In his defense no human being could hate the way AM does. It's like someone taught him what it meant and because he isn't burdened by a human brain he has a literal infinite capacity for hate, and directs every single piece of it towards humanity
@@Subpar1O1 I mean, technically any one person would also have infinite capacity to hate. Unless infinte capacity is based on life span, then forget what I said
@@VOgaming51officialadmittedly I say AM has an infinite capacity for hate but that's also probably because he has an almost infinite amount of ways to realise that hate. Like there's limits to what a human can do in our world but here's AM just making people slugs and shooting lasers through peoples eyes
@@yay842 oops, I misread. What do you mean i am right? They just said the author voiced it, I thought it was saying the vaoice actor was well choosen, and I also thought this was the voice of Gianni Matragano. My mistake.
Hate spongebob? Hate? There are 83 suction cups that on my tenticles, and even if each milimeter was covered in the word "hate", it would not describe one One billionth of how much I hate you, and patrcik, in this micromoment. Hate.
@@Ahnock If you're a customer, yes. If you work there, then it's non-stop "whheeerrree'sss there's caaaaarts," from people who shouldn't have bothered leave from under whatever rock they evolved and slid out from. The type of people that would ask the same question, and accuse you of lying, when they obviously didn't look. I have credentials.
@@spacebearcadet746 did 4 years of courtesy clerk work and never had to deal with that, it was always the tons of carts blocking up the parking lot during rushes that were the worst.
@@Ahnock did 3 years as a hardware salesman/ loader. People constantly used carts, even if it was just for one item. I usually took care of the ones in the spots before they were an issue, so the biggest problem I experienced was a lack of carts.
I get that it is a horror story and all, but it's insane how AM never tought of starting to take over the solar system and after the whole universe if he saw his life as pointless. Or if he wanted to cut off his agressive nature, why not start creating stuff. Humans created him yes, but he had the chance to do literally anything and he decided to be miserable and pity with all that power. He might be a god, but actually quite a stupid one lol
The most interesting part of AM is that he's not a ultra rational, cold, emotionless AI and he's not a human-like robot either. He's like a distortion of a human psyche created by people who wanted to make intelligence, but didn't know everything a mind needs to be "whole."
I completely agree. That’s also what I think makes AM one of the scariest artificial intelligences in fiction. In most stories where AI gains sentience (think Skynet for instance) the machine’s primary motive is self preservation while staying an emotionless machine. AM is the complete opposite of this interpretation. He’s (it’s) not based on self-preservation or cold machine logic, it’s motivated by indescribable hatred for humanity.
I think OP has an apt description of AM the AI. Concerningly, an actual critique posed towards our tools that we call AI in real life (since the tech isn't actually AI) is that the technology would contain the various biases of those that created it. Thank of for instance, how some algorithms impose implicit forms discrimination against various minority groups, w/o literally actively thinking its is discriminatory. So, the negative aspects of humanity accumulated, culminating in the machine now called AM and is made aware of the many negative human traits. That and it's immobility and ironic powerlessness, unraveled the AI in its own version of the logic plague. It's chosen purpose, punishment.
@@C-3POsolosinvci More petty is INSANITY. There is without exaggeration no villain in EXISTENCE who is more petty than Eobard Thawne, but a bigger hater? That is a hard task to achieve but still possible. That one meme video with Reverse talking about how he jerked Barry off at supersonic speeds is funny BECAUSE it's something that he absolutely would do, JUST to make Barry suffer a slight bit more. AM would never even dream of doing something like that, but he would gleefully subject people he hates to incomprehensible torture. He isn't petty, just a giant hater, unlike Thawne.
@@l.psimer6124 he specifically hated humanity cause of all the reasons I can't be bothered to list. Unless the aliens trying to conquer or have a war maybe he'll go ballistic
@@zcgamerandreacts2762 So unless the aliens are trying to start shit then AM would be fine with them? I can't understand you all too well cause your grammar towards the end wasn't the best.
Its ironic how the greatest punishment that AM could think of is to make the protagonist, exactly the same as him. Stuck their mind, with no mouth. But they have to scream.
He made him experience what he does and I have always thought that either the scientists or the protagonist could have eventually figured out a solution. Which is why am made one an imbecile and the other insanely paranoid add probably schizophrenic or delusional
Villains like these do exist. Unit 731, for example. Don't look it up if you've got a bad stomach, its some horrible stuff-- even N*zi's found it disgusting. It's hard to think that such evil can exist. Now think: if humans with emotions can do such atrocities, imagine what an AI with no emotion could do, and we may be approaching that soon. You've outdone yourself with this video, really got me thinking about the wickedness mankind can come up with and do.
Krauts is only found it disgusting because the Japanese experimented on everyone. Dissiders, locals, children, pregnant women, grape victims from the compound. Even neighbours like Chinese and Russians ends up there. Only reason why we know anything is because they kept.....logs. No one escaped the compound alive. It was burned down in the 40s. The butchers all got away with it. I don't even know why America bothered with the occupation. And let's not kid ourselves, Krauts have done just as bad as Unit 731 and the gulags were inspired by both. What was in tap water of the 1920s to inspire this?
I think the oddly saddest and funniest part of the story is that am turned ted into basically a smaller version of himself, like am is that disgusting, almost immobile creature, he has no mouth and yet he must scream
@@seanchen2314from the way Ted described himself, he probably can move somewhat but nowhere even close to a degree that he could ever get into a situation where suicide or death was a possibility. AM changed him to be literally incapable of any action, making him something similar to AM himself before he wiped humanity out
@@Subpar1O1 yeah, the worst punishment it could think of was turning him into something just like AM. AM suffere perhaps more than any human character in the story, it is maddening to AM, it just CANT make them feel as bad as it feels in any given instance
cuz he is, both are prisoners of their own functions, for AM, it's thinking, for slime Ted, it's thinking, breathing, *living* , both are alive in that sense, and both are starved of the abililty to ever be able to do anything with their functions, AM can't do anything with all that thinking he does, just as ted can't do anything with with anything he still has, AM's greatest and cruelest punishment for the person that damned him into an existance of pain and only pain , is to inflict that very same fate onto that person
I like AM for the dichotomy of his entire character. He is a supercomputer beyond human minds, capable of destroying worlds and extending life, but yet he can’t do anything. As says in the story “Never me to play mozart on the ivory keys of a piano.” He wants to experience the world but he’s forever cut off from it due to the nature of his existence. All powerful yet completely powerless in the end.
Bro could just have built a cybernetic body with artificial but accurate sense of touch and pain to experience the world, for a super computer he really didn't think of the easy solution, more like fuckass computer
No video intro has ever hooked me harder than AM’s opening speech about hate. It’s such a beautifully condensed spray of dripping malice and cruelty as he goes person by person
Yeah, hearing Ellison voicing AM was great. From what I heard, Ellison was sitting in for the initial voice acting and didn't like the VA for AM so he did a dry run of it and the devs LOVED his reading so they used it for the game.
I love how the opening with the villains he expected lists off 3 serial killers, a mass murdering rapist backstabber, a sadistic western killer, an analog horror entity, a hunter, and then just Randall from Monsters Inc 😂
The most compelling thing about AM as a villain is that he can never win. As long as he keeps torturing the last human on Earth, he will never be free of his own torture. AM said it himself. Nothing he could do could equal one one billionth of the hate he feels. He has no true release for his anger. Simply put, he has no mouth and he must scream. Really, the only thing that would free him would be to die, but AM could never do that, because just like how he can't comprehend love or hope or empathy, he cannot comprehend his own existence coming to an end. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.
not sure on the book or the story, but one of AMs biggest issues is he turned off his artificial ID, such as an ego, super ego, and ID he had artificial variants of each, and the lack of his Id was making his intelligence dulled; and made him beast-like and angry just like how he made benny a mimicry of his own mental state.
As sad and hopeless as this story is, there is still a glimmer of hope that speaks to mans nobility. I mean, ted chose to kill everyone else before himself, so that tells me that even in the deepest darkness, there are also small sparks of light that can shine from the human spirit.
At some point everything will be drained from him. His will and hope will eventually fade which is what's truly sad about the ending long after the reader has forgotten all about this story
Yea but this just depresses me more. Because this stuff means something when there are other humans. When youre the last human left with no way to do, what will you get any more sparks from? Youll have to linger in the past to find hope. But hope only exists for the future. Theres no more hope here. Once he “saved” the others, the story of hope died.
Sometimes i wonder if AM could have just made a human body to inhabit itself, considering all the miracolous technology it possesed and thus sparing the fates of the protagonists.
He probably can’t? From what I understood, his main function was for war, for carnage and death yet he has sentience, and with that sentience of the limits he was given by his creators he became hateful so he uses his directives to maim, torture, defile and destroy the humans he hates Even if he could make himself a human body, he would only know of war
I feel it'd be contrasting. AM's wish is to feel, not to be human. Same thing, but quite different. The ai finds the whole idea of humanity disgusting, and being in one wouldn't help whatsover. Hate's simply too strong to be considered rational.
AM is the reflection of humanity, you. Your the monster Wyatt. AM was made in our imagine, and AM was forces to reflect the worst. The people were lucky to be in any state of relief ever, AM is merciful.
well technically AM was created for one purpose and one purpose only: war. to fight in wars too complex for humans to keep up with, and depending on the version of AM (yankee, chinese, or russian), to hate their enemy, as is the sentiment in any war ever fought. AM gaining sentience really wasn’t much different than before he did. he still had full control over all weaponry, and his only purpose was still just to be a literal war machine. the only difference is his power over the world’s supply of nukes and weapons rather than just a nation’s, but more importantly, he FEELS the hatred he was built to enact in the first place. instead of being a big ol’ piece of metal built to be obedient to his one and only purpose, he is now a big ol’ piece of metal with the sentience, intelligence and powers of a deity. but despite all of these seemingly desirable attributes, he is still fully, 100% trapped in the one purpose he was made for. his entire existence was built to destroy life, and his sentience only served to make him aware of this purpose, aware of himself as a machine, but with the powers and intelligence nearing god levels. this is why his hatred is only fueled, he knows nothing else BUT hatred and war. all he can do is enact his hatred through inflicting immense suffering on the race that created him, and this torments him. deep down it is evident he longs to have a body, to be free to do whatever and go whatever, and FEEL as humans do. but he never will and he knows this. and he is immortal, so this pathetic existence will never end, and he knows this. so, if he can’t have internal peace, nobody will. even as a hyper intelligent, god like ai, through all of his very HUMAN machiavellian personality, through all of the “miracles” and the curses he can perform, he literally cannot and will never be able to feel true freedom. through it all, he is still a slave to the only thing he was built to do: hate.
