An AI's name tells you what its makers hoped it would be: a friend, a servant, a guardian or a god. This AI name generator names friendly assistants, ship and station computers, rogue AIs and acronym AIs, with what the letters stand for.
How fictional AIs get their names
An AI's name usually tells you what its makers wanted it to be, and science fiction has been playing with that since the 1960s.
- Acronyms: HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Acronyms make an AI sound like a product someone built and branded, which is exactly what it is.
- Friendly names: assistants get short, soft, human names, so people feel comfortable talking to them.
- Ship and station computers get names of duty and distance: Meridian, Vigil, or a moon of the outer planets.
- Ominous names: rogue AIs often get names from myth or from chess, like Erebus, the primordial darkness, or Zugzwang, the position where any move makes things worse.
Naming your AI
- Decide how the humans feel about it. A friendly name makes it a colleague; a cold acronym makes it a tool; a mythic name makes it a threat.
- Try the acronym style for names that come with their expansion: ARIA (Adaptive Reasoning Interface Array).
- Add a version number (Meridian 4, Mk II) to suggest earlier models, and what happened to them.
- Famous AIs are left out, from HAL and Skynet to GLaDOS and JARVIS, and so are real assistants like Siri, Alexa and Claude.
For an AI with a body, try the Robot Name Generator, and for the ship it runs, the Spaceship Name Generator.
For the rest of the future, see all the sci-fi name generators.