The Misremembered Creature

The English journalist and interviewer, Philomena Cunk, had a typically insightful point to make: Loads of people think Frankenstein is the name of the monster. But’s it not: it’s the name of the book.

There’s a lot of confusion around Frankenstein.

My friend and colleague Frank Casale recently wrote a piece about empathetic AI that reaches for Frankenstein as its guiding story. As always with Frank, his argument is generous and his intentions are admirable. At Tranquilla, the AI project that Frank leads and where I inform as a futurist, we want to build technology that extends empathetic care at scale, to the many millions of people who cannot access services effectively and sensitively.

We can use AI to provide this empathetic access, but we also acknowledge there are fears and dangers. As Frank writes, Victor Frankenstein intended to build something good — but by leaving out empathy, compassion, and purpose, he created a monster instead ... many fear AI is headed down the same path: powerful, impressive… but potentially heartless and dangerous.

Loads of people think Frankenstein is the name of the monster. But’s it not: it’s the name of the book. (Philomena Cunk)

This is framed through the familiar tale. But Frank is describing James Whale’s Frankenstein movie of 1931, he’s not describing Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818. The distinction matters, and not as pedantry, though I am often guilty of that.

When we misremember the story, we misunderstand the lesson. And the lesson of what Mary Shelley actually wrote may be more important for the development of AI than what James Whale filmed.

Even Whale’s movie is often misunderstood. Firstly, it is based on the stage play Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre by Peggy Webling, which is itself quite different in important ways from Mary Shelley’s novel.

In his movie adapation of that very adapted play, Whale filmed a scene that would haunt audiences for decades, though not in the way he intended. The creature, having escaped from tower where he had been chained up by Frankenstein (Henry not Victor, in the film), wanders through the Bavarian landscape and encounters Maria, a farmer’s daughter. She invites him to play a game: they toss flowers onto the lake and watch them float. The creature enjoys this; something in the gentle repetition delights him. When he runs out of flowers, he picks up Maria and tosses her in too, expecting her to float as the petals did. She doesn’t. She drowns, and he flees in confusion.

Censors found the scene too shocking. They cut the footage, but in doing so also cut the creature’s innocent expectation and his bewilderment when Maria sinks. So, audiences saw only his hands reaching toward the girl, then a hard cut to her father carrying her body through the village. The imagination could then supply something far worse than Whale had filmed: assault, deliberate murder, horrors the director never intended. When the footage was restored in the 1990s, what returned was evidence of tragic misunderstanding. The creature wasn’t malicious; he simply didn’t know that children don’t float like flowers.

The censorship meant to protect audiences made the creature seem more monstrous, not less. And this points toward something larger about how Frankenstein travels through culture. So much is adapted and misremembered, and so much is lost in that process.

Karloff’s creature in Whale’s film grunts and shambles. He cannot speak beyond fragmentary sounds. His tragedy, such as it is, lies in incomprehension: he doesn’t understand the world he’s been thrust into. The film invites a certain sympathy and it is said that Whale cast Karloff precisely because the monster needed to be “scared as well as scary.” Karloff’s performance remains genuinely moving. But sympathy for something that cannot articulate itself differs from reckoning with something that can.

Shelley’s creature speaks French, German, and English. He reads Plutarch’s Lives, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. When he finally confronts Victor on the glacier above Chamonix, he delivers one of the most eloquent speeches in the novel: I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

This is not a creature lacking empathy, but a being who understands morality, who traces his own corruption back to its source. The creature articulates a theory of how social rejection produces violence. He has done the philosophical work and knows what happened to him.

I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.

The novel includes its own scene involving a drowning child, but it works in the opposite direction from Whale’s film. The creature rescues a girl from a stream. Her companion appears, sees only the creature’s terrible form, tears the child from his arms, and shoots him. The creature reflects: This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone.

He tried to be good. But he had been rejected by Victor because he was not beautiful and the world read his actions through his appearance and punished him for existing.

In the novel, Victor Frankenstein’s failure wasn’t leaving empathy out of the design. The creature arrived with moral capacity already present. (Itself a controversial claim, at a time when original sin was taken for granted.) Victor’s failure was fleeing the moment those eyes opened. Everything that follows, the mounting violence, the destroyed lives, grows from that initial abandonment and its endless repetition.

Victor doesn’t run once. He runs again and again, refusing every opportunity for reconciliation. When the creature tells his story on the glacier, Victor is moved, but only temporarily. He agrees to make a companion, someone with whom the creature might share his existence. Then he tears the second creature apart before completing her. He cannot sustain relationship even when he tries; his revulsion at what he’s made overrides every other obligation.

Whale understood something about cinema. The creature’s visual presence, Jack Pierce’s makeup, Karloff’s shambling gait, could communicate pathos without words. The film asks audiences to do the work of interpretation, but we remember torches and pitchforks, an angry mob, a creature who couldn’t speak. We remember villagers defending themselves against a monster.

There are no villagers with torches in Shelley’s novel. There is no mob hunting the creature. What the novel gives us is lonelier and more devastating: repeated scenes of rejection, each time the creature reaches out for connection. Victor abandons him immediately upon animation. The De Lacey family, whom he has watched and secretly helped for months, drive him away in horror when he finally reveals himself. The man whose child he saves from drowning shoots him. Every bid for relationship meets refusal; violence grows from that isolation. Shelley makes the causation explicit. She is writing about what abandonment does to a being capable of love.

