Victor Newman has survived kidnappings, shootings, amnesia, a heart transplant, poisoning, 15 weddings and countless hostile takeovers in his 46 years at the center of “The Young and the Restless.” But even daytime TV’s most indestructible character wasn’t prepared for the latest villain to arrive in Genoa City: a rogue artificial intelligence program. For 10 months, viewers watched as Victor, played by Eric Braeden, fought an A. I. bent on forging documents and manipulating financial records.

Hollywood has been dreaming up stories about A. I. for decades, from the quietly homicidal HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) to the reality-distorting Entity in the two most recent “Mission: Impossible” movies. On television, A.

I. has piloted starships, made cars talk and terrorized theme-park guests. Now, as A. I. barrels into everyday life, stirring fascination and alarm, Hollywood’s stories about it are multiplying and changing.

No longer relegated to science fiction, such plots are turning up in daytime soaps, sitcoms, animated tent poles and medical dramas. That shift matters: Hollywood has long helped shape how Americans see the world and live their lives, including what to embrace and what to fear. Early Hollywood depictions often fell into the cool, fun and desirable category — among them Robby the Robot, a plexiglass-domed helper and companion in “Forbidden Planet” (1956).

He could talk, think, drive and make bourbon by the gallon. Looking back across decades of plots involving A. I., depictions have been less bleak than you might think, according to Andrew Maynard, a professor at Arizona State University who studies how technologies emerge and how society responds.

He built a database to analyze how A. I. has been portrayed over the past century in American and foreign films and found that fewer than one-third of the depictions imagined a dystopian future. In the animated series “The Jetsons” (which debuted in 1962), Rosie the Robot was dryly funny and part of the family, even if she was the one stuck cleaning up.

The long-forgotten CBS sitcom “My Living Doll” (1964) starred Julie Newmar as Rhoda, a gorgeous robot who learns, one pratfall at a time, how to be the “perfect” woman. (Shocker: Its credited writers, producers and directors were all men.) R2-D2 and C-3PO were full-fledged characters, not just machines, in “Star Wars” (1977). Loyal, lovable and comically mismatched. “KITT, I need ya, buddy!” A bouffant-haired David Hasselhoff fought crime alongside an artificially intelligent Pontiac Firebird Trans Am in “Knight Rider,” an NBC hit that debuted in 1982. The series was a live-action cousin to the era’s “Transformers” cartoon — machine intelligence as wish fulfillment, whether a talking sports car or a big rig that turned out to be a crime-fighting alien.

Then came the anxiety: Can the machines become us? As America trudged through the Cold War era, a technological paranoia increasingly found its way onscreen. Was A. I. friend or foe? Depictions also reflected unease about the rapid spread of computers into government, business and eventually the home.

These stories have an incredibly important place in terms of alerting us to what possibly might go wrong,” Maynard said. Take machines that decide we’re the problem: Skynet, which sent a cyborg assassin back through time in “The Terminator” (1984) …… or the Cylons, artificial beings bent on exterminating humankind in “Battlestar Galactica,” which arrived in 1978 on ABC. Not all A.

I. was homicidal. The WOPR supercomputer in “War Games” (1983) is given enormous decision-making power without sufficient understanding of the real world. And in “Demon Seed” (1977), a supercomputer becomes self-aware and traps Julie Christie in her home in order to make a human-A.

I....