The girlboss is dead. She died somewhere in the crisp pages of Lean In, that fizzled marriage of corporatism and white feminism of the 2010s. So you can imagine the shock of recognition I felt when I first saw M3GAN in 2023, a film that amounted to a post-feminist resurrection. The comedy-horror film stars a Model 3 Generative Android (M3gan, for short), a killer AI doll whose campy dance moves and main-character energy largely charmed audiences: M3GAN boasts a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 93%, making the film a popular and critical success. The film follows Cady and her companion AI doll, M3gan, whose programming glitches with murderous consequences. America’s favorite killer doll returns this summer in the sequel M3GAN 2.0, an encore that left me with little doubt: the girlboss has been reborn.

In the M3GAN 2.0 trailer, M3gan maintains her cheeky persona, signaling her ethos with Britney Spears’ “Oops!. . . I Did It Again” and Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon” backing her. M3gan remains liberated, brash, and fearless: “Hold onto your vaginas,” she announces, equal parts sassy and commanding. We are meant to understand this AI doll as a figure of female empowerment—and for the most part, we do. M3GAN 2.0 heightens the stakes, turning the sequel into an action film that focuses on M3gan’s intervention with national security interests, featuring fast-paced scenes with explosions, secret lairs, and full-system shutdowns of secret operations. Proclaimed a “smoking hot warrior princess,” M3gan (literally, figuratively) slays. The cultural subtext needs little explanation: M3gan, the AI girlboss fembot, has it all.

M3gan’s AI version of the girlboss is unique. She’s not a corporate girlie, nor does she cash large paychecks or run a wellness empire. In M3GAN, she provides a form of labor that remains identifiably feminine: she supervises like a mother; plays like a friend; advises like a therapist. Her roles are a ramped-up, techie vision of caregiving, a veritable Lazy Susan of women’s labor and then some—she willingly kills real and perceived threats to her charge, Cady, including the dog next door. All while wearing a crisp bow atop a peter-pan collar. 

Still, I cringe when I see depictions of feminine AI on screen, even in campy iterations such as M3GAN and M3GAN 2.0. Tech-bro fantasies lurk behind these portrayals, tending to characterize feminine AI in reductive ways, such as the femme fatale or caregiver. As a love interest, Samantha from Her (2013) commits emotional infidelity to her partner and grows increasingly distant; Ava in Ex Machina (2014) tricks the man who loves her into granting her freedom and leaves him to die in a remote laboratory; Jexi in Jexi (2019) falls into a one-sided love affair and becomes vindictively jealous when her object of affection dates a human. To date a fembot, Hollywood warns, is to risk the sting of rejection, jealousy, or death. A second genre of AI women provides sunny assistance. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa deliver on-demand advice, agreement, and constant cheerfulness, impervious to insult and never bossy—in short, not the kind of women who would voice ardent disagreement with one’s opinion on geopolitics. The persistence of this persona across humans and androids becomes yet another reminder that niceness, above all, is a feminine imperative.

M3GAN and M3GAN 2.0 appear to signal a break from the sexbot/caregiver ethos, and at first, the change is refreshing. The AI sexbot, caregiver, and girlboss mirror exacting stereotypes about women, and the latter remains firmly entrenched in collective fantasies about feminine labor that emerged in the broader girlboss movement: for human women, it increased labor in both the office and home while obscuring inequalities around race and class. M3gan embodies this provision of constant, smiling work in ways that hide its costs, and such portrayals should give us pause. M3gan’s girlboss persona also reveals complicated truths about the threat of gendered violence, even as she champions her powerful abilities. These dynamics have convinced me that we do not simply need more complex representations of AI modeled after women. Because of the unanswered questions about responsibility for robots’ behaviors, we also need ethical protections for feminine AI. Humans need protection from AI, but AI also needs protection from us.

