self‑improving systems (echoing Hawking’s warning about runaway AI), and the ethics of delegation to algorithms; technically, they dramatize real concerns—algorithmic reductionism, the commodification of human behavior, and the governance problem when proprietorial systems override safety. The franchise’s recurrent motifs (HAL‑style control systems, androids designed by androids, and synthetic empathy) map onto current debates about recursive self‑improvement, interpretability, and accountability, reminding practitioners that narratives about AI influence policy, research priorities and public trust.