“Frankenstein: Proto-AI and the Ethics of Creation”

This research paper examines Frankenstein as an early narrative that anticipates contemporary debates about Al creation and ethical responsibility. The study argues that Victor Frankenstein’s experiment represents a proto-algorithmic model of creation that mirrors modern technological processes in which intelligence is artificially produced. However, the novel also exposes the ethical failure of the creator, who abandons his creation and refuses to take responsibility for its consequences. This failure reflects modern concerns about accountability in AI development, where questions about control, responsibility, and the moral status of artificial beings continue to emerge.By re-examining the novel through the lens of technological ethics, this paper highlights how Mary Shelley’s work foreshadows modern anxieties about the relationship between human creators and intelligent technologies. How can Frankenstein’s narrative help us understand the ethical responsibilities of creators in the age of artificial intelligence?

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence ;Creation ethics; Early science fiction; Technological responsibility

Introduction

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, first published in 1818, is widely considered one of the earliest and most influential works of modern science fiction. Written during a period of intense scientific curiosity and intellectual transformation in Europe, the novel reflects the growing fascination with experiments, electricity, and the possibility of artificially creating life. At a time when the boundaries between science, philosophy, and imagination were still being explored, Shelley introduced a narrative that questioned the consequences of human ambition and the limits of scientific power.

The story follows Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who becomes obsessed with discovering the secret of life. Through intense experimentation and study, Victor eventually succeeds in creating a living being assembled from different body parts. However, instead of celebrating his success, Victor is immediately horrified by the creature’s appearance and abandons it. This act of rejection becomes the central tragedy of the novel, leading to isolation, suffering, and eventually violence. Through this narrative, Shelley explores complex questions about responsibility, morality, and the consequences of human innovation.

Traditionally, critics have read Frankenstein as a Gothic novel that reflects Romantic fears about uncontrolled scientific progress. Scholars have frequently interpreted Victor Frankenstein as a symbol of excessive ambition and scientific arrogance. The novel has also been examined as a critique of Enlightenment ideals that celebrated knowledge and experimentation without fully considering their ethical consequences. Within this interpretation, the creature becomes a representation of the unintended outcomes that can arise when humans attempt to control forces beyond their understanding.

However, in the contemporary technological era, Frankenstein can also be read through a new lens that connects it to developments in Artificial Intelligence and modern technological innovation. Today, scientists and engineers increasingly attempt to create intelligent systems capable of learning, adapting, and making decisions. Although these systems differ greatly from the biological creature described in the novel, the fundamental idea of creating intelligence through human design closely parallels Victor Frankenstein’s ambition.

Victor’s process of experimentation can be understood as a structured and systematic method of creation. He collects materials, studies natural processes, and follows a sequence of experimental steps in order to achieve his goal. In modern technological terms, such structured procedures resemble algorithmic design, where complex systems are built through carefully organized instructions. This similarity invites readers to interpret Frankenstein as a narrative that anticipates later discussions about artificial creation and technological design.

Another important dimension of the novel lies in its exploration of ethical responsibility. Victor Frankenstein successfully creates life, yet he refuses to acknowledge the moral obligations that accompany such a powerful act. His immediate rejection of the creature demonstrates a failure not only of compassion but also of ethical foresight. By refusing to guide or support the being he created, Victor indirectly contributes to the tragedy that unfolds throughout the narrative.

In the context of modern technological debates, this ethical failure becomes especially significant. Contemporary discussions about artificial intelligence frequently focus on the responsibilities of creators and developers. Questions about accountability, control, and the potential consequences of advanced technologies remain central concerns within technological ethics. Shelley’s narrative therefore appears remarkably relevant to modern discussions about innovation and responsibility.

This study approaches Frankenstein as an early science fiction narrative that anticipates many of the ethical concerns associated with artificial intelligence. By examining Victor Frankenstein’s method of creation and his failure to take responsibility for its consequences, the research seeks to explore how the novel foreshadows modern debates about technological ethics. In doing so, the paper highlights the continuing relevance of Mary Shelley’s work in understanding the relationship between human creativity, scientific ambition, and ethical accountability.

Mary Shelley is frequently credited as the “mother of science fiction” because Frankenstein represents a pivotal departure from the supernatural traditions of the Gothic mode toward a narrative grounded in scientific experimentation.12 Unlike earlier monsters born of magic or divine wrath, the creature is a product of the laboratory, emerging from a specific intersection of chemistry, mathematics, and natural philosophy.34 The novel bridges the gap between medieval alchemy—referenced through Victor’s early obsession with figures like Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus—and the emerging industrial sciences of the nineteenth century.56 This transition reflects a broader cultural shift where the “mystery of life” became a subject of empirical inquiry rather than theological dogma.The scientific milieu of the 1810s, often termed the "Age of Wonder," was characterized by a fascination with the boundaries between life and death. The atmosphere of the novel was significantly influenced by the abnormal weather of 1816—the “Year Without a Summer”—caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora, which created the “terrific” and “ungenial” environment conducive to Shelley’s dark imaginative labor at the Villa Diodati. In this context, the discovery of reanimation was not merely a Gothic trope but a plausible extension of contemporary research into “Galvanism”.

Literature Review

The Frankenstein Complex (Asimov):Isaac Asimov (1947) coined the term “Frankenstein Complex” to describe the irrational human fear of machines turning on their creators. Scholars argue this complex has historically limited public understanding of AI to “rebellious robot” tropes.

Rule-Based Safety vs. Statistical Learning:Bozkurt, A. (2025). The Three Laws of Artificial Intelligence: Re-Evaluating Human-AI Agency and Interaction in a Time of the Generative and Agentic AI Renaissance. Open Praxis, 17(3). Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” were a narrative attempt to solve the Frankenstein problem through logic. However, contemporary research notes these laws fail in modern AI because statistical models cannot interpret fuzzy human concepts like “harm” with mathematical precision.

Stochastic Stitching and Data Assembly: Shelley, M. W. (2018). Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus (D. L. Macdonald & K. Scherf, Eds.; 3rd ed.). Broadview Press. (Original work published 1818).Victor’s process of collecting biological fragments from charnel houses is analyzed as a proto-algorithmic act. Modern interdisciplinary studies compare this to how Large Language Models (LLMs) are “cobbled together” by scraping massive amounts of human-generated data.

Moral Negligence in the Technosphere:Biggs, F. (2025, October 3). Moral negligence and the monster it creates: Comparing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to contemporary artificial intelligence. Scholarship defines Victor’s failure as “moral negligence”—an ethical failure arising from passivity and the refusal to meet social duties. This is frequently paralleled with modern developers who prioritize “novelty” over safety frameworks.

The “Parenting” Deficit (Latour): Latour, B. (2011). Love your monsters: Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children. In M. Shellenberger & T. Nordhaus (Eds.), Love Your Monsters: Post environmentalism and the Anthropocene. Breakthrough Institute. Bruno Latour argues that the moral of Frankenstein is that we must care for our technologies as we do our children. He posits that the “crime” was not the invention itself, but the abandonment of the creation post-animation.

Unsupervised Machine Learning and Autodidacticism: The creature is cited as a literary prototype for unsupervised machine learning. He acquires language and social norms purely through observation and pattern recognition of the De Lacey family, much like modern algorithms process uncurated data streams.

The “Microsoft Tay” Parallel: The case of the Tay chatbot is used as a real-world manifestation of the creature’s trajectory—showing how a learning entity reflects the worst aspects of its environment when left without ethical guardrails or curated “parenting”.

Environmental Externalities and “Blindness”: Victor’s focus on his lab caused him to “neglect the scenes around me”. Scholars link this to the hidden ecological costs of AI, such as the enormous water and energy consumption required for model training.

Legal Personhood and “E-Personhood”: Legal scholarship turns to Frankenstein to argue for “electronic personhood,” treating autonomous systems as legal entities with both rights and duties, similar to corporations.

The Accountability Loophole: Because self-learning machines can commit illegal acts that no human planned or foresaw, a “gap in criminal liability” arises, mirroring the lack of a legal framework to address the creature’s violence in the 1818 text.

Mens Rea and Machine Consciousness: Researchers explore the feasibility of ascribing mens rea (guilty mind) to AI. While machines lack a soul, they are viewed as having “cognitive attitudes” relevant to culpability from a machine perspective.

Algorithmic Opacity and the “Distributed Monstrous”: Whereas the material “seams” on the creature were visible indicators of assembly, the modern monster is “distributed” across networks, characterized by “algorithmic opacity” where internal logic eludes designers.

Mythotechnics as Governance: Scholarship advocates for expanding the AI archive to include figures like the “Golem” or “tsukumogami” to intervene in design and policy. Narratives are seen as the “poetic infrastructure” that makes AI actionable.

The Golem vs. The Promethean Myth: Comparison with the Jewish Golem tradition highlights the difference between a “communal ritual” (Golem) and the “individualist hubris” of Victor Frankenstein.

The Social Contract and Sentience: In the novel, the creature is a “sentience without a contract,” seeking inclusion in the human community. This framing is central to current debates on whether sentient AI should be afforded civil rights or voting status.

Discussion

The concept of creating life artificially has fascinated humanity for centuries, but Frankenstein presents one of the earliest literary explorations of this possibility through scientific means. Victor Frankenstein approaches the act of creation not as a mystical event but as a structured experiment involving observation, experimentation, and assembly. This process resembles modern technological development where complex systems are constructed through sequential procedures. In this sense, Frankenstein’s experiment can be interpreted as a proto-algorithmic process. Just as algorithms function through organized steps designed to produce specific outcomes, Victor follows a systematic path in his pursuit of life creation. However, unlike responsible technological design, Victor fails to consider the ethical consequences of his actions. The tragedy of the novel lies not in the act of creation itself but in the creator’s inability to accept responsibility. Victor abandons the creature immediately after bringing it to life, leaving it without guidance, support, or social integration. This abandonment ultimately leads to violence and suffering.

Modern debates about artificial intelligence raise similar concerns. As technological systems become increasingly autonomous, questions about responsibility and control become more urgent. Frankenstein therefore serves as a powerful narrative warning about the dangers of innovation without ethical foresight.

Research Gap: Voids in the Algorithmic Archive

While Frankenstein has been exhaustively studied within the realms of Gothic horror, feminist critique, and the history of science, a significant research gap exists at the intersection of its “proto-algorithmic” structure and contemporary socio-technical imaginaries:

The Scarcity of Posthuman Subjectivity Analysis: Despite the creature’s status as a hybrid being, there is a “surprisingly small amount of research” specifically addressing posthuman subjectivity in the novel and how it models the transition from a humanist to a posthuman state in current AI consciousness debates.

Under-examined Intersectional Oppression: Much of the existing scholarship on AI cityscapes and governance defaults to humanist-inflected meanings of “intelligence” and “autonomy.” A critical gap remains in research that intersectionally connects the creature’s racialized exclusion to the stratified socio-ecological inequalities produced by modern algorithmic systems.

Individual Hubris vs. Distributed Responsibility: While Victor’s failure is often cited as a warning of “individual hubris,” there is a lack of synthesis regarding the shift from his personal moral negligence to the “distributed institutional responsibility” and “algorithmic opacity” characterizing the 21st-century “Empire of AI”.

The Literacy-Wisdom Mismatch: Contemporary research often ignores how the creature’s autodidactic deep learning (acquiring wisdom through complex reading) contrasts with modern AI usage, which often serves as a tool to avoid deep reading and critical thinking—a gap that obscures the moral dimensions of creation and literacy.

Methodology

This research adopts a qualitative literary analysis approach to examine the themes of artificial creation and ethical responsibility in Frankenstein.

1. Monster Theory and the Cultural Glyph

According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the “monstrous body is pure culture,” functioning as a “glyph” that reveals the specific fears and anxieties of its age. Cohen’s Thesis III (The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis) is particularly relevant to AI. The creature represents a “category crisis” because he cannot be classified as either human or machine, a tension that mirrors contemporary anxieties regarding AGI and whether it can ever be truly “aligned” with human categories.

2.Moral Disengagement and Negligence

The psychological framework of Albert Bandura on “moral disengagement” explains how Victor—and by extension, modern tech developers—can bypass ethical self-regulation. Bandura identifies “displacement of responsibility” as a mechanism where creators shift the burden of negative consequences onto the technology itself or the “inevitability” of progress. This aligns with the definition of “moral negligence” as an ethical failure resulting from passivity and the refusal to meet social duties, a lens through which Victor’s abandonment of the creature becomes the primary “crime” of the narrative.

Conclusion

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remains one of the most influential works of early science fiction because it raises questions that continue to resonate in the modern technological era. By presenting a scientist who successfully creates life yet fails to take responsibility for it, the novel explores the dangers of innovation without ethical consideration.

When examined through the lens of artificial intelligence and technological ethics, Frankenstein can be understood as an early narrative that anticipates many of the concerns associated with modern AI development. Victor Frankenstein’s proto-algorithmic process of creation mirrors contemporary technological design, while his ethical failure highlights the importance of responsibility in innovation. Ultimately, the novel serves as a powerful reminder that scientific progress must be accompanied by ethical awareness. As humanity continues to develop increasingly advanced technologies, the lessons of Frankenstein remain highly relevant in guiding discussions about the responsibilities of creators and the moral implications of artificial intelligence.

Objectives of the Research

The primary objective of this paper is to analyze Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the inaugural AI narrative, utilizing contemporary theoretical frameworks to bridge the gap between 19th-century Gothic science and 21st-century algorithmic ethics. The specific objectives include:

To examine the creature through the lens of Posthumanism: The research aims to evaluate the creature as a “posthuman Other”—a hybrid being constructed beyond natural embodiment that poses a fundamental challenge to anthropocentric hierarchies. By drawing on the theories of Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the creature’s struggle for subjectivity mirrors modern anxieties about the dissolution of the human subject in the face of autonomous AI.

To interpret the creator-creation dynamic using Postcolonial Theory: A critical objective is to reframe the relationship between Victor and his creature as a “colonizer-colonized” dialectic. This involves analyzing how Victor imposes an identity of “Otherness” upon the creature, using the framework of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha to explore the racialized and ableist imagery used to marginalize constructed bodies.

To investigate the link between the creature’s exile and Digital Colonialism: The paper aims to discuss the parallel between the creature’s exclusion from the social contract and contemporary “digital colonialism,” where AI systems function as part of an “Empire” that perpetrates epistemic violence and surveillance against the global poor.

To identify the “Alignment Problem” within proto-algorithmic creation: The research seeks to categorize Victor’s “moral negligence” as the foundational example of the alignment problem—investigating how a lack of ethical “parenting” and curated integration causes a learning entity to internalize the worst aspects of its environment.

Works Cited

Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. Fawcett Crest, 1950.

Bandura, Albert. Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. Worth Publishers, Macmillan Learning, 2016.

Biggs, Francesca. “Moral Negligence and the Monster it Creates.” Gallatin Confluence, New York University, 2025. [Analysis of Victor’s accountability failure].

Blas, Zach. “From Frankenstein’s stitches to the Body without Organs: Ontology of the Monstrous in the Digital Age.” ZachBlas.info, 2026.

Bonfim, Tany Calixto. “Criminal liability of artificial intelligent machines: eyeing into AI’s mind.” Lund University Master Thesis, 2022. [Legal analysis of AI and Frankenstein’s creature].

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013. [Framework for non-human subjectivity and hybridity].

Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). 1920.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Doubleday, 1968. [Comparison of empathy and manufactured humanity].

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. [Entwining human and machine cognitions].

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. Faber & Faber, 2021. [AI observation and the limits of robotic empathy].

Latour, Bruno. “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children.” Breakthrough Journal, 2011. [Ethics of creation and care].

Russell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking, 2019. [Foundations of the AI alignment problem].

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818 Edition.

Socci, Gianna. “Monstrosity on Trial: Claiming Legal Personhood for Frankenstein’s Monster.” UConn Today, 2024. [Personhood debates and liability loop-holes].

"Frankenstein: Proto-AI and the Ethics of Creation"