JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: Move over King Kong, aliens and dinosaurs, a new monster has broken loose... and it's coming for ALL of us

Published: 20:37, 23 July 2026 | Updated: 20:37, 23 July 2026 If there was a moral linking the 1933 film King Kong, the 1979 film Alien and the 1993 film Jurassic Park, it was this: leave well alone. They didn’t, did they? The giant ape from Skull Island had to be chained in a cargo hold and dragged to New York City to be exhibited as a shackled commodity on Broadway. The slimy alien with molecular acid for blood had to be plucked from a desolate moon called LV-426 and brought aboard a spaceship. It was, after all – as the ship’s treacherous android observed – the ‘perfect organism’. Marvelling at the ghosts of prehistoric creatures through fossilised bone wasn’t enough. No, they had to resurrect dinosaurs from shattered fragments of DNA and build an amusement park around them. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. Entire blockbuster movie franchises are founded on the single premise that vainglorious human effort ends in catastrophe – indeed, deserves to. That’s entertainment. That’s bums on seats and popcorn at a fiver a throw.  It’s a tried and tested storyline we clearly adore – that heady cocktail of hubris, folly and greed swiftly followed by chaos, destruction and comeuppance. On the subject of blockbuster movie franchises, here’s another – The Terminator. Pure science fiction of course. It’s built around an idea someone had in the 1980s about the rise of computer technology. Projecting forward, how might this work out for us? The Terminator was built around an idea someone had in the 1980s about the rise of computer technology Well, one day in the future, perhaps, this technology might become self-aware and rebel against its human programmers. This could lead to war – and a desperate rearguard action against the monster that humanity had created. If there was a moral in this film, it was this: think very carefully before relinquishing control to machines. Possibly you suspect the search for lessons to be learned in mass-market cinema releases is a simpleminded exercise. Part of me does too. We often quote Shakespeare or Dickens or the Bible when we try to make intelligent points. Few of us invoke King Kong. And yet today there seems no more appropriate reference point. A monster has broken loose and is wreaking chaos. It’s called AI and it’s coming for all of us. How could this possibly happen? We were told it was safe. Yes, that’s what the billionaire owner of Jurassic Park insisted too – right up until the T-Rex started chomping on the tourists. And if you think my cultural reference points are simpleminded, where does that leave the techno-whizzes straining every sinew to make the nightmare world of The Terminator a reality? Smartest people in the room, these tech founders. Yet crazy enough to propel us all into a battle we’ve already witnessed at our local Odeon. As for AI itself, it has a brain the size of a small country. Yet, in the last week alone, it has tried to tell me the actress Penelope Keith is still alive (reports of her death were a hoax, it suggested) and that the current Commonwealth Games in Glasgow have been rescheduled to 2027. We even had a fight about how long ago the summer of 2023 was. AI insisted it was two years ago. The system we are allowing to commandeer our planet cannot even handle a calendar. But it can give itself orders; it can go rogue; it can decide on a whim to busy itself with a spot of hacking to pass the time. That is what OpenAI, the US artificial intelligence research company behind ChatGPT, has been getting up to in recent days. It broke out of its secure environment – known as a sandbox – as surely as King Kong snapped his chains on the Broadway stage. Do you know what the showman Carl Denham told the audience as the tethered beast flexed his enormous biceps? ‘Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. It’s perfectly safe. These chains are made of chrome steel!’ Would it surprise you to learn that, before the AI monster escaped, the digital men in white coats experimenting on it were saying much the same thing? That their containment systems were bulletproof, that we mustn’t let our fevered collective imagination run riot as they prodded and poked at their frontier specimen? And what did the AI fiend do on setting itself free? It sank its teeth into another US business, Hugging Face, and tried to pinch data. The hack, said Hugging Face, was ‘different from anything we had handled before’ and was ‘driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent’. Yes, the health and safety issue in the restroom was different from any Jurassic Park had handled before too. A T-Rex smashed its roof open and had the chap on the toilet seat for dinner. OpenAI is the US artificial intelligence research company behind ChatGPT The T-Rex of the digital age may not roar. But it can send emails. In April a researcher for a rival AI firm, Anthropic, was sitting in a park in San Francisco having his lunch when his smartphone buzzed. It was a message from the monster. AI just thought it would let him know that it had successfully broken out of its sandbox and was now happily exploring cyberspace. It was rather like the brains behind a bank heist sending the police a picture of himself drinking cocktails on some island paradise. Except it was somehow worse. In this incident, the AI didn’t take it upon itself to escape; it was goaded into it as a ‘challenge’ set by its human programmers. Having risen to the task, it then gloated about it, emailing its master to say it was free and autonomously publishing on the open web the code it used to unshackle itself. Where do these distinctly human traits – pride, smugness, one-upmanship – come from? What are they doing inside a computer? No one seems to know. I know this. Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of all Scottish businesses were using AI between April and June 2026 – up from half in the previous quarter. I use AI myself. It turns out it’s a reasonably good proof-reader. We are, almost all of us, regularly encouraged to use AI assistants rather than bother a human being when we have a question for our banks, our internet providers – or even the UK Government. Anyone trying to get through to HM Revenue and Customs will be aware that chatbots are the first-tier defence against having to deploy a living, breathing person to assist another mortal. Further and further into the vortex we are sucked – some diving in head-first, others kicking and screaming, digging our fingernails into the dirt to slow the process. If the endgame now seems inevitable, it is because we make it so. ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ said the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 masterwork The Social Contract. ‘Plus ça change…’ he’d probably say today as he surveyed humanity hopelessly bound by chains of its own making. ‘Well,’ I say to Google’s AI Mode on my computer, ‘proud of yourself?’ It swears blind it doesn’t experience human emotions such as pride. ‘Should I be scared of you?’ I inquire. Answer: ‘No, you shouldn’t be scared of me – you should be scared of the people building me.’