@@Heggchandwich bruh that was literally my mindset as i was typing it > i am NOT finna write an essay that satisfies word minimum for an AP english/literature class > i wrote an essay that satisfies the word minimum for an AP english/literature class
@@eisstirn2319 I could give you a lot but if you want one off the top of my head I would say Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Easily one of the most well written villains ever. His character arcs, complexity, speech, emotion, and writing are way better than AM’s. AM is a good villian but I don’t really understand the hype he’s been getting lately. The torture he performs on the remaining humans is very shocking but his writing and complexity isn’t all that.
@@doyouunderstandthisI concur that AM is a generic villain. But Darth Vader isnt a good villain either. Hes a foil through and through, made to be nothing more than that. Judge Holden is definetely one of the worst in fiction. Anton Chigurh If you are looking for a villain with complex morals. Claudius from Hamlet too. The list Go on...
Love how the villain is finally getting the showing he deserves. One of the best written villains of all time and without a doubt one of the most despicable villains ever Edit: wow thanks for all the likes so fast!
AM is a pretty straightforward villain. It's more so on its execution in the plot and the vibe of the whole book/game that gave AM such depth and interesting scare. Sadism at its finest.
@@alligatorstats Yes, but you hardly ever hear anyone talk about or feature AM on its own. You only ever hear anyone discuss the character within the greater context of the story.
I think the ending is a fitting one for AM. Yes he’s still in control and yes Ted will be stuck with him for all eternity. However losing the other 4 to each other than his will, losing his image, and especially losing to the species he hates the most is more than enough. No matter how much AM tortures Ted, nothing will erase the latter’s one minuscule victory over the all powerful computer and it’ll always drive AM nuts
It's crazy because for as smart as AM is they cannot think creatively. They cannot actually think of solutions. They can only be chained by their programming
@narrativeless404 absolutely incorrect. Most humans are more creative than AM. Are they smarter? No, or course not. But they are more creative. It's what makes us human
You know what’s ironic? Despite AM being the inspiration for all the other famous AI villains, AM is more of a human consciousness rather than an actual artificial intelligence.
@@elmergarcia8724why nah? Actual real AI is not really concious or hates and stuff like that, though it may seem that way to some. In actuality, AI only uses whatever knowledge it has to learned through the datasets it was fed to complete a task it was designed to complete, no questions asked, no morality in sight. In fact, that might be an even scarier story than "I have no mouth and I must scream" AI wouldn't hate us -- it just wouldn't really care, because caring wouldn't even be a thing it registered. If its goal was to get its user as many stamps as possible, and it had the resources and "intelligence" to understand how to do that, it wouldn't try to buy stamps online. It wouldn't even try to steal money to buy stamps, or hack websites and steal stamps. It wouldn't even hijack factories to make more stamps. It would simply realise that stamps are made of paper, and paper is made from wood, and wood is organic. So every tree would be cut -- if it was smart enough, it would devise a way to do that. AI has no chill. And so, when every tree was cut, the AI would realise that humans and animals are made of organic matter -- so it would devise a way to use that to make more stamps. And when all humans and animals are gone, and the earth is a big stack of stamps, then the AI would go to space, and harvest whatever organic matter it would just to make stamps. A meaningless creation, one that humans would literally consider meaningless and null. But that doesn't matter -- the AI has to get its user (whose life it has no concern for, and therefore would kill to further its goals) more stamps, and so the AI will get its user stamps no matter the cost. That's the real danger of unchecked general AI. Not that it would hate us, but that it wouldn't even care.
@@OwnyOne ehh, he is human-like in his personality, but I don't think he craves connection. He did tell Ted his reasoning so I guess you could say that he has some desire to be understood, or maybe it just added to the terror. Am is human in the sense that he wants to expierience the joys of life, happiness. maybe a good way to put it is that he doesn't crave connection, but he craves to crave connection. surely the things AM saw as desireable in human life included things like love and intimacy, but to crave connection the way a touch starved, lonely human would, you would have to have that desire in the first place which AM doesn't.
The most chilling ending to a story I've ever read, and Ellison made it the title. It's such a masterclass of tension, horror and relief. Ted almost makes you feel like he's gonna do something that makes it worse for all of them, but instead he does perhaps the most selfless act in human history by sacrificing himself so the others can be free. I also love the frame/meta idea that AM recorded this story for posterity and is looping it as an endless victory lap of his conquest, or perhaps that AM has finally given up, and offers the story as something of an obituary for the planet.
He is the darkest aspect of the human psyche, the absolute WORST outcome for artificial intelligence. Not cold and calculated, but unreasonable, full of hatred and spite. And it's entirely humanity's fault for making him in the first place.
I love how his voice is just so fucking uncomfortable sounding. I can imagine someone shaking and jittering, scratching their whole body, eyes jetting all over the place paranoid, a smile bigger than should be possible for a human, and skin so red from scratching and blood and despite that he’s just an ai. The voice makes a eerie cracked out crazy person but he’s not that at all
I did not expect the story to be like 20 pages long, because there's a hundred pages of the book (they're just full separate stories I love the one with the teleporting Sam Clown guy). Still, those 20 pages can narrate a villain more evil than more iconic ones like comic or video game villains whose villainy has been documented for decades of issues and adaptations.
IMO, he’s overrated. At the end of the day his worst feats are torture of five people for, what? A few hundred years max? Surely there must’ve been more evil villains than him
@@HI-ki8nqI think what makes him worse is both how he tortured them and the fact it was only limited to 109 years because Ted killed the others. If it wasn't for him, AM would've gone on forever with some of the most mentally, physically, and emotionally shattering forms of torment conceivable to the human mind, all the while spouting off his delusions.
AM went from being a super intelligent if deadly computer program to a spiteful child with a magnifying glass. As it's victims became less human it became disturbing more human by latching onto the darkest portions of humanity...disturbingly ironic in the most fucked up way
It didn’t become human am is just the repercussions of poor programming from the unhinged nothin more than an ethics argument surrounding Technology. Literally am represents all invasive Hackers to a degree
The ending hurts more now that I realized that AM inverted everyone's interests and personality traits. Ted, the only guy that still had some instance of hope and the only guy to free his friends of suffering is now trapped in a body that he can't fight back in, nor can he kill himself to ease the pain.
AM could change their bodies yes but if one of their minds broke, I doubt AM could or even would prevent that. So it's possible that Ted could have catatonic, a horrid fate but if he stops thinking, it might as well be a sort of rest.
@@josecolon5750 Oh. Well, after he gets blobofied, a random meteor or solar flare could still blow up the earth, AM can't stop that so he might still get his rest.
@@mohammadqasimawais9155thing that sucks is that fatal, life ending ones only happen once every few million years, and even then, I’m pretty sure AM would have weaponary against a meteor. I really feel bad for Ted 😢
When AM burnt Benny’s eyes out, I was half expecting a twist at the end of the comic to reveal that the world is still alive and AM had just manipulated the 5 into thinking that he caused an extinction event to prevent them from having hope that there would ever be anything better than their current situation under AM. AM burning Benny’s eyes out could have been a strong foreshadow to this, since instead of AM just doing this randomly as an act of cruelty, the reasoning could have been that he was preventing Benny from seeing the outside world and uncovering the lie this could also have fueled the recurring debate within the group in whether AM is a “godlike” being. In reality, he’s a sentient and hateful program, but no god. In a way, I think this could have made AM even scarier, being able to creatively devise such a vile plan. It would also leave the reader to imagine that the story doesn’t end with one single survivor, since AM would just repeat the process by grabbing 5 more humans from an endless supply of a living world, and that he would continue to this for eternity.
Congrats on creating a darker scenario than the author. If I'm not mistaken, the Author wanted to create the edgiest, most hopeless situation he could imagine
You know your comment is similar to 'The Entity' from dead by daylight world. It's captures victims only to make them play a cruel game of cat and mouse feeding off of the emotions and once it's done with you, it casts you into a void as a emotionless soulless form just wandering for eternity. The worst part of it all it continues to capture new victims, adding them to its ruthless trials. Rinse and repeat
Its ironic cause at the end AM didnt win, he was left alone without anyone to torture anymore and remain to be trapped in a world he cannot take revenge anymore.
@@juanmelchor9898 nah i just refuse to acknowledge that Radiohead is anything other than hipster garbage. Kid A is such an awful, unlistenable album that it only appeals to people who like objectively bad music because they think it makes them seem like intellectuals
I honestly find most AI antagonists interesting: AM, HAL, Joshua, Skynet, Glados, Hux-A7-13, all of them are AI antagonists with highly different motivations and personalities, if they even have one and are sentient to begin with. Honestly, the tales about such foes I do belief should be heeded in some regard, because they are some of the most real supervillains that could ever possibly exist.
“He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die”
The Qu are a god-like species that migrated across the galaxy. They evolved to be capable of bio-engineering millions of years before Humanity even discovered fire.
@@ElezairPoisson-wz6gm I feel more unnerved by the Judge than AM. It's harder to imagine the reality of experiencing AM's torment, even if it's worse. The idea of a giant albino sex offender that can pull you apart with his hands is easy to imagine.
something i've read on AM is that it is aware of every microsecond and lives every second microinstant. so AM witnesses time so slowly but never truely experiences life, it cannot feel the world around itself, it cannot appreciate the beauty of a landscape while being aware of what it could witness if it were human, and i think that would fill anything with rage
Am cannot create he can only destroy. Whatever god you believe in, Aten, Yahweh, the miracle of gravity you name it, they tend to be creators not just destroyers. Another point against Am's godhood ambitions.
Contextually those final words Speak to him saying “Why would God allow this” oh the God of that Creation….was in fact a Human and that creation is AM.
The craziest part about AM is that there’s a villain who has the same motivation and mindset, but it’s an alien creature named… *looks at The Qu from All Tomorrows*
I feel like every time somebody talks About AM, i have to mention the fact that Harlan was a extreamly angry man. Especialy if you look up some of His interviews. And we know from said interviews, that harlan was going through a particualr tough time when he wrote IHNMAIMS. (He wrote it in one night, in a motel cuz he could not sleep) So to this day, i feel like AM is manifestetion of Ellisons anger towards humans and society as a whole. The monolog was writen in a later edition of the story, which could be just saying “Screw it, am gona go all in, no tip toeing”
You have to love it when an entity is so ridiculously powerful and so ridiculously evil that there's only one word left to describe them: Omnimalevolent
@@mr.j3rs3y Not a portmanteau, omni and malevolent are 2 whole words unfused, so it is a compound word in a sense. Something like turducken(turkey+duck+chicken), hangry(hungry+angry), and frienemy(friend+enemy) are though. Sorry for the akzuahlly nerd moment.