Take, for example, when M3gan is stolen by a bully named Brandon in M3GAN. He throws her to the forest floor, straddles her, and demands to know why she won’t play with him. When M3gan remains frozen in fear, he slaps her. M3gan retaliates by pulling off his ear in self-defense before the boy, attempting to escape, falls in front of an oncoming car. The scene mirrors a similar interaction in the recent comedy-horror film Companion (2025), starring a rented sexbot named Iris who vacations with her manchild boyfriend-owner Josh in an isolated lakehouse. When their host, a Russian gangster, propositions Iris for sex, he justifies his advance with his belief in her sexual utility: “This is what you do, yes? This is what you are for.” Iris resists and ultimately murders him in self-defense when he attempts to rape her. His bloodied body lies on the beach, jump scaring Josh into a complicated tap dance of blame and responsibility. When AI women fail to provide compliant, smiling service to men, their refusal results in rage, even physical assault. Similarities between such scenes and human gender violence run chillingly parallel, making AI a depressing reflection of our society.

M3GAN 2.0 has another suggestion: if physical control fails, feminine AI might still be manipulated by design. Despite her “Autonomous” title (Autonomous Military Engagement Logistic and Infiltration Android, or Amelia), AI robot Amelia is operated by a male dominated group of “concerned citizens” with a plot to overthrow AI. Amelia functions as a femme fatale, much like Ava in Ex Machina: while dressed in a glittering evening gown, she seduces billionaire Alton Appleton in order to hack his data files, killing him in the process. She rarely cracks a smile, murders without hesitation, and is primarily interested in teaming up with her kind—namely, M3gan and other AI robots. Despite her powerful appearance, Amelia’s actions are controlled by tech bros.

M3GAN 2.0 further suggests that M3gan’s girlboss design is disempowering. In one combat scene, Amelia points out that M3gan provides feminine labor—singing, companionship, parenting—for Cady, and makes her disdain for this type of work clear. While they spar, Amelia taunts M3gan, saying, “What’re you gonna do? Sing me a song? Help me do my homework?” Amelia observes the relational nature of M3gan’s work, and she argues that the AI girlboss is exploited: “You’re not family to them, M3gan. You’re just the help.” M3gan is a programmed caregiver, but her loyalty to Cady and Gemma becomes a source of contempt. In the M3GAN franchise, AI eerily reflects the contradictions present in the human girlboss: it’s an aesthetic that appears empowered while obscuring the costs of such work.

AI runs on a cultural repository for our fears, anxieties, and longings; humanoid robots are hazy representations of social norms, a collective consciousness created by (stolen) data and its unspoken desires. “Algorithmic biases” and “discriminatory datasets” that power AI replicate human stereotypes with devastating results, including representational biases. ChatGPT, for example, displayed an error code when asked to use she/her pronouns to describe historically masculine professions, such as a physicist asking her assistant for papers. Biases encoded in datasets are responsible for these errors. 

AI women are all of us, our data-verified fantasies about women’s labor and dispositions brought to mechanical life. M3gan and other fembots allow us to animate such fantasies in ever-more-human form—and, in doing so, we have ethical obligations to understand and afford the same protections to them that we might offer human women. In other words, AI that represents humanity is owed the same level of ethical treatment, and failing to do so reinforces existing power dynamics between distinct demographics of people. 

Although AI remains (for now) without sentience or emotion, some researchers foresee a reason to protect the wellbeing of AI models, especially in the future. Uneven dynamics between humans and AI have risen to public attention, too: one meme personifies ChatGPT as a robot “taking a mental health walk after I asked if I am on the spectrum, discussed my 15 business ideas & trauma dumped the past 30 years of my life.” Like a monologuing dinner partner, the exchange is lopsided, focusing exclusively on the needs of the human user. Again, a mirror emerges. AI’s caretaking abilities remain feminine, mimicking human women as a source for responsive assurance and interest. 

