Artificial intelligence

Astromech and protocol droids were both given artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was a form of technology that could be installed into droids to give them some degree of independent thought. By 35 ABY, galactic society had accepted that there was a probability of abuse and civilizational collapse if droids could truly think. To ensure the safety and security of organic beings, droid minds were hard-coded with prohibition programmes. However, additional anti-droid sentiment fueled targeted discrimination against such thinking-and-feeling machines, particularly after the onslaught of the Separatist Droid Army during the Clone Wars.

Doctor Gubacher of the Galactic Republic was an artificial intelligence specialist during the war, designing and making modifications to droids for the Republic. Kallon, a member of the Free Ryloth Movement, was considered to be a genius with artificial intelligence, and had used his knowledge to reprogram the brains of Separatist droid fighters. In the search for rebel outposts following the Battle of Yavin, Imperial Security Bureau and Imperial Intelligence analyzed data on suspicious activities with reference to population data and used AI predictors to list targets for probe droids.

Eternal Rur was the name held by the disembodied consciousness of a deceased male human Rur which was stored within the Rur crystal. It was located at the Citadel of Rur and was destroyed around 0 ABY. In the time following the Battle of Endor, Imperial Grand Admiral Rae Sloane tried listening to a phono-play about a droid containing an artificial intelligence named ADAM. The auto-fighters were automated TIE fighter series starfighters that were produced by the forces under Commodore Visler Korda on the planet Rekkana.

Behind the scenes

From science fiction to reality

George Lucas' 1971 film THX 1138

The term "artificial intelligence" was introduced to the current Star Wars canon in the 2015 novel Lords of the Sith. The original 1977 Star Wars film by George Lucas featured droids as their own characters while Lucas' first theatrical film, 1971's THX 1138, features a dystopian consumerist society tightly controlled by robotic police and was based on his 1967 short film in film school. Lucas started working on his Star Wars rough draft in 1974 after realizing that a film "being pessimistic doesn't seem to accomplish anything" but continued pondering about the fate of American democracy in the wake of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Artificial intelligence (AI) in the real world refers to a wide range of developing technology, including theoretical forms of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence with cognitive performance at human levels or higher and generative AI that use machine learning to create new data.

AI entered the public consciousness in 2022 with the launch of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and text-to-image models such as OpenAI's DALL-E to the general public. In June that year, an engineer of Google's LaMDA LLM raised concerns that the model could be sentient following a conversation with the chatbot, including a joke about Jedi. There have been public concerns over ethics, alleged copyright infringement, and the costly environmental impact of training frontier AI models,

Star Wars and AI

Existential risk and AI existentialism

"Dark Droids doesn’t shy away from examining the way droids exist in Star Wars, which for me, as a writer of science fiction, is really exciting. We're reckoning with a moment in the real world where "droid intelligence," a.k.a. AI, is something we're being forced to stare at with open eyes. If created sentience can exist, what will we think about it once it arrives? More importantly—and this is the central question of the series—what will it think of us?"

―Charles Soule

Leading AI experts have warned in May 2023 that current trends of developing advanced AI are estimated to lead to human extinction.

The comic series Star Wars: Dark Droids written by Charles Soule and published between August and December of 2023 features a galaxy-wide crisis involving a rogue artificial intelligence named the Scourge. Written with the contemporary development of AI in mind, Soule intended to explore what AI would think of people via how droids exist in Star Wars. In Ross Douthat's interview of Tony Gilroy for The New York Times that was published on June 5, 2025, the two discussed how Gilroy's television series Andor focused on the destruction of community and the future of AI, including how AI-generated fiction could displace stories like Star Wars that are written, performed, and discussed by humans. Beyond the effects of AI on the Hollywood business, Gilroy said he had discussed AI with people in Los Angeles in the past few days and came across the "terrifying" prospect of a misaligned AI superintelligence killing all humans arriving as early as 2027, or alternative dystopic scenarios such as mass unemployment and an AI nuclear race between the United States and China.

In Star Wars, existentialism in droids was addressed in Alan Moore's "Rust Never Sleeps" comic strip published in 1982 and the D-Squad arc of the television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, released in 2013—George Lucas said in 2020 that the arc, comprising "Secret Weapons," "A Sunny Day in the Void," "Missing in Action," and "Point of No Return," were his favourite episodes of The Clone Wars. At 2024's Cannes Film Festival, Lucas said he intended the Star Wars universe to show that all people are "equal" regardless of their appearance, gender, or species, with the only form of discrimination being anti-droid sentiment similar to the contemporary development of advanced AI.

Generative AI

"[…] it's not being created by a human mind and what the human emotions—and that's what distinguishes art. You need that human quality in there.[…] I would never use AI art in its pure form because it's not really art."

―Doug Chiang, in an interview in 2023

C-3PO, fictional human-cyborg relations droid, identified as agitated by a real developing AI system.

On December 1, 2017, Lucasfilm and IBM's Science and Star Wars video series concluded with an episode on AI. IBM's "Watson" medical question answering model had played the role of co-host alongside Anthony Carboni throughout the series. For the final episode, Watson analysed the text of C-3PO's dialogue in all Star Wars films as well as information from the Databank feature on StarWars.com for emotions, language styles, and social tendencies. IBM also trained computer systems on the modalities of body gestures and voice inflections and applied them to Anthony Daniels' portrayal of C-3PO in Return of the Jedi, applying facial recognition and identifying moods such as "agitation."

