Frankenstein Is Not Your AI Metaphor (At Least, Not Like That)

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When the first trailer for legendary Mexican director Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein dropped, the tagline—four words slammed across the screen in huge white letters—sent me scrambling for a Google doc: ONLY MONSTERS PLAY GOD.

As a writer who works in technology and also happens to have an extremely marketable degree in English literature, my immediate impulse was to reach for the AI take: Frankenstein, creation, hubris, founders, models—the Substack essay basically wrote itself.

Then I watched the movie, twice. Frankenstein absolutely has something to say about AI. Just not the thing I thought.

Here’s a quick recap for those of you who haven’t read the book or have, but it’s been a while since high-school English: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tells the story of an obsessive young academic, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac in the film) who, on a mission to conquer death and push human knowledge to its outermost limits, brings the creature (that’s a spectacular Jacob Elordi in the movie) to life. Fallout ensues.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a largely faithful adaptation of the 1818 novel, with a number of what I’d say are acceptable-to-excellent tweaks. But the more I think about it, the more I have an issue with its slogan.

“Only monsters play God” is a catchy tagline aimed at driving views. But there’s so much more to this book and this film than Disney-grade platitudes about “real monsterhood” can convey. Because the most interesting part is not the “it’s aliiiiive” moment in the lab (as much as that scene in the movie rips); it’s what happens after the eyes open, when the question becomes what you owe to what you’ve made, and what kind of monster you become when you walk away.

The part that tracks: Natural stupidity

Guillermo del Toro really, really does not like AI. He’s said he’d “rather die” than use generative AI in his films. His comment to NPR lives rent-free in my head: “My concern is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity.”

So when he finally made Frankenstein, he wanted “the arrogance of Victor to be similar in some ways to the tech bros.” Del Toro understands Victor as a guy who charges ahead, builds something he doesn’t fully understand, and panics afterward—hardly the tragic genius who flew too close to the sun.

Del Toro fears the human who shrugs and ships anyway, not the machine itself.

This is where Frankenstein and AI really do align. Victor treats building a new form of life like a private science project rather than a public act with consequences. In Shelley’s novel, he panics and runs the instant the creature opens its eyes. When people start dying at the creature’s hand (which they very much do in the book), Victor’s first instinct is: “I didn’t kill anyone, my creature did.”

It’s a clean dramatization of something some people in tech are tempted to do with AI—pretend harms such as deepfakes and psychosis are an unfortunate side effect of something that was, at its core, neutral. As if design choices, training data, incentive structures, and deployment decisions aren’t part of the creation.

If you’re launching systems that mediate hiring, healthcare, education, or politics, you are Victor in the lab. You don’t get to throw up your hands later when the thing behaves in ways you did not anticipate.

This is where Frankenstein earns its staying power—and where it starts to complicate the easy AI metaphor. Shelley doesn’t give us a ranting, raving monstrosity or a straightforward morality tale. She gives us a creature who talks back.

Where the simple metaphor breaks: The creature’s inner world