I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.
Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.)
A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the worldwide crapsack economic system. They don't abolish corporations, although they might take them over.
Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the world into a post-scarcity society, it probably wouldn't be filed under "cyberpunk" either...
Rampant capitalism is kinda genre-defining for Cyberpunk so Cyberpunk without corporations wouldn't really be Cyberpunk. _The Matrix_ only qualifies as Cyberpunk because within the matrix the machines effectively control the capitalist power structures to exert their influence.
Abundance/scarcity isn't really about availability, it's more about access. You can have a cyberpunk story in a "post-scarcity" setting in the sense of availability (due to sci-fi tech) but you can't have it without unequal access to those resources.
Right: I'm implying that the genre definition itself places an upper-bound on how impactful AI is "allowed" to be, which creates a kind of (heh) no-so-anthropic principle, ex:
A: "Why isn't there more AI in cyberpunk media?"
B: "There's a decent amount already, as characters or tools."
A: "But why didn't those authors address its potential to be even bigger?"
B: "Some did, but that makes stories we don't categorize as cyberpunk."
Agreed, which is why The Culture (series) isn't cyberpunk but The Polity (by Neal Asher) kinda skirts the line, in many ways they are similar except resource inequality still exists on a wide/policy scale in the latter.
AIs are in plenty of cyberpunk stories, but your comment did make me think that they are often rather stereotypically “alien entity characters” and not a kind of corporate technology / weapon that is controlled by a specific organization.
Which is a shame, as it seems to me that the overwhelming risk of AI is from the latter scenario, and not as a rogue individual entity.
I think you can look at Star Trek as a fairly grounded example of where current LLMs could go: the ship's computer is not autonomous in any way but it does accept fairly vague instructions and you can apparently vibe-code the holodeck.
AI is one of the core parts of cyberpunk, through androids / humanoid robots. Blade Runner is completely built on the protagonist having to interact with rogue artificial intelligence.