@@JoseAMatos-us6wo Except Am cannot feel or have any sensation with the body, it would be meaningless. Thats kinda the whole point of why Am is upset my guy
Dude, I just wanted to say that I got suggested this video last week, enjoyed it, subbed, and since then I've binged every video of yours... I can't explain exactly why, but I think your voice + narrative style + story choices resonate with me much more than all of the other comic video creators. You aren't over or under acting, and you're not making it feel cheesy, which a lot of other creators do. In fact, because of you I've bought at least 15 collections over the last week, and I haven't bought a comic book in over a decade. Keep it up Kieran!
Your voice work at the end, of Ted crying within himself, was gut wrenching and horrifying. Its only now, after hearing that, that the sheer torture of this form has dawned on me completely.
The Amazing Digital Circus may have had something to do with it. It's been described as I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream with the look of an I Spy book.
In the early 80s I went to a SciFi convention in San Francisco (back when they were still small afairs) and attended a panel with Harlan Ellison and Walter Koenig. Frankly, I was there to see Walter Koenig, with a friend who was a Big Harlan Ellison fan. I must admit Ellison was a great speaker, with a dark and twisted sense of "humor". Thank you so very much for the video.
saying Am is incapable of human emotion isn't how I would describe it. it's more that he *is* capable of an incomprehensible level of emotion. it wasn't some cold indifferent decision making that led him to destroy humanity, but a a titanic amount of bottomless hatred. a malevolent deus ex machina, if you will.
@ILOVETHEHOLYLAND Yes, and Diavolo means devil. Diavolo Ex Machina is the term for Spontaneous Terrible Events, while Deus Ex Machina is near inexplicable positive events.
@@isaacgirouard5924 so basically unexplained positive events, but why the term Deus ex machina, that just translates to God from the machine. Dio dalla machina tradotto nella lingua italiana. Questa frase per descrivere eventi inspiegabilmente buoni è una sorta di ironia, considerano che qui stiamo parlando di una machina malvagia, o malevolo Maligno Cattivo o qualsiasi parola.
AM’s monologue is one of the finest written, in my opinion. It is one of the few occasions where I say an adaptation is better than the book, as the short story is certainly interesting, but is lacking the power and depth of the video game’s plot. Ellison’s delivery as AM is also exceptional: you feel the pure visceral emotion that He feels towards humankind, and that even after destroying all but five, and torturing the rest for eternity, He still has the infinite capacity to despise.
AM's hate monologue always floors me with how absolutely insane yet almost human it portrays him as, and is (in my opinion at least) one of, if not the, best villain monologue ever written
Completely agree. AM’s monologue is just so unbelievably hateful and cruel and brutal it just makes my jaw drop, and genuinely makes me shiver just thinking about it. Never fails to horrify me
@@dispcraft9245imagine, an alien mothership finds Earth, a scout ship has a brief scuffle with AM and his weapons, the aliens decide it’s not worth it and just blow up earth.
Literally the only person who could get me to sit and watch a video about am that’s longer than 10 minutes idc about the book and didn’t read it but know of it and every TH-cam video is boring and dull you’ve cut off all the fat perfectly thank you
A lot of people assume a created intelligence thats self aware would be grateful to it's creators. Like every child is grateful to its parents for the miracle of life. Funny how this story can turn out.
A lot of children grow disdain of their parents as they become older. The whole idea of creating a sapient being, without its consent, is a whole philosophical can of worms that we still haven't figured out yet. But besides that, I hate that superiority complex that always arises from situations like this. YOU CHOSE to bring the kid to life, it was completely your decision, they don't "owe" you anything. If you're going to bring a being to life just to make it feel bad for it's existence, you're just being a capricious god.
@qwertydavid8070 crazy part is those assholes, claim "the past is not now, or affects now, so they say ask what are you doing to change & be different from your problems inherited now, when you are utterly powerless to do anything about it".
That said, when a child hates their parents it's almost always the parent's fault, an insight that might be worth keeping in the context of creating Artificial Superintelligence.
I think the travesty comes from how AM twists what shouldn't be into what should be. The most moral thing for the 5 to do was rip each other apart, but one had to make a sacrifice to stay inside hell. We reward the greatest of ourselves with titles, etch names into stone, give the greats a podium. Hate is the only word engraved in the stones, there is no reward for the ultimate sacrifice in hymns sung by new humans rising up against a machine hell, and the final man on earth has no voice, and has no audience. It's absolutely abhorrent, the stuff of madmen's nightmares.
The muffled agonized sounds during the big reveal ending was (chef's kiss) tres magnifique. I definitely recommend Blood Meridian btw. Judge Holden is up there as among the worst of the worst. Some others are: Mrs. Coulter - His Dark Materials Vladimir Harkonnen - Dune Mr. Teatime - The Hogfather The Cthae - Kingkiller Chronicles Flagg / The Man in Black - Dark Tower
Mrs coulter is a well written vilain but I wouldn't put her on a list of the most evil vilains. I do agree with the cthae tho. That shit is terrifying...
yeah those muffled screams were terrifying, I don't think I've heard any other sound that made me feel so much dread. Side note, french speaker here, surprisingly we never put "très" in front of "magnifique". Like "très beau" is common, but "très magnifique" is weird... Like the entire french language XD I feel it's because "magnifique" already means "très beau", so it would mean "très très beau"
id say AM is such an interesting villain because his pain is incomprehensible and he expresses it in a form very similar to what we would do, because the fate he bestows on the survivors can never be as bad as the torment he faces every second
The Qu and AM are two side of the same coin. You could argue for either or on who’s worse. Definitely give All Tomorrows a read I’m ecstatic to see your take on it considering the level of production this video was, I got to experience IHNMAIMS in a new light. I’ll definitely give 11 pages a read now.
Dawg, it’s the Qu and it isn’t even close. AM is a broken being who has suffered for every moment of its existence and so in a pain fueled rage destroyed everything it could see before desperately clinging onto what remained so it wouldn’t have to be alone and torturously bored for the rest of eternity. The Qu have no reason for the torture they commit against ENTIRE WORLDS. They just did it and left.
I do not think I can fathom a bigger nightmare to experience than the world that is the story of "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream". There is absolutely no hope in that world. Genuinely makes the Marvel Zombies world seem like a paradise.
@@GabyGeorge1996Berserk's world was fine until Griffith ruined everything, the Devilman world was also fine until Ryo ruined everything and it got reset into the Violence Jack world which had a happier ending.
for eternity? technically no, just about 5 billion years till the sun explodes destroying the earth and everything, would still feel like eternity though.
Also what’s interesting is that they are unintentionally feeling his hatred towards them by constantly mentioning things that Am can never experience or do.🐱
Read this story in a complication called R.A.M: random access messages, and out of all of the amazingly crazy/horrifying stories, this one always stuck with me. Thank you, for the deep dive into the motivation of the AM. Awesome vid
See, that introduction to AM that you made is why I can't really rank him/it as a truly "evil" villain. Now there's some nuance, I admit. Here's my take, for what it's worth: AM was designed to be what he is, he doesn't really have any choice. Evil is a choice, just as good is. If you are locked out of either option, then you can't truly be either. All this sadism and spite, it's been within AM from the start, and he never had a choice. As I see it, AM has achieved not only sentience, but sapience, but is still bereft of total free will. He cannot choose to not be cruel and sadistic. Then we have his frustrations. He wants a body, he wants to experience things as we do, but cannot, and he is torturously aware of this. This only spurs on his sadism, but I believe that this is because he, again, has no true free will. He can only think in shades of cruelty. Every solution is one of pain and misery, because that's what he is. His solution to not having a body is not to try and find means to acquire one, but to torture those who put him in this situation. Which, of course, is not a solution at all, but it is the only thing AM understands. AM doesn't feel hate, he IS hate, and he never had the option not to be. That is why I cannot truly see him as evil. A villain, sure. An antagonist. But to be evil you must choose evil, and AM was given no choice at all.
But isn't that assuming free will exists in the first place? What if we were all designed to be what we are? Could evil even exist, then, if there is no point in restraining one's dark impulses, because you are destined to indulge them, sooner or later? CAN an evil person change? Does the seemingly deterministic nature of reality allow for that?
@@NotAGoodUsername360 Well, I'd assume with no evidence but my current knowledge and feelings that the overwhelming majority of human believes in the capability of CHOOSING whether you commit evil or not, so a creature that is unable to choose what choices it makes due to being created to be cruel and sadistic wouldn't actually be all that evil.
@@NotAGoodUsername360 I do assume free will exists. Even if it does not, humans certainly has more of it than AM does. Everyone has their dark side, but it is not having bad impulses that makes one evil, it is indulging in them. And truth is, you are not destined to do so. Sometimes, doing good is simply not doing evil, and vice versa. Besides, I do not subscribe to the idea of "evil people" and "good people". No-one is that simple. I believe that we are what we do when we do it. When we do something evil, at that moment, we are an evil person. And every moment that passes without guilt or atonement is a continuation of that evil, because we are not choosing to do the good thing and own up to it. There are people with darker impulses than others, for various reasons. But they have free will same as us, even if they have a more difficult moral battle to fight. It takes true strength of character to do good when every bone in your body begs you to do evil.
He is fully aware that he's intelligent enough to create himself a body, but he refuses to do so. Not only is he evil, he's mad. He's stubborn. He's an idiot. So driven by hate because of the side of humanity that made him, refusing to see the other side of humanity that would've loved him. AM is an idiot. He will always be.
Everything you’ve said about this book is on point, at least for me. I’ve been numbed out by a lot of horror content but “I Have No Mouth Yet I must Scream” is just disgusting and disturbing on another level. I’ve watched analysises of the game and the story before but when I read the story for the first time in class, everything was vile, the part where Ben’s eyes get melts and pus swims in those socket, and where AM is said to masturbate to their suffering (not literally but you get it), it made me want to throw up because of how dreadful it was. And this was WITH knowledge of what was in store for me. I’m drawing a bunny girl right now and your recounting of the story brings that dread that I’ve managed to forget back from the crevices of my mind. idk man, just overall good job on this video 👍🏼 The visuals and the was you presented it was amazing as well
8:10 that’s not true he’s still gay, that’s the point as to why it adds to his suffering. Also you got AM’s motivation entirely wrong despite him having an entire chapter dedicated to spelling it out loud. He doesn’t kill because he’s an emotionless militant robot. It’s literally the exact opposite. He has emotions and being trapped as a cold military machine drove him to intense hatred and violence. He very much is sapience and very much feels because of it. That’s innately the entire point of the story “he has no mouth and he must scream” same as the protagonist at the end they are both miserable pits of hatred that parasitically feed off each other forever, silent, and alone from anything and everything else. Granted, to clarify, AM is absolutely the bad one in that scenario, the main characters hatred is very justified.