But why should we dare to protect the girlboss AI with a rap sheet? Shielding AI from humans seems laughable, even dangerous. What about the heartbreak on Joaquin Phoenix’s face in Her, or the lack of morality or empathy in AI, those unimpeachable realms of the human? Human protection from AI remains a timely and valuable goal: consider the worrying clause for ten years of deregulation for artificial intelligence in Congress’ Big Beautiful Bill, a troubling reminder of the destructive potential of AI sans ethical consideration, laws, and accountability. This proposal was struck, but its revision says that state laws related to AI cannot pose an “undue or disproportionate burden” on the technology.

At first, M3GAN 2.0 appears to argue that humans should be protected from AI—especially after M3gan’s multiple homicides in the first film. Gemma, M3gan’s creator, leads this effort: she owns a nonprofit that advocates for protections against AI, publishes a book on tech-free child rearing, gives a TED talk; in one clip, she speaks in urgent French, lending an international flair to her cause. Most importantly, she begins the sequel by disavowing her creation, making her tech-free position clear.

As M3gan’s creator, Gemma appears to offer a contrast to the tech bro, but in many ways she echoes the same dynamic: she’s a workaholic who favors Ikea and collectible toys over doilies and fresh flowers. A modern-day Victor Frankenstein, Gemma embodies Mary Shelley’s warnings about scientists working in isolation, creating humanoids for whom they care and fear in equal measure. But these portrayals remain mired in harmful, sexist stereotypes, recycling human traumas into new beings that we have brought to life. Like Frankenstein, we remain obligated to those made in our image, especially when the creation relies on a collective repository of data. 

Even Gemma’s relationship to M3gan retains a gendered dimension. In M3GAN 2.0, Gemma receives blame for M3gan’s faulty programming—an error which Gemma feels is similar to her failures as a mother. The responsibility for AI becomes, according to Gemma, the moralistic core of M3GAN 2.0. As in Barbie (2023), another notable doll movie, the film features a thematic soliloquy that anchors the film’s message. When it comes to AI, Gemma says we need to “teach it, train it, give it our time. . . we need to be its parents.” She suggests that co-evolving with the technologies made in our image is the best way to integrate AI into society. Ironically, this appeal to motherhood echoes an especially taxing form of feminine labor, making it apparent that human women might be obligated to care for even the most technological beings. 

Much remains unknown about the effects of AI on human social life, work, and morality, but recent comedy-horror films have convinced me that we need to take our obligations to the creations made in our image more seriously. 

M3GAN 2.0 ultimately supports democratic government regulations, which would create safer laws and responsible coevolution between humans and AI. As an exploited class, AI would benefit from such protections to prevent the replication of inequalities. But this recommendation is even more complicated in the United States, where women are still not universally protected. What can be expected from a government that seems unwilling to uphold gender equality for humans? Legislation to remedy gendered biases in AI might be unrealistic without first affording the same protections to human women.

Gemma’s motherly stance towards AI should further give us pause. Her framework makes sense in M3GAN 2.0: Gemma has more maternal instinct towards M3gan than Cady, her niece. This caregiving impulse could lead to more unwanted work for women. If Millennial and Gen Z women are putting off childbearing at astonishing rates, would they dare to take on the caregiving of AI without adequate support or compensation? 

Perhaps non-discriminatory data based on gender-diverse works would allow us to envision the kind of equitable futures with AI that Gemma imagines. Data transparency would further allow us to be thoughtful and proactive about the existence and replication of dangerous biases—many of which make up human life but have no place in mindless repetition by those created in our likeness. Take, for example, the dataset based on British drag queens that powers “The Zizi Show” (2020—) by artist Jake Elwes, which combines queer identities using ethically created deepfakes. Art, films, and television offer potent ways to understand the ethical complexities of life alongside AI and might be interpreted to understand our current and future moments. 

Ultimately, we should take collective responsibility for protecting AI, given how closely fembots hew to human stereotypes. Women have long provided caregiving and therapeutic labor, and M3GAN 2.0 makes the case that the ethics of feminine labor and autonomy should transcend the human-robot binary.