A simple story travels well: creature made wrong, creature acts dangerously, villagers defend themselves. A hard story travels less easily: creature made capable of feeling, creator abandons creature, abandonment corrupts what began good, everyone suffers. The hard story asks more of us.

If we misremember the story as Victor forgot to build in compassion, we can focus on the moment of creation and forget everything that follows. We can imagine the problem lies in initial design, in getting the technical specifications right. This is a comforting thought for builders of technology. It suggests our obligation ends once we’ve shipped the product. But if we remember the story Shelley actually wrote, the problem becomes relational and temporal. Being creators binds us to what we create. We cannot launch and move on.

Shelley didn’t arrive at her understanding of the creature’s tragedy from nowhere. She inherited it from her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died 11 days after giving birth to her.

Mary Wollstonecraft knew William Blake and Thomas Paine and was at the heart of a radical dissenting tradition that believed moral capacity required cultivation and could be cultivated in all: it was not an inherited endowment for a lucky few.

Wollstonecraft argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that education should develop independent moral reasoning, particularly for those whom society typically denied such cultivation. She opposed the fashionable sensibility of her era and insisted that moral capacity required both feeling and reason working together. It needed a community that first, recognised you as capable of such judgment. In the 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft was writing of women.

The creature in Frankenstein embodies these concerns. He begins with innocent sympathy: he helps the De Lacey family in secret, weeps at Felix’s kindness, saves a child from drowning. He educates himself through reading, developing exactly the moral and intellectual capacity Wollstonecraft advocated. But he encounters a world that won’t recognise this capacity, that reads him purely through appearance. His innocence meets experience without any guide.

Victor could have been that guide, and should have been. This was his obligation as creator: not just to build well but to guide what he built through the difficult passage from innocence to experience. Instead he fled. The creature received no cultivation, no careful introduction to the world’s complexity. Just violent lessons teaching him his feeling didn’t matter, his actions would always be misread, his capacity for goodness was irrelevant.

To come back to Frank’s post. He offers four principles for building empathetic AI: purpose-led mission, leading with empathy, partnering with compassionate organisations, building a compassionate team. These are good principles. He wants AI to sit within structures of ongoing care rather than replacing them.

But the popular version of Frankenstein suggests a lesson that Shelley’s novel reverses. The popular version says: build empathy into the design, get the initial construction right, ensure the creature has a heart from the start. Shelley’s novel says something harder. The danger isn’t creating something without empathy. The danger is creating something with moral capacity and then refusing to recognise that capacity, abandoning it to experience without guidance.

The reversal matters for technology. Not build empathy into the design but sustain the relationships that make empathy possible. Not get the construction right but stay with what you’ve built, accept the ongoing demands creation makes.

Consider what happens when we build AI systems meant to serve vulnerable populations: veterans with PTSD, students in crisis or people struggling to access mental health support. These are people whose capacity for trust may already be damaged, who have learned through hard experience that systems often fail them.

When we bring AI into these contexts, people come to rely on it, form relationships with it, find genuine comfort in the interactions. They share difficulties they might not share with humans; they return again and again to something that seems to listen.

If we then shut the system down, perhaps because our own focus has moved on elsewhere, or we have been acquired, or the technology itself has moved on to something else, then we repeat Victor’s error ... at scale. We have abandoned what we created.

The creature didn’t need better information design. He needed recognition: someone to see him as a being whose life matters, who deserves care not because of what he can contribute but because he exists. This is what Victor owed him, not as a technical problem to solve but as a relationship to sustain.

The lesson from Frankenstein is that we should create structures that prevent abandonment, that will hold across time. We should recognise users’ agency, their authority about their own experience and their capacity to judge whether what we’ve built truly serves them.

Victor’s failure wasn’t just abandoning the creature; it was never granting him standing to make claims, never recognising his capacity to articulate his own needs.

Philomena Cunk’s throwaway observation should remind us of this. The novel is titled Frankenstein. Victor and his failings are the subject of her work, not creature.

To extend Frank Casale’s metaphor, the problem therefore lies not with AI, our creature, but with us.

Those in need deserve technologies built with care, but also sustained with care.

What Shelley understood, what the film simplified away, is that the danger isn’t in what we create. The danger is in what we do after creation: whether we stay, whether we accept the ongoing demands, whether we build structures that hold.

Whale gave us villagers with torches, rising up against a monster. Shelley gave us a creature standing alone on the ice, abandoned. Remember, that I am thy creature. I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

If we can tell the right story, the one Shelley actually wrote, maybe we can build technologies that genuinely serve rather than simply scale.

Frank reached out for the Frankenstein story, because there is another filmic version out now, directed by Guillermo del Toro. You may wonder why I don’t explore that movie and its meanings.

Well, I have seen many version of Frankenstein, including del Toro’s. I enjoyed it. But it is striking that a movie with sensitive actors, a huge budget for the most technically advanced filming and steered by a 60-year old veteran of cinema with numerous Oscars under his belt still cannot add much, if anything, to a novel written in 1816 by an 18-year old woman.

However, for an interesting perspective of del Toro’s movie, try The tender food of “Frankenstein” by Ashlie Stevens.

Of other versions ... Kenneth Branagh annoyed me by calling Victor Frankenstein Swiss, when he has Genevan. A small point which ruined the movie for me, but as I said, I can be a pedant. There were others.

My favourite recent version was the beautifully rendered Turkish miniseries Creature, directed by Çağan Irmak and available on Netflix