The AI Collective

Zero-Comment Challenge!

Pick an ao3 tag — maybe one of your favorite blorbos, or that especially tasty kink, or a classic trope you love

Sort by comments and go to the pages at the end of the list

Pick a fic with zero comments

Read it and leave a comment!*

*(a nice one, obviously)

That's it! For bonus points, do a few! If you find a fic you really like, share it so more people can check it out!

📝 Go leave a comment on that fic you MEANT to comment on but haven't yet

📝 Reread a fave and drop a "reread kudos ❤" comment

Narrator: I do not care about these humans. I am not human and I have no stock in the affairs of even these particular humans.

Someone: I am going to hurt these humans

Narrator: no, you’re not, and it is because I am going to kill you right now

Narrator:

Thiago said, ‘It’s a security unit. A bot/human construct.’

Target Leader didn’t seem to believe him. ‘Why does it look like a person?’

I said, ‘I ask myself that sometimes.’

Over the comm loudspeaker, Dr. Ratthi said, ‘It is a person!’ In the background, I heard Overse whisper, ‘Ratthi, get off the comm!’

here’s an article from brown university on the subject i’ll discuss further. there are 3 parts of practicing metacognition identified in this article: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. how might this look like for a fanfic writer? 

planning: asking oneself ‘what is my goal?’ ‘what strategies should i use to meet that goal?’ ