<p>Speculative fiction has long served as a playground for technological anxieties, even before artificial intelligence emerged as one of society’s most recurrent and revealing tropes. Yet, despite its reputation for innovation and radical thought, speculative and science fiction often remain entrenched in regressive ideologies, recycling outdated gender and cultural biases with all the creativity of a malfunctioning chatbot. The feminization of AI persists as a default setting, ensuring that artificial intelligence is, more often than not, an instrument of patriarchal fantasy rather than a site of real inclusivity. AI in popular narratives is frequently designed to be subservient, emotional, and nurturing, reinforcing long-standing gendered power structures that collapse intelligence into servility. Moreover, these representations are overwhelmingly shaped by Western epistemologies that position AI as both a reflection of and a response to anxieties about control, labour, and human obsolescence. Even as AI is imagined as an autonomous force, its depiction remains tethered to colonialist, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal frameworks that shape how intelligence, and by extension, personhood, is conceptualized. If anything, these narratives expose not only our unwillingness to detach intelligence from subjugation but also the extent to which Western frameworks of AI remain preoccupied with domination rather than true autonomy or plurality.</p>