>>97671478>small universe Jobberac >genuinely good rather than just passableIgnoring his lackluster episodes and fights and the crappiness of making everything connected to Krypton, making Brainiac a pure AI misses the point of Brainiac. Brainiac is not a cold calculating computer, he's an organic, physical being of blood and flesh (and metal and plastic and probably some graphene too) that acts like a cold calculating computer. Brainiac is the ultimate nightmare scenario of us becoming one with the machine. He's a computer in the original sense of the word - one who calculates/computes. The universe is numbers to him, something to shrink and control, everyone is numbers to him. Superman is a number that just happens to be very stubborn and doesn't want to enter the equation.
Brainiac is not a cold computer because he was made to be that way, or because hooks himself to computers and puts weird cybernetics on his head. That doesn't make him into a monster (otherwise Cyborg would be a monster, too). He's a cold computer because he acts like one. At any moment, Brainiac could put a stop to it, free all these people, and start doing great good for the universe with all that knowledge. He doesn't. Not because he can't, because he won't.
Making Brainiac a Kryptonian AI following his programming to the exact word to a fault gets rid of all this. He was programmed to learn everything, so to do that, he absorbs all the knowledge from a planet, then destroys it (leaving nothing, also getting rid of the great symbolism of his shrink ray) so it can’t make his knowledge incomplete. That just makes him a gray goo machine. He’s executing a simple directive to the point of causing harm. He just needs to be debugged. Like in Smallville. Luthor says as much.
Of course I can't really blame them for wanting to make their own version when Brainiac in the comics at the time was still doing that Milton Fine crap and didn't have much of a characterization nailed down in general.