In a interview at the PIDS Enghien special effects festival in 2023, Lucasfilm Vice President and Executive Creative Director Doug Chiang said that he does not consider AI "art" as art because he considers art as creations of the human mind and emotions, though artists could use AI-generated imagery as reference material to make art. On April 8, 2025, Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic's Rob Bredow unveiled the potential applicability of AI in visual effects in a TED Talk. In it, he featured a conceptual AI-generated short film made by ILM's Landis Fields in a period of two weeks titled Star Wars: Field Guide. While the short featured visual hybrids of real world animals, Bredow suggested that the technology could be used to visualize impressions of a series during pre-production and that artists would remain the creative backbone at Lucasfilm and ILM.

Work on Star Wars continues in Ukraine, taking advantage of AI technology.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted the Ukrainian speech-synthesis start-up Respeecher's work on the Obi-Wan Kenobi television series, but employees finished replicating James Earl Jones' voice as Darth Vader via artificial intelligence with the actor's consent. Respeecher had previously replicated actor Mark Hamill's voice as a young Luke Skywalker for the television series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Respeecher also replicated the voice of the Hungarian actor Lajos Kránitz, who dubbed Darth Vader in the Skywalker saga, for the Hungarian dubs of the Obi-Wan Kenobi series on Disney+.

In an interview with Collider that was published on March 10, 2025, showrunner Tony Gilroy said that he had wanted to publish the scripts of Andor online, which he described as "an ego thing" based on "vanity," but the team decided against it because they wish to prevent their scripts from being used to train AI models. In another interview with Collider on May 4, 2025, the interviewer expressed being glad that Bail Organa was recast rather than performed with AI de-aging technology, and both Gilroy and Genevieve O'Reilly agreed with the sentiment.

On May 16, 2025 Epic Games introduced the late James Earl Jones' voice as Darth Vader as a conversation partner in the video game Fortnite's Galactic Battle mode, subject to parental controls and in English only. When addressing Darth Vader, the player's voice audio is processed by Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash model to generate Darth Vader's dialogue responses, which are transformed into audio in James Earl Jones' voice via the Flash v2.5 model of the American speech synthesis company ElevenLabs. Players could report Vader's lines to Epic Games, which noted that interactions with Vader would not be used to train AI models. The feature was developed in consultation with James Earl Jones' family, Disney, and Lucasfilm. Three days later, on May 19, the SAG-AFTRA labor union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Fortnite's signatory company, the Epic Games subsidiary Llama Productions, with the US National Labor Relations Board for the use of the AI Darth Vader voice to "replace bargaining unit work" by human SAG-AFTRA performers.

On June 11, 2025, Disney, Universal City Studios, and their subsidiaries—including Lucasfilm which owns the Star Wars franchise—filed a lawsuit against Midjourney on the charge of copyright infringement of their intellectual property via Midjourney's text-to-image and text-to-video generative AI services, described as "plagiarism" and "piracy" in the filing presented to the US District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles. In the lawsuit, multiple Star Wars characters—including Darth Vader, R2-D2, C-3PO, Luke Skywalker, and more—were used as examples of how Midjourney infringed on Disney's copyright.

Robotics

A BDX droid in Disneyland—a real world robot with AI technology by NVIDIA and Google DeepMind

BDX droids are real-world robots made by The Walt Disney Company's Research and Imagineering departments using NVIDIA AI as part of a collaboration with NVIDIA and the Google DeepMind AI laboratory. The initial robots were developed under a year and manually operated with two joysticks—but they were more complex than Disney's pre-existing repertoire of animatronics as Imagineers used reinforcement learning, based on artists' animations, for the robots to move in imitated motions while navigating various terrain via real-time simulation. Each had two NVIDIA Jetson computers. They were unveiled by Disney Imagineers in October 2023 when three "droids-in-training" roamed the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge themed land in Disneyland in California. The "play test" showed that the robots could maneuver on uneven ground, dance without losing their balance, and "interact" with guests with pre-set responses.

BDX units were later featured at the Disney Experience SXSW conference on March 8, 2025, where Imagineers explained their development of the robots via reinforcement learning and simulation. Jon Favreau then revealed that the BDX units would appear in the 2026 film The Mandalorian and Grogu. During NVIDIA's AI conference ten days later, on March 18, CEO Jensen Huang announced that his company was collaborating with Google DeepMind and Disney Research to further develop Newton, an advanced physics engine that would allow AI models to be trained precisely and at high speeds. A BDX unit named "Blue" operating with Newton featured with Huang on stage.

Appearances

• Brotherhood (and audiobook) (Mentioned only)
• Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel (and audiobook) (Mentioned only)
• Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising (and audiobook)
• Lords of the Sith (and audiobook) (First appearance)
• Darth Vader (2015) 6
• The Screaming Citadel 1 (Mentioned only)
• Doctor Aphra (2016) 9
• Doctor Aphra (2016) 11
• Doctor Aphra (2016) 12
• Doctor Aphra (2016) 13
• Doctor Aphra (2020) 21 (Mentioned only)
• Doctor Aphra (2020) 24
• Doctor Aphra (2020) 25
• Doctor Aphra (2020) 26
• Doctor Aphra (2020) 29
• "Hare-Brained Heist" — Star Wars Adventures Annual 2019
• Alphabet Squadron (and audiobook)
• Aftermath: Life Debt (and audiobook) (Mentioned only)
• Star Wars: Skeleton Crew — "The Real Good Guys"
• "True Love" — Tales from a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Aliens: Volume I

Sources

• Star Wars Encyclopedia: The Comprehensive Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy (First identified as AI)

External links

• Artificial general intelligence on Wikipedia
• Artificial intelligence on Wikipedia