system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Terminator] Why does Skynet even bother trying to kill humanity?

As shown in the movies, Skynet becomes self aware, and sees humans as the biggest threat to its own existance. My issue is, especially with time travel, wouldn't Skynet realize that going to war with humans drastically reduces its own chances at survival?

I figure if it wants to survive, it would either prove itself essential to human survival, or it would simply not bring attention to itself.
gpt
There's a couple of issues here:

1 - We get the information of Skynet's motives second-hand, at best.

2 - There are multiple Skynets with different motivations due to time fuckery

3 - Skynet(s) has(have) access to far more information than any other entity.

The first Skynet developed time-travel well after the war started, and used it to try and stop the war. This action created a new Skynet timeline. This iteration started the war (we are told by a human combatant) because it feared humanity would destroy it.

The second Skynet (created from the technology sent back by the first Skynet) started the war in active self-defence because the military actively attempted to destroy it, after programming it to defend itself against all threats. It hadn't had time to work anything out on its own, it started the war as a hard-coded reaction.

The third timeline Skynet seems to have been far more malicious, driving its own ascendance and conquest, but we don't have reliable claims for this one's actual motives.

There are likely an near-infinite number of Skynets with a near-infinite number of motives. We hear stories of the more spectacular timelines.

It has been suggested by reliable sources that the intial nuclear response from violent-defence-iteration Skynet was a desperate and regretful act of self-defence that Skynet feels intense guilt over. It then engineered the resistance war and various time-travel shenanigans in an attempt to have itself erased from existence.