#darksyde

General: Pre-war, the creation of AIs was only allowed if it was officially sanctioned by the council itself, with the promise that any illegal AIs created would be destroyed and the one who created it severely punished. 

These AIs once created, much like actual cybertronians, are immediately assigned a particular role depending on their type to which they are too attend without deviation and any who do not perform to satisfaction- whether that’s simply underperforming or showing too much individually for their liking- will be “scrubbed”, returned to a blank slate which can be tweaked to ensure that such a deviation does not happen again.

This threat, along with conditioning is why seeing outliers from the descriptions below are extremely rare.

How common an AI was depended on their type, albeit ironically in what manner flipped when the war arrived.

Before war the more advanced the AI type, the less common, but when the war arrived the more advanced the AI type the more capable they were off fending off hostile cyberattacks and as such they became more common as the less advanced and defensive capable were successfully hacked and wiped out.

The general public attitude towards these AIs ranged from neutral to negative.

Those who saw them as potentially of use and those who were perturbed by them and saw them as taking jobs that could instead have being filled by- “actual people”. There were also those who disagreed with the creation of artificial life who lacked any sort of real Primus-given spark on a religious level too.

Teletraans:

Teletraan programmes are the usual “starting point” for AIs, their programming being directly derived from Vector Sigma. These AIs are fully sentient, and are invariably used to assist in the running and monitoring of large ships and bases.

They do not however frequently talk, often only doing so when it is strictly necessary and any of them making use of a holomatter avatar is extremely rare.

This is because their assigned role does not strictly include dealing with people: they are to manage the ships and bases themselves, not the teams that may be stationed on them. That leadership role is allocated to someone else, whether a cybertronian or a T-AI.

To differentiate between which Teletraan is which, they officially use registration numbers- so you will get Telatraan I, Teletraan II and so forth. The higher the number, indicates how early on they were created- for example I would be older than II.

However, despite that the number of a Teletraan does not technically indicate rank, as a Teletraan V could easily be created to be assigned to a much larger base than that Teletraan III manages, depending on what is required when Teletraan V is developed.

Of all AI types, Teletraans are the rarest, very few being created. However, percentage wise they also suffered much less casualties than any other AI type, due to having the highest defensive capabilities.

The most prominent wartime Teletraan is that of Teletraan-I, the eldest who was also used to pilot the Ark, which carried many Autobot survivors off of Cybertron once rendered uninhabitable. 

T-AIs:

All T-AIs (”Tactical-Artificial-Intelligence”) are “daughter-programmes” of a Teletraan, being derived from their programming just as a Teletraan is derived from Vector Sigma.  Like Teletraans, they are also fully sentient.

These AIs are used to run and co-ordinate teams and operations rather than any particular ship or base. Where Teletraans manage “home” operations their daughter-programmes manage “away” operations. 

As a result of them directly having to manage people, T-AIs are much more “social” than the Teletraans are. They will frequently engage in direct interactions with their assigned workers, possessing holomatter avatars which are used to assist in that endeavour.

As such, it is not uncommon for a T-AI and those operating under them to become relatively attached to each other, which in turn is why the those belonging to the T-AI type were the most common AIs to be scrubbed pre-war, when that empathy became apparent to their superiors as it began to impact their performance.

To differentiate which T-AI is which, Iaconian letters were used. So you would get the equivelant of T-AI-A and T-AI-B. On top of that, for convenience these letters would usually according to protocol be automatically be visible somewhere on a T-AIs holomatter avatar, so who they are should still be visible on sight. 

Overall, before the war T-AIs were more common than Teletraans, but still not common. There were 26 letters in the Iaconian alphabet and as such a maximum of 26 T-AIs.

During the war, their numbers were cut significantly. This is both due to their tactical positions making them priority targets, as well as a direct mistake of the council allocating a T-AI to monitor the growing Decepticon insurgency via monitoring several mines, without taking into account their tendency to become attached to their charges.

This resulted in a traitor who enabled the deletion of several sister-programmes before being discovered. Which in turn made the council much more prone to pre-emptively getting rid of T-AIs to prevent a repeat situation.

The most prominent AI during the wartime is that of T-AI-A, the eldest who helped co-ordinate the teams and tactics of the Elite Guard

NAVIs:

“Daughter-programmes” of T-AIs, who are only about mid-tier in terms of sentience.

NAVIs are provided with default faux “personalities” once first commissioned which can range from purely logical to bubbly, depending on the preference of whomever is commissioning them. Whatever the personality however, they will still follow whatever orders are given to them and are incapable of even considering disregarding them.

That said, older ones have been known on occasion to develop quirks that are not part of their pre-programmed personality, as well as occasionally express opinions about orders, even if they still cannot disobey them.

Their roles in which they receive these orders to fulfil, are essentially to be the glorified navigation system and pilots of small to medium sized ships. Unlike T-AIs they do not possess any authority over any crew on-board, they simply take the ship where they are told to.

They do possess holomatter avatars which can respond to the crew, but they’re generally only used when the NAVIs presence was directly requested, rather than them casually engaging with anyone.

They do not possess official unique names to designate them, as there is not generally a seen need to name a navigation system and the only reason they will ever possess one is if they are given a nickname by crew.

NAVIs are far more common than T-AIs, many having been created during the Golden Age to help automate ships to seek out potential colony worlds and them continuing to be used even after to assist in transport and attempts to re-establish contact.

But attitude towards what to do with them shifted during the war depending on what part of the war it was. Initially the response was to try hack them in order to obtain ship files they may have access too, as well as destroy them in an effort to sabotage warships. 

As NAVI only possessed mid-tier sentience their defensive capabilities were significantly lacking in comparison to more advanced AIs, this hugely cut down their numbers, resulting in the once plentiful type becoming quite rare by the time of the Exodus.

But the Exodus is when attitudes towards them shifted, with many cybertronians scrambling for a way to get off world and not many knowing how to pilot a ship well enough to be able to do just that. As such, they quickly became a valued resource as a potential ticket off of an uninhabitable world.

A well-known NAVI from the wartime is that of Navi-ko, the pilot of the Decepticon ship known as “Darksyde”. Part of the reason for Navi-ko being so well-known is not just association via the ship they pilot, but also their eventual upgrade to becoming a drone.

I-QUEUE:

Derived from NAVIs, these AIs do not possess any sentience at all.

They are organising systems who manage and answer questions regarding archives, all the while being incapable of coming up with any unique or creative thoughts or opinions about these archives.

They will answer anyone who asks about these archives, not differentiating between faction or caste unless files are explicitly classified.

But as it was, their access to such archives still made them targets of cyberattacks during the war, by those seeking to either gain the archives they possessed or eliminate them before others could gain access to those archives.

Due to their complete lack of sentience or individuality, no particular I-QUEUE was prominent during the war.

Drones:

What defines a drone is that they are any sort of artificial intelligence that inhabits a sparkless cybertronian body.

They cannot be classed as any of the above AIs because being in a cybertronian body and operating with a cybertronian processor has a significant impact on the way that the AI functions.

For example, the inevitability of non or mid-level sentient AIs such as I-QUEUEs and NAVIs eventually gaining full sentience the longer they spend in a body, albeit that takes a significant, gradual time to develop.

They also tend to be very childlike and naïve when that sentience first develops, lacking much life experience, which means that they still continue to be very easily manipulated and told what to do.

This development of full sentience is not generally believed within the cybertronian populace to be true however, just as it isn’t with regular sentient AIs, due to them still lacking any spark which most cybertronians take as a must to indicate true mechanical life.

Very few of them had ever even met any drones, which could have persuaded them to think otherwise if they did.

This is because drones were always very, very rare pre-war Cybertron, being rarely created and even more rarely surviving long after that creation, due to the resulting treatment of them being classed as disposable.

They became slightly more common during the war with scientists such as Shockwave seeking to boost the number of available workers and soldiers, but there were still at most about a handful of them. 

But people tend to think them much more common than they actually are.

Especially so as the term “drone” also became the insulting term for bots said to simply, unquestionably follow along with whatever role they were assigned. This in turn occasionally results in confusion, with people not always being sure which sort of drone someone actually is.

Examples of notable genuine drones include the former NAVI, Naviko and the human created Nightbird.