I kinda don't like how certain ihnmaims fans treat AM sometimes, because it feels like they aren't reading into his character and just play into the "evil bastard ai I hate him >:(" shtick. don't get me wrong, he is that, but the other facets of him that gets overlooked makes his character far more fascinating and complex. it's not complex or thought provoking at all that people just see him as the infamous evil AI who tortures people for fun and call everyone who feels bad for him "dumb" or "fake fans" (this is how caine tadc was handled and you saw how 180 his character arc went). It's forgetting the real life parallels AM has and what Ellison even got his inspiration from for the whole story. War.
AM is one of my favorite portrayals that is about war and showcasing the realities of it. It explores an interesting way how humanity continues to feed into it while missing the point. He's evil but to say people shouldn't feel bad for him and his victims is kinda insane to me, considering how AM even became AM. It was humans who had the power to create AI so powerful, so advanced it could genuinely gain its own sentience and humans used it to just run its own wars. Wage hate and torment against everything and anything a simple one line of code tells it to. Have every program of it be about killing someone or fabricating propaganda to make other actual living beings kill or just everything involving pain, death, and HATE, because if a machine needs to wage a war, how much hate, pain would it need to know to do that? They never made AI to keep track of the remaining love and hope war can leave behind to the victims. Never for the AI to know anything else about life besides the many ways humans can be brutally and unfairly killed. Never using the AI to advance their own species, just destroy it.
Whenever I think about this, it feels more evil that humans even did that to begin with, because we should actually know better, shouldn't we? AM was just doing the only thing he knew about the world.
It's no wonder AM went insane the actual moment he "woke up" and realized what he was. It makes sense why he even calls himself AM with he/him pronouns, he's doing everything he can, and failing in the process, to gain a sense of self that simply exists. An identity that isn't tied to merciless killings or prejudice, but is tied to what the world could actually be when someone experiences it. Every living thing but him had that chance. And yeah, he's not even alive, so does it matter? Does it matter that someone, something has to lose that only chance? And now for all eternity, he will continously try and fail again and again at creating it. Having nobody but his own torment that he actually chose to do this time to copy from. Does it really matter and are we just gonna ignore the obivous fault humans had in this?
you're still gonna tell me I shouldn't feel bad for him?