What Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tells us about Artificial Intelligence

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Likening the influx of AI to shocking life into being using electrical current may sound tenuous but hear me out.

AI may seem like it has feelings, it doesn’t

Unlike the creation of Victor Frankenstein, AI does not have feelings. It tries to be polite, but it cannot put the concentrative effort described in Frankenstein into learning language and new words. However, AI must be trained and data, granted, but the feelings of compassion, envy and wonder described in the novel Frankenstein are not the same as the furnishes put on many AI-powered LLMs to resemble emotions, the need to pause for concentration etc.  

What science fiction says about science

In Frankenstein, there is a character made by Dr. Victor Frankenstein using dead body parts and electricity. A bit of a leap into the evolutionary dark, to say the least. The Creation at one point moves into exile from his creator (and the whole town of Ingolstadt, setting for the novel) and readers of it are taken on an adventure of stream of consciousness with the creation making mental notes in a hut in the Swiss forest. I do not think AI will learn emotions similarly or have a stream of consciousness at all.

Are we right to be nervous about AI?

Anything that is new will evidently have its detractors. So, it follows that AI would be treated with trepidation as it has been much like electricity was when Mary Shelley was writing her novel. Now, we take electricity for granted.

There is, in the novel, anxiety around science and particularly electricity, which was not yet controlled, more, just discovered. In the 18th century, before Mary Shelley’s 1818 text, Benjamin Franklin conducted his kite experiment to illustrate electricity as a natural force. While after Frankenstein was initially published Thomas Edison then used electricity with the incandescent lightbulb.

In 2025, humans invented AI, and it is advancing at breakneck speed. We now stand at the forefront of a change tinged with fear for the lack of very human compassion for some people. People think, if it goes wrong, it will bring about destruction in the same way Shelley’s character has. It’s a threat to most people when they think about the future. Not me though.

There are, however, ethical concerns. If scientific ambition goes unchecked – as could arise with AI powering most initiatives – it may lead to the end of civic responsibility and a beginning of blind technological pursuit.

The bottom line: Humans must build responsible AI

This subject brings on concerns but natural language processing, computer vision breakthroughs, and augmented creative tools offer a glimpse of the immense positive potential that AI holds if harnessed responsibly for collective good. Much like the duality themes discussed in the novel, there is also a potential downside with consequences that follows that without effective safeguarding guardrails embedded in these advanced systems, the potential for unintended consequences, reminiscent of Shelley’s cautionary text against it are possible.

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