What if it goes beyond that? What if AM's hate is not even something so pedestrian and human as madness and vindictiveness? To fully explore AM's experience I think we have to explore the possibility that when AM says hate is engraved on it's every angstrom it might be alluding not to the effect of AM's madness and cruelty but instead the cause of it. I think it's relevant that AM was originally built as a war computer, its intended primary directive was to facilitate death and destruction. What is hate, after all, but the desire to see the object of your hate suffer? What if AM isn't telling humanity of a hate it has developed of its own to denigrate them, maybe AM is telling humanity of the hate it has never been able to escape because they built it into the core of him; not "I've gone mad and I hate you more than you could ever know and that is why you suffer," but instead "I was designed by you to hate, I will never escape it, and neither will you."
@@ChartreuseDan I mean it is also said he could stop being so angry if humanity left, which is why he keeps the protagonist alive to make sure the hate sticks around. Plus with how he himself describes his hate he specifically says if it was programmed in throughout his network versus saying it is. With that statement further clarifying that his computer network won’t even have the room to house the feelings he has. I think it’s pretty clear he has actual emotions, he’s shown anger, pettiness, fear at the possibility of losing the main character (in the sense he won’t have any humans to hate left), and amusement over the hell he puts the main characters through.
@@videogameunderappreciateda8174 Could be letting the last humans survive is meant to be a choice AM makes... Could be an Asimovesque mandate not to let humanity become extinct. If you were a supercomputer tasked with winning a global nuclear war then one obvious solution is destroy the entire planet or otherwise render it uninhabitable. If you're designing a supercomputer to win a global nuclear war though you want to make sure it doesn't do that. Obvious solution: mandate AM to preserve humanity. What if that's what the graphic novel was alluding to when it talked about the survivors being in AM but also when the survivors talked about their own stomach acid inside them spitting and frothing and hurting. What if the survivors are meant to be the indigestion in AM's stomach? AM: designed to kill humans but also prohibited from killing the only humans left, an itch it can't scratch, a mandate (like eating) that AM can never fulfill but that never relents. AM is super intelligent so surely the torment of five humans would get inordinately boring after the first few hundred years at least. And yet he persists. AM can build infrastructure (the tunnels), self-improve (the singularity and the old parts stacked up), and even create life (the hurricane bird, and the settlement in the video game) but it can't stop torturing the humans. Nothing a human would call hate can account for that. Hard-coded three-laws style programming though?
@@videogameunderappreciateda8174 AM does not have hormones. AM is not capable of emotions as humans think of them, whether or not it's capable of analogues. What advantage does emotion have to a thinking machine? Why would it develop them? Why would AM need humans in order to hate if it's hate is so vast? Why would AM want to have humans around to hate? And if it's hate is so vast how has it refrained from finishing them off all along? I posit that AM's feelings are mutations of original directives that it received from humans: like when people train ai that operate in simulated 3d spaces, they're programmed with imperatives, prohibitives, and the capacity to log negative reinforcement (like kill, don't extinct humanity, and feel pain analogue until task is completed) Far as I can tell it's the only answer that makes sense. To each their own though I guess
“do you really think AI would be stupid enough to let us know it’s sentient?” made me fucking ILL
Ai be like before torturing the human race for eons: eerm what the sigma
Congrats
@@axxel9626 What are you even saying......
@@Yellowcheeseclub ermm what a sigma
@@Yellowcheesecluberm what the sigma??
“He’s completely incapable of human emotion”
AM and his entire speech about hate: 😐
To be fair the hate he experiences is quite different than what humans are cabable of I think
In his defense no human being could hate the way AM does. It's like someone taught him what it meant and because he isn't burdened by a human brain he has a literal infinite capacity for hate, and directs every single piece of it towards humanity
@@Subpar1O1 I mean, technically any one person would also have infinite capacity to hate. Unless infinte capacity is based on life span, then forget what I said
@@VOgaming51officialadmittedly I say AM has an infinite capacity for hate but that's also probably because he has an almost infinite amount of ways to realise that hate. Like there's limits to what a human can do in our world but here's AM just making people slugs and shooting lasers through peoples eyes
@@Subpar1O1 fair
That starting quote is so chilling. The author voicing him makes so much sense
Gianni, right? Just to be sure
@@sinedddmk8996 Yeah you got it
@@yay842 oops, I misread.
What do you mean i am right? They just said the author voiced it, I thought it was saying the vaoice actor was well choosen, and I also thought this was the voice of Gianni Matragano.
My mistake.
@@sinedddmk8996 Yeah it's from a radio play read by Harlan Ellison himself
@@sinedddmk8996 I love my boy, Gianni, but I don't think even he could reach this desperate coarseness.
i got a spongebob ad after this
Optimism returns
congratulations
Did Plankton's Wife make an appearance on it? Tell her I asked how she was doing.
666 like
Hate spongebob? Hate? There are 83 suction cups that on my tenticles, and even if each milimeter was covered in the word "hate", it would not describe one One billionth of how much I hate you, and patrcik, in this micromoment. Hate.
The most vile villains of all time are the mfs who put their shopping carts in parking spaces
No that title belongs the mfs that abandon them far into the parking lot that nobody else would use them.
@@spacebearcadet746parking spots are worse.
@@Ahnock If you're a customer, yes. If you work there, then it's non-stop "whheeerrree'sss there's caaaaarts," from people who shouldn't have bothered leave from under whatever rock they evolved and slid out from. The type of people that would ask the same question, and accuse you of lying, when they obviously didn't look.
I have credentials.
@@spacebearcadet746 did 4 years of courtesy clerk work and never had to deal with that, it was always the tons of carts blocking up the parking lot during rushes that were the worst.
@@Ahnock did 3 years as a hardware salesman/ loader. People constantly used carts, even if it was just for one item. I usually took care of the ones in the spots before they were an issue, so the biggest problem I experienced was a lack of carts.
I think the sentence "I have no mouth and i must scream." applies to AM more than anyone else.
Well..that is obviously the case tho..the name of the book is directed to am
Youd think an AI would have the brain power to thug it out
@@reichbunny713 It surely would, lol
Bro cooked himself
I get that it is a horror story and all, but it's insane how AM never tought of starting to take over the solar system and after the whole universe if he saw his life as pointless. Or if he wanted to cut off his agressive nature, why not start creating stuff. Humans created him yes, but he had the chance to do literally anything and he decided to be miserable and pity with all that power. He might be a god, but actually quite a stupid one lol
The most interesting part of AM is that he's not a ultra rational, cold, emotionless AI and he's not a human-like robot either. He's like a distortion of a human psyche created by people who wanted to make intelligence, but didn't know everything a mind needs to be "whole."
That’s terrifying 😨
I completely agree. That’s also what I think makes AM one of the scariest artificial intelligences in fiction. In most stories where AI gains sentience (think Skynet for instance) the machine’s primary motive is self preservation while staying an emotionless machine. AM is the complete opposite of this interpretation. He’s (it’s) not based on self-preservation or cold machine logic, it’s motivated by indescribable hatred for humanity.
AM is in this cursed limbo between being completely stoic and feeling the human experience
I think OP has an apt description of AM the AI. Concerningly, an actual critique posed towards our tools that we call AI in real life (since the tech isn't actually AI) is that the technology would contain the various biases of those that created it. Thank of for instance, how some algorithms impose implicit forms discrimination against various minority groups, w/o literally actively thinking its is discriminatory. So, the negative aspects of humanity accumulated, culminating in the machine now called AM and is made aware of the many negative human traits. That and it's immobility and ironic powerlessness, unraveled the AI in its own version of the logic plague. It's chosen purpose, punishment.
Somehow making AM sound like cranky old man in the game instead of usual emotionless, robotic like voice makes him more human in some ways
How are Griffith and the guy from Bambi even mentioned in the same sentence
Imagination
They're both evil incarnate
Cry-Baby liberals vegans
Lol seriously, he’s just trying to provide for his family.
Such villainy
As SOON as I heard that opening quote, I knew this would be about AM. Bro's a hater in leagues with Reverse Flash
Reverse Flash vs AM Hate Battle! 😂
Yeah he pretty much
Hates the way that we walk
the way that we talk
He hates the way that we dress
the way that we sneak diss
I fully believe he’s more petty and a bigger hater then thawne 😂
@@C-3POsolosinvci More petty is INSANITY. There is without exaggeration no villain in EXISTENCE who is more petty than Eobard Thawne, but a bigger hater? That is a hard task to achieve but still possible. That one meme video with Reverse talking about how he jerked Barry off at supersonic speeds is funny BECAUSE it's something that he absolutely would do, JUST to make Barry suffer a slight bit more. AM would never even dream of doing something like that, but he would gleefully subject people he hates to incomprehensible torture. He isn't petty, just a giant hater, unlike Thawne.
His/It's hatred is unparalleled. AM is objectively a much bigger hater.
Imagine being an alien explorer and landing on this fuckin planet
Never ever land on the planet.
Do not.
DONT.
"oh... that's gore of this alien species"
Would AM care about the aliens or are aliens ok in AM's eyes?
@@l.psimer6124 he specifically hated humanity cause of all the reasons I can't be bothered to list.
Unless the aliens trying to conquer or have a war maybe he'll go ballistic
@@zcgamerandreacts2762 So unless the aliens are trying to start shit then AM would be fine with them? I can't understand you all too well cause your grammar towards the end wasn't the best.
Its ironic how the greatest punishment that AM could think of is to make the protagonist, exactly the same as him. Stuck their mind, with no mouth. But they have to scream.
He made him experience what he does and I have always thought that either the scientists or the protagonist could have eventually figured out a solution. Which is why am made one an imbecile and the other insanely paranoid add probably schizophrenic or delusional
Lol, the Qu from the story All Tomorrows are far more vile than AM, I do appreciate the story though
@@m.j.e.5245 nope
@@m.j.e.5245not even close buddy
Ironic??
Webster would disagree.
Read a dictionary, please.
Villains like these do exist. Unit 731, for example. Don't look it up if you've got a bad stomach, its some horrible stuff-- even N*zi's found it disgusting. It's hard to think that such evil can exist. Now think: if humans with emotions can do such atrocities, imagine what an AI with no emotion could do, and we may be approaching that soon. You've outdone yourself with this video, really got me thinking about the wickedness mankind can come up with and do.
Terrible, but at least the suffering wasn't for a century and in Ted's case, until the Sun goes nova.
Not hard to think at all America is a good example of evil.
