# What is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein really about, and why does it come up in AI debates?

Date: 2019-06-05 · Author: Robert Scales · https://guidetoartificialintelligence.com/en/learn/why-does-frankenstein-matter-for-ai/

**Answer:** Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, tells of a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who brings a body to life and then abandons the intelligent, feeling creature he has made. Mary Shelley's novel is less about a monster than about a maker who refuses responsibility, which is why it has become the go-to story whenever people worry about what happens to the things we create, including AI.

When a new AI system makes headlines, one name shows up again and again in the commentary: Frankenstein. It has become shorthand for a creation that slips out of its maker's control. Yet people who go back to Mary Shelley's novel often find a different book from the one they expected. The "monster" is articulate and thoughtful, reads poetry and philosophy, and begins life gentle. What goes wrong has as much to do with the man who made him as with the creature himself.

That makes the novel more useful for thinking about AI than the scary-movie version suggests. It is a story about building something that can learn, and about what its maker owes it and everyone else.

## How the book came to be

In the summer of 1816, Mary Godwin, soon to marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, stayed with him near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where they spent long evenings with Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati, the house where he was staying. The weather was cold and gloomy, so the group stayed indoors reading German ghost stories. Byron proposed that each of them write one.

Mary, then 18, struggled for days to come up with an idea. The conversations turned to the nature of life, to the theories of Erasmus Darwin and to *galvanism*, the experiments of Luigi Galvani showing that electricity could make dead muscles twitch. Soon afterwards she imagined a scientist horrified by the life he had made. What began as a short tale grew, with Percy's encouragement, into a novel she finished in the spring of 1817.

The book was published in London on 1 January 1818 by the small firm of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, in three volumes and an edition of only 500 copies. It appeared without the author's name, with a preface written by Percy and a dedication to Mary's father, the philosopher William Godwin. She was credited by name only in 1823, on the second edition. In 1831 she published a heavily revised version, which is the text most people read today; the 1818 text is closer to her first conception.

## What happens in the novel

Victor Frankenstein, a gifted young student from Geneva, becomes obsessed with discovering how life begins. At the university of Ingolstadt he spends nearly two years assembling a body and searching for a way to bring it to life. On a dreary November night he succeeds. The creature's eye opens, and Victor, overcome with disgust, runs from the room and abandons it.

Left alone, the creature has to work out the world for himself. He is rejected everywhere because of his appearance. He hides in a rough hovel beside a cottage and secretly watches the family who live there, and from them he learns to speak and later to read. Eventually he finds Victor and makes his case: he was kind once, he says, and misery has made him cruel. He asks his maker for help. When Victor refuses and later breaks a promise to him, the story spirals into revenge and loss for both of them.

## How the creature learns

The most striking passages, for anyone interested in AI, describe how the creature learns language. No one teaches him. He simply observes, for months, and slowly works out what the sounds mean. Here is how his learning unfolds:

| What he observes | What he learns |
|---|---|
| The family's sounds produce smiles or sadness in each other | Speech carries meaning between minds |
| Certain sounds come up whenever an object is present | First words: fire, milk, bread, wood |
| The family call each other by different names | Names, and words like "father" and "sister" |
| Words such as "good" and "unhappy" recur | He can say them before he understands them |
| He finds three books and reads them | Ideas about history, love and his own place in the world |

The books he finds are John Milton's *Paradise Lost*, Plutarch's *Lives* and Goethe's *Sorrows of Werter*, and they shape how he sees himself. Comparing his fate with Milton's Adam, he tells Victor:

> "I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel"

That is a powerful idea for 1818: a made mind that learns entirely from what it observes and reads, and whose character is shaped by how it is treated.

> **Try it:** Pick a word you learned as an adult, perhaps from work or a hobby. Write down how you first worked out its meaning. Was it explained to you, or did you infer it from hearing it used, the way the creature did? Then think about what a machine would need in order to learn the same word the same way.

## Why it mattered

*Frankenstein* founded a whole family of stories. The writer Brian Aldiss has argued that it is the first true science fiction novel, because its hero deliberately uses laboratory science to achieve something fantastic. It shaped much of the fiction about artificial beings that followed, and the name "Frankenstein" itself is now widely used, though not by Shelley, for the creature.

Its deepest theme is responsibility. Victor's failing is not that he creates life but that he walks away from it the moment it disappoints him. Readers concerned with AI see the parallel: building a system that learns from the world, then refusing to take care over what it learns or how it is used. The novel turned 200 last year, and its questions are being asked with fresh urgency.

## Is today's AI anything like Frankenstein's creature?

In most ways, no. The AI systems of 2019 have no bodies, feelings or wishes of their own. A speech recognizer or a translation program does one narrow job, and it does not lie awake resenting its maker. Talk of machines "turning on us" usually says more about our fears than about any current system.

In one way, though, the comparison is apt. Many modern AI systems, such as OpenAI's GPT-2 language model shown earlier this year, learn by absorbing huge amounts of human writing, much as the creature learned by listening and reading. They pick up what is in that material, good and bad, and their makers cannot always predict the result.

That is where Shelley's novel still earns its place. It does not warn us against creating things; it shows what happens when a creator stops paying attention. Whether we are building chatbots or chess programs, the useful question is the one Victor never asked: what does this creation need from us, and what will it learn from how we treat it?

## Sources

- Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818 text): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445
- Frankenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankenstein&oldid=899445000