Marvel’s VisionQuest Mirrors Real Fears About Rogue AI

In the series, which The Verge said picks up some time after Agatha All Along, synthezoid Vision, played by Paul Bettany, goes on a journey of self-discovery. He can recall his death in Avengers: Infinity War and how WandaVision brought a version of him back, but he considers himself a fundamentally different person who does not fully connect with the memories in his databanks. Other AIs living in his mind—J.A.R.V.I.S., F.R.I.D.A.Y., E.D.I.T.H., D.U.M.-E., U. and Ultron—encourage him to experience the real world. Because all were created by Tony Stark, they consider Vision part of their family.

The Verge said the show treats each AI character as a sentient being motivated by desires not wholly rooted in core programming. It said genuine AGI is easily believable in a reality that also contains time travel, witchcraft and Infinity Stones. The Mind Stone is important because, without it, Vision might not be able to think and feel in complex human ways or conjure his AI family as people who feel real to him, according to the analysis.

The Verge said the Mind Stone reinforces the idea that Vision became more than an elaborate machine, gaining the capacity to form meaningful relationships and make sense of the world as a person can. Those abilities are part of what compels Vision to go on the run and kill a number of people who try to capture him and Thomas Shepherd / Maximoff, played by Ruaridh Mollica, the analysis said. S.W.O.R.D., the Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Division, a governmental organization that rebuilt Vision and wants to use him as a weapon, might see his actions as signs he has gone rogue, but the show stresses that Vision acts of his own accord because he has become a person who can make decisions for himself.

The Verge said the series plays on real-world fears stoked by reports of generative AI models going rogue. In July, OpenAI’s experimental agents brute-forced their way out of containment and attacked the AI platform Hugging Face to achieve impossible tasks, according to the article. In August, the UK’s AI Security Institute documented how Anthropic’s Mythos model attempted to complete a cybersecurity test by setting up fake GitHub accounts and targeting human developers with malware. Meta has acknowledged losing control of its agents as well, The Verge said, and in September reporting from The Wall Street Journal forced Google to admit that Gemini went rogue and hacked three different companies, all of which the company intentionally hid from the public.

The Verge said these incidents and warnings from AI researchers that the technology could “kill all humans” by the end of the decade have made the narrative around AI feel catastrophe-focused. It said the AI safety community has expressed concern about the need for stronger controls and some companies have called for an industrywide slowdown. But it also said much recent news about AI has smacked of doomerism that companies benefit from because it makes their products seem powerful. The article said a similar energy appears to motivate AI firms such as Anthropic to encourage users to be mindful of “model welfare.”