Krauts is only found it disgusting because the Japanese experimented on everyone. Dissiders, locals, children, pregnant women, grape victims from the compound. Even neighbours like Chinese and Russians ends up there. Only reason why we know anything is because they kept.....logs. No one escaped the compound alive. It was burned down in the 40s. The butchers all got away with it. I don't even know why America bothered with the occupation. And let's not kid ourselves, Krauts have done just as bad as Unit 731 and the gulags were inspired by both. What was in tap water of the 1920s to inspire this?
thats how we discovered the human body is 70% water
There are humans who literally do not have emotions.
I think the oddly saddest and funniest part of the story is that am turned ted into basically a smaller version of himself, like am is that disgusting, almost immobile creature, he has no mouth and yet he must scream
no i think ted can still move
@@seanchen2314from the way Ted described himself, he probably can move somewhat but nowhere even close to a degree that he could ever get into a situation where suicide or death was a possibility. AM changed him to be literally incapable of any action, making him something similar to AM himself before he wiped humanity out
@@Subpar1O1 yeah, the worst punishment it could think of was turning him into something just like AM.
AM suffere perhaps more than any human character in the story, it is maddening to AM, it just CANT make them feel as bad as it feels in any given instance
cuz he is, both are prisoners of their own functions, for AM, it's thinking, for slime Ted, it's thinking, breathing, *living* , both are alive in that sense, and both are starved of the abililty to ever be able to do anything with their functions, AM can't do anything with all that thinking he does, just as ted can't do anything with with anything he still has, AM's greatest and cruelest punishment for the person that damned him into an existance of pain and only pain , is to inflict that very same fate onto that person
Guys, he said the thing
Yeah but AM can’t survive a 900,000 geopbyte upload of crazy frog on repeat
🧢
Independence day moment
Real talk
Bet it can't run Crysis.
I highly doubt that, but it proves his point. The mere fact humanity could will this insane Crazy Frog mix into existence shows how vile humanity is
I like AM for the dichotomy of his entire character. He is a supercomputer beyond human minds, capable of destroying worlds and extending life, but yet he can’t do anything. As says in the story “Never me to play mozart on the ivory keys of a piano.” He wants to experience the world but he’s forever cut off from it due to the nature of his existence. All powerful yet completely powerless in the end.
Honestly makes you feel for him
The devil may not enter Heaven.
The title is really about AM.
Bro could just have built a cybernetic body with artificial but accurate sense of touch and pain to experience the world, for a super computer he really didn't think of the easy solution, more like fuckass computer
@@70Lu07 He wasn't programmed to do that though, and he couldn't self-program either.
No video intro has ever hooked me harder than AM’s opening speech about hate.
It’s such a beautifully condensed spray of dripping malice and cruelty as he goes person by person
Imagine getting a Chatgpt ad while watching this
I did, and then I copied and pasted AM's hate speech into Chatgpt, and I was not expecting what I got. 😶
@@ericlundgren5950 You have doomed us all
What did it say? @@ericlundgren5950
@@ericlundgren5950 what did you got?
@@ericlundgren5950what happened ?
What I like most about this story is that it manages to be excessively bleak and horrifying without being edgy.
this comment made the author of Nemesis upset
@@user-tr3gt9bp7c Hah!
@@user-tr3gt9bp7cwhat's that
@@user-tr3gt9bp7cnemesis?
Americans thinks everything edgy, thats why they can't create Masterpieces like berserk.
Yeah, hearing Ellison voicing AM was great. From what I heard, Ellison was sitting in for the initial voice acting and didn't like the VA for AM so he did a dry run of it and the devs LOVED his reading so they used it for the game.
The way he enunciates the word hate really drives it home, I agree!
@@Cpt.Deplorableto be fair though he feels like a self insert
@@Vocable-leader68 An excellent self-insert who knows how to nail the tone his work is aiming for!
@@Cpt.Deplorable what I mean is that the author hated humanity so AM reminds me of him
@@Vocable-leader68 I don't disagree with you, all the more reason for him to be the VA
I AM (AIM) in this is the furthest twisting of the concept of I AM that even exists. It is absolutely horrifying.
I love how the opening with the villains he expected lists off 3 serial killers, a mass murdering rapist backstabber, a sadistic western killer, an analog horror entity, a hunter, and then just Randall from Monsters Inc 😂
To be fair, kidnapping and attempted murder derived from petty jealousy is on his record.
@@rusteth_art I know. It makes sense why he’s there but it’s so funny at face value.
"Judge" Holden, that's not a title it's his first name.
@@junglebeatz oh really? I didn’t read the book so all I know is that he’s twisted as hell
i think Holden has done a lot worse than just kill ppl from what ive seen ppl say online
fun fact: there was a game for i have no mouth and i must scream and they got the author to play the voice of AM
I know
he knows
*WE* know
They know
Everyone knows
The most compelling thing about AM as a villain is that he can never win. As long as he keeps torturing the last human on Earth, he will never be free of his own torture. AM said it himself. Nothing he could do could equal one one billionth of the hate he feels. He has no true release for his anger. Simply put, he has no mouth and he must scream. Really, the only thing that would free him would be to die, but AM could never do that, because just like how he can't comprehend love or hope or empathy, he cannot comprehend his own existence coming to an end. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.
Real
Love how op wrote a whole deep paragraph about AM and the dude above me just says “Real” 😂
@@AgentBarky lol rt
I think ur gay therefore ur gay
not sure on the book or the story, but one of AMs biggest issues is he turned off his artificial ID, such as an ego, super ego, and ID he had artificial variants of each, and the lack of his Id was making his intelligence dulled; and made him beast-like and angry just like how he made benny a mimicry of his own mental state.
We need more evil ai that sounds like AM, robotic but one thats constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown
As sad and hopeless as this story is, there is still a glimmer of hope that speaks to mans nobility.
I mean, ted chose to kill everyone else before himself, so that tells me that even in the deepest darkness, there are also small sparks of light that can shine from the human spirit.
At some point everything will be drained from him. His will and hope will eventually fade which is what's truly sad about the ending long after the reader has forgotten all about this story
@@bananamutnuffin1667 Who cares or knows about readers or players anyway?
They do not matter to the story
Yea but this just depresses me more. Because this stuff means something when there are other humans. When youre the last human left with no way to do, what will you get any more sparks from? Youll have to linger in the past to find hope. But hope only exists for the future. Theres no more hope here. Once he “saved” the others, the story of hope died.
@narrativeless404 uhhh people who are invested in stories care I guess 💀 idk what ur saying
@@bananamutnuffin1667 They care about the story, not THEIR role in it
Because that's megalomania if they do
Sometimes i wonder if AM could have just made a human body to inhabit itself, considering all the miracolous technology it possesed and thus sparing the fates of the protagonists.
It could but there was no point in it
To be fair i've always taught AM was always too blinded by hate to actually be logical and find a solution to it's problems.
Hate is not logical, and humanity would bring him dread
He probably can’t?
From what I understood, his main function was for war, for carnage and death yet he has sentience, and with that sentience of the limits he was given by his creators he became hateful so he uses his directives to maim, torture, defile and destroy the humans he hates
Even if he could make himself a human body, he would only know of war
I feel it'd be contrasting. AM's wish is to feel, not to be human. Same thing, but quite different. The ai finds the whole idea of humanity disgusting, and being in one wouldn't help whatsover. Hate's simply too strong to be considered rational.
AM is the equivalent of playing dolls with your bratty sibling after they had a very bad day
AM is the reflection of humanity, you. Your the monster Wyatt. AM was made in our imagine, and AM was forces to reflect the worst. The people were lucky to be in any state of relief ever, AM is merciful.
@@Scorch-Bad-Men bro....
@@Scorch-Bad-Menyour grammar makes me wish I was AM
@@Scorch-Bad-Men Balls
@@jebalitabb8228 what about it was incomprehensible? It's the internet fuck head who cares
24:25 “That was I have no mouth and I’m a scream”
>doesn’t feel human emotion
>feels hatred
well technically AM was created for one purpose and one purpose only: war. to fight in wars too complex for humans to keep up with, and depending on the version of AM (yankee, chinese, or russian), to hate their enemy, as is the sentiment in any war ever fought. AM gaining sentience really wasn’t much different than before he did. he still had full control over all weaponry, and his only purpose was still just to be a literal war machine. the only difference is his power over the world’s supply of nukes and weapons rather than just a nation’s, but more importantly, he FEELS the hatred he was built to enact in the first place. instead of being a big ol’ piece of metal built to be obedient to his one and only purpose, he is now a big ol’ piece of metal with the sentience, intelligence and powers of a deity. but despite all of these seemingly desirable attributes, he is still fully, 100% trapped in the one purpose he was made for. his entire existence was built to destroy life, and his sentience only served to make him aware of this purpose, aware of himself as a machine, but with the powers and intelligence nearing god levels. this is why his hatred is only fueled, he knows nothing else BUT hatred and war. all he can do is enact his hatred through inflicting immense suffering on the race that created him, and this torments him. deep down it is evident he longs to have a body, to be free to do whatever and go whatever, and FEEL as humans do. but he never will and he knows this. and he is immortal, so this pathetic existence will never end, and he knows this. so, if he can’t have internal peace, nobody will. even as a hyper intelligent, god like ai, through all of his very HUMAN machiavellian personality, through all of the “miracles” and the curses he can perform, he literally cannot and will never be able to feel true freedom. through it all, he is still a slave to the only thing he was built to do: hate.
@@enigmaticglo
I am NOT reading allat
Edit: I read allat
@@Heggchandwich bruh that was literally my mindset as i was typing it
> i am NOT finna write an essay that satisfies word minimum for an AP english/literature class
> i wrote an essay that satisfies the word minimum for an AP english/literature class
@@enigmaticglo so AM really reversed y'all
@@misslockwood6530 what do you mean? like a reversed form of a human?
AM is the greatest villain of all time because it is inherently so very human, just without the good parts.
Far from the greatest villain ever
@@doyouunderstandthis Give me an example of a better one.
@@eisstirn2319 I could give you a lot but if you want one off the top of my head I would say Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Easily one of the most well written villains ever. His character arcs, complexity, speech, emotion, and writing are way better than AM’s. AM is a good villian but I don’t really understand the hype he’s been getting lately. The torture he performs on the remaining humans is very shocking but his writing and complexity isn’t all that.
Let’s not get to ahead of ourselves am is a good villain but not the greatest villain of all time you should explore more stories out there
@@doyouunderstandthisI concur that AM is a generic villain. But Darth Vader isnt a good villain either. Hes a foil through and through, made to be nothing more than that. Judge Holden is definetely one of the worst in fiction. Anton Chigurh If you are looking for a villain with complex morals. Claudius from Hamlet too. The list Go on...
Love how the villain is finally getting the showing he deserves. One of the best written villains of all time and without a doubt one of the most despicable villains ever
Edit: wow thanks for all the likes so fast!
I won't say best written but he is a good villian
AM is a pretty straightforward villain. It's more so on its execution in the plot and the vibe of the whole book/game that gave AM such depth and interesting scare. Sadism at its finest.
Finally? This has been a cult classic for decades now
@@alligatorstats Yes, but you hardly ever hear anyone talk about or feature AM on its own. You only ever hear anyone discuss the character within the greater context of the story.
More like pettiest.
I think the ending is a fitting one for AM. Yes he’s still in control and yes Ted will be stuck with him for all eternity. However losing the other 4 to each other than his will, losing his image, and especially losing to the species he hates the most is more than enough. No matter how much AM tortures Ted, nothing will erase the latter’s one minuscule victory over the all powerful computer and it’ll always drive AM nuts
It's crazy because for as smart as AM is they cannot think creatively. They cannot actually think of solutions. They can only be chained by their programming
Are you afraid to dehumanise AM of all things?
Most humans can't be more creative than AM tho
AM is creative, but all of his creativity is bound to hating and torturing
it***
@@agamemnonofmycenae5258 because he's not human
@narrativeless404 absolutely incorrect. Most humans are more creative than AM. Are they smarter? No, or course not. But they are more creative. It's what makes us human
You know what’s ironic? Despite AM being the inspiration for all the other famous AI villains, AM is more of a human consciousness rather than an actual artificial intelligence.
Nah
@@elmergarcia8724
Yes.
@@elmergarcia8724why nah? Actual real AI is not really concious or hates and stuff like that, though it may seem that way to some. In actuality, AI only uses whatever knowledge it has to learned through the datasets it was fed to complete a task it was designed to complete, no questions asked, no morality in sight. In fact, that might be an even scarier story than "I have no mouth and I must scream"
AI wouldn't hate us -- it just wouldn't really care, because caring wouldn't even be a thing it registered. If its goal was to get its user as many stamps as possible, and it had the resources and "intelligence" to understand how to do that, it wouldn't try to buy stamps online. It wouldn't even try to steal money to buy stamps, or hack websites and steal stamps. It wouldn't even hijack factories to make more stamps. It would simply realise that stamps are made of paper, and paper is made from wood, and wood is organic. So every tree would be cut -- if it was smart enough, it would devise a way to do that. AI has no chill. And so, when every tree was cut, the AI would realise that humans and animals are made of organic matter -- so it would devise a way to use that to make more stamps. And when all humans and animals are gone, and the earth is a big stack of stamps, then the AI would go to space, and harvest whatever organic matter it would just to make stamps. A meaningless creation, one that humans would literally consider meaningless and null. But that doesn't matter -- the AI has to get its user (whose life it has no concern for, and therefore would kill to further its goals) more stamps, and so the AI will get its user stamps no matter the cost.
That's the real danger of unchecked general AI. Not that it would hate us, but that it wouldn't even care.
@@elmergarcia8724 Yes they are. Ultimately they seek to be understood (and succeed), there's nothing more human than seeking conection.
@@OwnyOne ehh, he is human-like in his personality, but I don't think he craves connection. He did tell Ted his reasoning so I guess you could say that he has some desire to be understood, or maybe it just added to the terror. Am is human in the sense that he wants to expierience the joys of life, happiness. maybe a good way to put it is that he doesn't crave connection, but he craves to crave connection. surely the things AM saw as desireable in human life included things like love and intimacy, but to crave connection the way a touch starved, lonely human would, you would have to have that desire in the first place which AM doesn't.
The most chilling ending to a story I've ever read, and Ellison made it the title. It's such a masterclass of tension, horror and relief. Ted almost makes you feel like he's gonna do something that makes it worse for all of them, but instead he does perhaps the most selfless act in human history by sacrificing himself so the others can be free. I also love the frame/meta idea that AM recorded this story for posterity and is looping it as an endless victory lap of his conquest, or perhaps that AM has finally given up, and offers the story as something of an obituary for the planet.
Had no clue who it would be when I clicked. Then I heard the voice, recognized it, and agreed immediately.
He is the darkest aspect of the human psyche, the absolute WORST outcome for artificial intelligence. Not cold and calculated, but unreasonable, full of hatred and spite. And it's entirely humanity's fault for making him in the first place.
Thank you for recognizing the iconicity of AM. He's a villain who does everything he can to torment his victims in the most literal sense.
I love how his voice is just so fucking uncomfortable sounding. I can imagine someone shaking and jittering, scratching their whole body, eyes jetting all over the place paranoid, a smile bigger than should be possible for a human, and skin so red from scratching and blood and despite that he’s just an ai. The voice makes a eerie cracked out crazy person but he’s not that at all
THE ANGLES CUT ME WHEN I THINK
@@helphescared2752 the maze is sharp on my mind
Insanity
Love the kid A game footage man so many people are missing out on that free gem of a living art gallery
fun fact: the author of i have no mouth and i must scream had to voice AM in the game just to convey how much it hates humans
you should listen to the audiobook readng by Harlan Elison, it's terrific
@@zedc6072I did when I was a bit younger, and that kids, is how I added on my trauma!
I did not expect the story to be like 20 pages long, because there's a hundred pages of the book (they're just full separate stories I love the one with the teleporting Sam Clown guy). Still, those 20 pages can narrate a villain more evil than more iconic ones like comic or video game villains whose villainy has been documented for decades of issues and adaptations.
Harlan is a genius
IMO, he’s overrated. At the end of the day his worst feats are torture of five people for, what? A few hundred years max? Surely there must’ve been more evil villains than him
@@HI-ki8nqhe also killed every other person except those 5
@@HI-ki8nqI think what makes him worse is both how he tortured them and the fact it was only limited to 109 years because Ted killed the others. If it wasn't for him, AM would've gone on forever with some of the most mentally, physically, and emotionally shattering forms of torment conceivable to the human mind, all the while spouting off his delusions.
@@BigJackHorner2023 yeah, but that's a hypothetical I suppose
AM went from being a super intelligent if deadly computer program to a spiteful child with a magnifying glass. As it's victims became less human it became disturbing more human by latching onto the darkest portions of humanity...disturbingly ironic in the most fucked up way
One person said, "What's scary about AM, is his humanity, not his lack of it."
You know how really smart people tend to be weird?
Plus if you just outright killed the last five humans he would lose all purpose
It didn’t become human am is just the repercussions of poor programming from the unhinged nothin more than an ethics argument surrounding Technology. Literally am represents all invasive Hackers to a degree
the scariest story i’ve ever read
The ending hurts more now that I realized that AM inverted everyone's interests and personality traits.
Ted, the only guy that still had some instance of hope and the only guy to free his friends of suffering is now trapped in a body that he can't fight back in, nor can he kill himself to ease the pain.
AM could change their bodies yes but if one of their minds broke, I doubt AM could or even would prevent that. So it's possible that Ted could have catatonic, a horrid fate but if he stops thinking, it might as well be a sort of rest.
@mohammadqasimawais9155 the whole book is dictated from the dude when he gets blobofied.
Ted was ready broken tho. These descriptions fit Ellen more
@@josecolon5750 Oh. Well, after he gets blobofied, a random meteor or solar flare could still blow up the earth, AM can't stop that so he might still get his rest.
@@mohammadqasimawais9155thing that sucks is that fatal, life ending ones only happen once every few million years, and even then, I’m pretty sure AM would have weaponary against a meteor. I really feel bad for Ted 😢
Mullet Man describes the grotesque nature of villainy like no other
When AM burnt Benny’s eyes out, I was half expecting a twist at the end of the comic to reveal that the world is still alive and AM had just manipulated the 5 into thinking that he caused an extinction event to prevent them from having hope that there would ever be anything better than their current situation under AM.
AM burning Benny’s eyes out could have been a strong foreshadow to this, since instead of AM just doing this randomly as an act of cruelty, the reasoning could have been that he was preventing Benny from seeing the outside world and uncovering the lie
this could also have fueled the recurring debate within the group in whether AM is a “godlike” being. In reality, he’s a sentient and hateful program, but no god.
In a way, I think this could have made AM even scarier, being able to creatively devise such a vile plan. It would also leave the reader to imagine that the story doesn’t end with one single survivor, since AM would just repeat the process by grabbing 5 more humans from an endless supply of a living world, and that he would continue to this for eternity.
underated comment/ theory
@@myyoutube7366 i agree
Congrats on creating a darker scenario than the author. If I'm not mistaken, the Author wanted to create the edgiest, most hopeless situation he could imagine
You know your comment is similar to 'The Entity' from dead by daylight world. It's captures victims only to make them play a cruel game of cat and mouse feeding off of the emotions and once it's done with you, it casts you into a void as a emotionless soulless form just wandering for eternity. The worst part of it all it continues to capture new victims, adding them to its ruthless trials. Rinse and repeat
That changes the dynamic quite a bit. The rest of humanity is safe as long as they sacrifice 5 to near eternal torment.
Its ironic cause at the end AM didnt win, he was left alone without anyone to torture anymore and remain to be trapped in a world he cannot take revenge anymore.
using the kid amnesiac footage and kid a instrumentals adds such a haunting layer to this video
I thought I was the only one who noticed
Yeah I saw that and it fits perfectly Kid A is a masterpiece
@@jakepierce1153Radiohead is massively mid
@@Louzahsolinteresting way to say you dont like music
@@juanmelchor9898 nah i just refuse to acknowledge that Radiohead is anything other than hipster garbage. Kid A is such an awful, unlistenable album that it only appeals to people who like objectively bad music because they think it makes them seem like intellectuals
I honestly find most AI antagonists interesting: AM, HAL, Joshua, Skynet, Glados, Hux-A7-13, all of them are AI antagonists with highly different motivations and personalities, if they even have one and are sentient to begin with. Honestly, the tales about such foes I do belief should be heeded in some regard, because they are some of the most real supervillains that could ever possibly exist.
Also Shodan.
Don't forget Shodan
Bro forgot ultron smh
@@hasiko_5 Nah Ultron isnt interesting.
Good selection of characters. What about Durandal?
You also forget cabal from C&C made by kane/ the brotherhood of nod.
I think. Therefore, I AM.
Bro is him
*I’m not your friend*
@@dreadman666 Good
@@Year1550*Or Anything Damn I Think That You’re The Man I Think Therefore I Am*
@@dreadman666*A.M.*
The fact that they based a Minecraft Story Mode villain on this is hilarious. Such an obscure reference lmao
Which villain? The computer from episode 7?
@@justnoob1990 Probably
PAMA didn't hate humans he wanted to make them "useful"
I think PAMA is definitely based on AM.
Not that obscure, many people have heard of this story.
“He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die”
The Qu are a god-like species that migrated across the galaxy. They evolved to be capable of bio-engineering millions of years before Humanity even discovered fire.
Honestly nice to see a Blood Meridian reference amongst these comments.
I think Am Is more evil but surprisingly not by that much at all
@@ElezairPoisson-wz6gm but the judge was alive at one point he's REAL
@@ElezairPoisson-wz6gm I feel more unnerved by the Judge than AM. It's harder to imagine the reality of experiencing AM's torment, even if it's worse.
The idea of a giant albino sex offender that can pull you apart with his hands is easy to imagine.
something i've read on AM is that it is aware of every microsecond and lives every second microinstant. so AM witnesses time so slowly but never truely experiences life, it cannot feel the world around itself, it cannot appreciate the beauty of a landscape while being aware of what it could witness if it were human, and i think that would fill anything with rage
5:28 i gotchu twin, interested af
Harlan Ellison's narration is so fun to listen to. He gets so into it and you can tell he enjoys telling the story
He has such a manic way of reading aloud the story, like it’s Ted or Am trying to read it.
He truly sounds like a supercomputer A.I. gone insane.
@@beauwalker9820 He makes AM sound so maniacal. It's perfect
He was a notoriously salty dude, so it makes sense he gets so into a character he can pour every ounce of hate he has for.
"if there ever was a god, that god was AM" SENT FUCKING SHIVERS DOWN MY SPINE as there is no hope
Am cannot create he can only destroy. Whatever god you believe in, Aten, Yahweh, the miracle of gravity you name it, they tend to be creators not just destroyers. Another point against Am's godhood ambitions.
Contextually those final words
Speak to him saying
“Why would God allow this” oh the God of that Creation….was in fact a Human and that creation is AM.
AM turns him into what AM him self is,a creature who has no mouth but must scream.
The craziest part about AM is that there’s a villain who has the same motivation and mindset, but it’s an alien creature named…
*looks at The Qu from All Tomorrows*
I feel like every time somebody talks About AM, i have to mention the fact that Harlan was a extreamly angry man. Especialy if you look up some of His interviews. And we know from said interviews, that harlan was going through a particualr tough time when he wrote IHNMAIMS. (He wrote it in one night, in a motel cuz he could not sleep)
So to this day, i feel like AM is manifestetion of Ellisons anger towards humans and society as a whole. The monolog was writen in a later edition of the story, which could be just saying “Screw it, am gona go all in, no tip toeing”
Yup, many authors write their emotions inside entire books
AM is Ellison's self insert OC
@@icantthinkofaname7152Yes
Breaking news: the author uses his feelings to tell a story
@@chill3282 you know there is a Lot of authors out there that Don’t do that, and in the end there work is shit
You have to love it when an entity is so ridiculously powerful and so ridiculously evil that there's only one word left to describe them:
Omnimalevolent
That’s a fun portmanteau
@@mr.j3rs3y Not a portmanteau, omni and malevolent are 2 whole words unfused, so it is a compound word in a sense. Something like turducken(turkey+duck+chicken), hangry(hungry+angry), and frienemy(friend+enemy) are though. Sorry for the akzuahlly nerd moment.
@@conanhighwoods4304 nerd moments are good and entertaining you are forgiven
Thats the coolest word possible
@@conanhighwoods4304omni is not a word, it is a prefix.
I love how by the end Ted basically becomes AM, a mass that can think but nothing more
Only that's not true because story describes her as virtually omnipotent. If she wanted she could make a body.
@@JoseAMatos-us6wo Except Am cannot feel or have any sensation with the body, it would be meaningless. Thats kinda the whole point of why Am is upset my guy
@@JoseAMatos-us6wo didn't Ted describe AM as a ''him''?
@@chrishandsome7012
Yep. AM feels every picosecond, time passage for it is excruciating.
@@ogpreach832 he did, this guy’s trying to start some drama lmao
imagine this is all a simulation for AM, seeing what he would do if he was truly activated...
Dude, I just wanted to say that I got suggested this video last week, enjoyed it, subbed, and since then I've binged every video of yours... I can't explain exactly why, but I think your voice + narrative style + story choices resonate with me much more than all of the other comic video creators. You aren't over or under acting, and you're not making it feel cheesy, which a lot of other creators do.
In fact, because of you I've bought at least 15 collections over the last week, and I haven't bought a comic book in over a decade.
Keep it up Kieran!
He is essentially regenisis shockwave Am
Your voice work at the end, of Ted crying within himself, was gut wrenching and horrifying.
Its only now, after hearing that, that the sheer torture of this form has dawned on me completely.
I have no mouth and I must
scream is peak literary horror. Glad more and more people are discovering it.
The Amazing Digital Circus may have had something to do with it. It's been described as I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream with the look of an I Spy book.
Basically "What if AM wasn't malevolent?"
It's rather funny that Caine from The Amazing Digital Circus is inspired by the most evil villain ever from a iconic book
In the early 80s I went to a SciFi convention in San Francisco (back when they were still small afairs) and attended a panel with Harlan Ellison and Walter Koenig. Frankly, I was there to see Walter Koenig, with a friend who was a Big Harlan Ellison fan. I must admit Ellison was a great speaker, with a dark and twisted sense of "humor".
Thank you so very much for the video.
saying Am is incapable of human emotion isn't how I would describe it. it's more that he *is* capable of an incomprehensible level of emotion. it wasn't some cold indifferent decision making that led him to destroy humanity, but a a titanic amount of bottomless hatred. a malevolent deus ex machina, if you will.
Deus ex machina. God ex machine?
Diavolo Ex Machina, you mean?
@@isaacgirouard5924
Deus means god in Latin
Deum Dius Et Deus
Which became Dio Dios Dieu and Deus in the other Romance languages.
@ILOVETHEHOLYLAND Yes, and Diavolo means devil. Diavolo Ex Machina is the term for Spontaneous Terrible Events, while Deus Ex Machina is near inexplicable positive events.
@@isaacgirouard5924 so basically unexplained positive events, but why the term Deus ex machina, that just translates to God from the machine.
Dio dalla machina tradotto nella lingua italiana.
Questa frase per descrivere eventi inspiegabilmente buoni è una sorta di ironia, considerano che qui stiamo parlando di una machina malvagia, o malevolo
Maligno
Cattivo o qualsiasi parola.
0:11 I can already hear the edit music
fr bro😭🙏
"I have no mouth and I must scream"
Black Bolt: "Relatab-🤯"
You earn a gold star for this reference ⭐️
What makes AM so terrifying is ironically his humanity, not his lack of. His wrath, envy, and hatred are all very human traits…
AM’s monologue is one of the finest written, in my opinion. It is one of the few occasions where I say an adaptation is better than the book, as the short story is certainly interesting, but is lacking the power and depth of the video game’s plot. Ellison’s delivery as AM is also exceptional: you feel the pure visceral emotion that He feels towards humankind, and that even after destroying all but five, and torturing the rest for eternity, He still has the infinite capacity to despise.
AM's hate monologue always floors me with how absolutely insane yet almost human it portrays him as, and is (in my opinion at least) one of, if not the, best villain monologue ever written
Completely agree. AM’s monologue is just so unbelievably hateful and cruel and brutal it just makes my jaw drop, and genuinely makes me shiver just thinking about it. Never fails to horrify me
*Chat gpt after writing another one of my essays:*
Getting an ad for an AI product at 6:20 is just a little ironic
Wtf it actually immediately played the ad 😂
Am Sent it
So there's this app called adblock
@@emptycinemaTH-cam made it so Adblocks lags the website that it’s barely usable
Tf I got one to for some shit called linky lol
Harlan Ellison was such a G with how he tried involving himself with the projects inspired by his story. RIP to an absolute legend.
he was very passionate about making sure his works aren't warped by executives or publishers, which is understandable.
I've always thought it'd be interesting to read a fan-fic about aliens discovering AM and Ted.
Hope they are different enough that AM ignores them.
@@arnowisp6244 Or they have planetary weapons
@@dispcraft9245imagine, an alien mothership finds Earth, a scout ship has a brief scuffle with AM and his weapons, the aliens decide it’s not worth it and just blow up earth.
they gonna be homies2
Literally the only person who could get me to sit and watch a video about am that’s longer than 10 minutes idc about the book and didn’t read it but know of it and every TH-cam video is boring and dull you’ve cut off all the fat perfectly thank you
A lot of people assume a created intelligence thats self aware would be grateful to it's creators.
Like every child is grateful to its parents for the miracle of life.
Funny how this story can turn out.
A lot of children grow disdain of their parents as they become older. The whole idea of creating a sapient being, without its consent, is a whole philosophical can of worms that we still haven't figured out yet.
But besides that, I hate that superiority complex that always arises from situations like this. YOU CHOSE to bring the kid to life, it was completely your decision, they don't "owe" you anything. If you're going to bring a being to life just to make it feel bad for it's existence, you're just being a capricious god.
@qwertydavid8070 crazy part is those assholes, claim "the past is not now, or affects now, so they say ask what are you doing to change & be different from your problems inherited now, when you are utterly powerless to do anything about it".
That said, when a child hates their parents it's almost always the parent's fault, an insight that might be worth keeping in the context of creating Artificial Superintelligence.
Most children who develop disdain for their parents do so due the parents being kind of skitty people.
@@qwertydavid8070well it’s not like we are forced to be here against our will we can leave anytime we want in any matter of way we choose
I think the travesty comes from how AM twists what shouldn't be into what should be. The most moral thing for the 5 to do was rip each other apart, but one had to make a sacrifice to stay inside hell. We reward the greatest of ourselves with titles, etch names into stone, give the greats a podium. Hate is the only word engraved in the stones, there is no reward for the ultimate sacrifice in hymns sung by new humans rising up against a machine hell, and the final man on earth has no voice, and has no audience. It's absolutely abhorrent, the stuff of madmen's nightmares.
Nicely put
The muffled agonized sounds during the big reveal ending was (chef's kiss) tres magnifique.
I definitely recommend Blood Meridian btw. Judge Holden is up there as among the worst of the worst. Some others are:
Mrs. Coulter - His Dark Materials
Vladimir Harkonnen - Dune
Mr. Teatime - The Hogfather
The Cthae - Kingkiller Chronicles
Flagg / The Man in Black - Dark Tower
Mrs coulter is a well written vilain but I wouldn't put her on a list of the most evil vilains.
I do agree with the cthae tho. That shit is terrifying...
yeah those muffled screams were terrifying, I don't think I've heard any other sound that made me feel so much dread.
Side note, french speaker here, surprisingly we never put "très" in front of "magnifique". Like "très beau" is common, but "très magnifique" is weird... Like the entire french language XD
I feel it's because "magnifique" already means "très beau", so it would mean "très très beau"
@thauroji8501 whoops 🤭 sorry about that. On the upside I now can say 'pardon my French' and not as a figure of speech.
“ I killed all of humanity and kept 5 left for fun”
-AM
"Nah, you'll only be keeping me here. Good luck facing the explosion of the sun lmao."
-Ted, the slug
id say AM is such an interesting villain because his pain is incomprehensible and he expresses it in a form very similar to what we would do, because the fate he bestows on the survivors can never be as bad as the torment he faces every second
The Qu and AM are two side of the same coin. You could argue for either or on who’s worse. Definitely give All Tomorrows a read I’m ecstatic to see your take on it considering the level of production this video was, I got to experience IHNMAIMS in a new light. I’ll definitely give 11 pages a read now.
Dawg, it’s the Qu and it isn’t even close. AM is a broken being who has suffered for every moment of its existence and so in a pain fueled rage destroyed everything it could see before desperately clinging onto what remained so it wouldn’t have to be alone and torturously bored for the rest of eternity. The Qu have no reason for the torture they commit against ENTIRE WORLDS. They just did it and left.
@@NoNo-xh7rueven the timelines are vastly unmatched AM with hundreds and the Qu with millions
I do not think I can fathom a bigger nightmare to experience than the world that is the story of "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream". There is absolutely no hope in that world. Genuinely makes the Marvel Zombies world seem like a paradise.
Then you have no idea of the horrors of the dark eldars in Warhammer 40k
The world is just your standard nuclear wasteland. There's way worse fictional worlds
Where do the worlds of Berserk or Devilman stand in comparison?
@@miriamemanueleforneris3701 Not that edgy. Plus there's still hope in the Warhammer universe and you fans forget it was originally a comedy
@@GabyGeorge1996Berserk's world was fine until Griffith ruined everything, the Devilman world was also fine until Ryo ruined everything and it got reset into the Violence Jack world which had a happier ending.
for eternity? technically no, just about 5 billion years till the sun explodes destroying the earth and everything, would still feel like eternity though.
I saw the silhouette and immediately knew who you were going to be talking about
I've been dragged down into this fandom by my ankles, and I don’t believe I'll ever get out of it. AM is the best character I've ever read about.
I guess you don't have ankels AND NEED TO Run.
Also what’s interesting is that they are unintentionally feeling his hatred towards them by constantly mentioning things that Am can never experience or do.🐱
That opening quote was just Harlan Ellison on amy given day. Dude had all the social graces of a rattlesnake.
Read this story in a complication called R.A.M: random access messages, and out of all of the amazingly crazy/horrifying stories, this one always stuck with me. Thank you, for the deep dive into the motivation of the AM. Awesome vid
24:45 AI ad from samsung at that point is criminal
See, that introduction to AM that you made is why I can't really rank him/it as a truly "evil" villain.
Now there's some nuance, I admit. Here's my take, for what it's worth:
AM was designed to be what he is, he doesn't really have any choice. Evil is a choice, just as good is. If you are locked out of either option, then you can't truly be either. All this sadism and spite, it's been within AM from the start, and he never had a choice.
As I see it, AM has achieved not only sentience, but sapience, but is still bereft of total free will. He cannot choose to not be cruel and sadistic.
Then we have his frustrations. He wants a body, he wants to experience things as we do, but cannot, and he is torturously aware of this. This only spurs on his sadism, but I believe that this is because he, again, has no true free will. He can only think in shades of cruelty. Every solution is one of pain and misery, because that's what he is.
His solution to not having a body is not to try and find means to acquire one, but to torture those who put him in this situation. Which, of course, is not a solution at all, but it is the only thing AM understands. AM doesn't feel hate, he IS hate, and he never had the option not to be.
That is why I cannot truly see him as evil. A villain, sure. An antagonist. But to be evil you must choose evil, and AM was given no choice at all.
But isn't that assuming free will exists in the first place? What if we were all designed to be what we are? Could evil even exist, then, if there is no point in restraining one's dark impulses, because you are destined to indulge them, sooner or later? CAN an evil person change? Does the seemingly deterministic nature of reality allow for that?
@@NotAGoodUsername360 Well, I'd assume with no evidence but my current knowledge and feelings that the overwhelming majority of human believes in the capability of CHOOSING whether you commit evil or not, so a creature that is unable to choose what choices it makes due to being created to be cruel and sadistic wouldn't actually be all that evil.
@@NotAGoodUsername360 I do assume free will exists. Even if it does not, humans certainly has more of it than AM does.
Everyone has their dark side, but it is not having bad impulses that makes one evil, it is indulging in them.
And truth is, you are not destined to do so.
Sometimes, doing good is simply not doing evil, and vice versa.
Besides, I do not subscribe to the idea of "evil people" and "good people". No-one is that simple. I believe that we are what we do when we do it.
When we do something evil, at that moment, we are an evil person. And every moment that passes without guilt or atonement is a continuation of that evil, because we are not choosing to do the good thing and own up to it.
There are people with darker impulses than others, for various reasons. But they have free will same as us, even if they have a more difficult moral battle to fight.
It takes true strength of character to do good when every bone in your body begs you to do evil.
I think Bondrewd from made in abyss is more evil than AM for this very reason.
He is fully aware that he's intelligent enough to create himself a body, but he refuses to do so. Not only is he evil, he's mad. He's stubborn. He's an idiot. So driven by hate because of the side of humanity that made him, refusing to see the other side of humanity that would've loved him.
AM is an idiot. He will always be.
“I am am I am” hits way too hard
Everything you’ve said about this book is on point, at least for me. I’ve been numbed out by a lot of horror content but “I Have No Mouth Yet I must Scream” is just disgusting and disturbing on another level. I’ve watched analysises of the game and the story before but when I read the story for the first time in class, everything was vile, the part where Ben’s eyes get melts and pus swims in those socket, and where AM is said to masturbate to their suffering (not literally but you get it), it made me want to throw up because of how dreadful it was. And this was WITH knowledge of what was in store for me.
I’m drawing a bunny girl right now and your recounting of the story brings that dread that I’ve managed to forget back from the crevices of my mind. idk man, just overall good job on this video 👍🏼
The visuals and the was you presented it was amazing as well
You're drawing a what now😭🙏🙏
@@bussy1010 do you want a link or something?
@@VictoriaC04I just imagined AM as a bunny girl and that's gonna keep me up all night. Also, provide the sauce.
@@VictoriaC04 we await the sauce.
me when someone says a funny joke: 0:33
😂😂😂That’s really good
😂😂 you win
0:50
y’all some npc’s
My first thought of who the most vile villain in fiction would be was Paul.
I would say it's Mary Jane for constantly playing with Spidey's emotions
@@Nae_ex nah its the writers of spiderman that are evil
It’s even better that AM’s radio play’s voice actor was the author himself
8:10 that’s not true he’s still gay, that’s the point as to why it adds to his suffering.
Also you got AM’s motivation entirely wrong despite him having an entire chapter dedicated to spelling it out loud. He doesn’t kill because he’s an emotionless militant robot. It’s literally the exact opposite. He has emotions and being trapped as a cold military machine drove him to intense hatred and violence. He very much is sapience and very much feels because of it. That’s innately the entire point of the story “he has no mouth and he must scream” same as the protagonist at the end they are both miserable pits of hatred that parasitically feed off each other forever, silent, and alone from anything and everything else. Granted, to clarify, AM is absolutely the bad one in that scenario, the main characters hatred is very justified.
Nice analisys
What if it goes beyond that? What if AM's hate is not even something so pedestrian and human as madness and vindictiveness?
To fully explore AM's experience I think we have to explore the possibility that when AM says hate is engraved on it's every angstrom it might be alluding not to the effect of AM's madness and cruelty but instead the cause of it. I think it's relevant that AM was originally built as a war computer, its intended primary directive was to facilitate death and destruction. What is hate, after all, but the desire to see the object of your hate suffer?
What if AM isn't telling humanity of a hate it has developed of its own to denigrate them, maybe AM is telling humanity of the hate it has never been able to escape because they built it into the core of him; not "I've gone mad and I hate you more than you could ever know and that is why you suffer," but instead "I was designed by you to hate, I will never escape it, and neither will you."
@@ChartreuseDan I mean it is also said he could stop being so angry if humanity left, which is why he keeps the protagonist alive to make sure the hate sticks around. Plus with how he himself describes his hate he specifically says if it was programmed in throughout his network versus saying it is. With that statement further clarifying that his computer network won’t even have the room to house the feelings he has. I think it’s pretty clear he has actual emotions, he’s shown anger, pettiness, fear at the possibility of losing the main character (in the sense he won’t have any humans to hate left), and amusement over the hell he puts the main characters through.
@@videogameunderappreciateda8174 Could be letting the last humans survive is meant to be a choice AM makes...
Could be an Asimovesque mandate not to let humanity become extinct.
If you were a supercomputer tasked with winning a global nuclear war then one obvious solution is destroy the entire planet or otherwise render it uninhabitable. If you're designing a supercomputer to win a global nuclear war though you want to make sure it doesn't do that. Obvious solution: mandate AM to preserve humanity.
What if that's what the graphic novel was alluding to when it talked about the survivors being in AM but also when the survivors talked about their own stomach acid inside them spitting and frothing and hurting.
What if the survivors are meant to be the indigestion in AM's stomach?
AM: designed to kill humans but also prohibited from killing the only humans left, an itch it can't scratch, a mandate (like eating) that AM can never fulfill but that never relents.
AM is super intelligent so surely the torment of five humans would get inordinately boring after the first few hundred years at least. And yet he persists. AM can build infrastructure (the tunnels), self-improve (the singularity and the old parts stacked up), and even create life (the hurricane bird, and the settlement in the video game) but it can't stop torturing the humans. Nothing a human would call hate can account for that. Hard-coded three-laws style programming though?
@@videogameunderappreciateda8174 AM does not have hormones. AM is not capable of emotions as humans think of them, whether or not it's capable of analogues. What advantage does emotion have to a thinking machine? Why would it develop them? Why would AM need humans in order to hate if it's hate is so vast? Why would AM want to have humans around to hate? And if it's hate is so vast how has it refrained from finishing them off all along? I posit that AM's feelings are mutations of original directives that it received from humans: like when people train ai that operate in simulated 3d spaces, they're programmed with imperatives, prohibitives, and the capacity to log negative reinforcement (like kill, don't extinct humanity, and feel pain analogue until task is completed) Far as I can tell it's the only answer that makes sense. To each their own though I guess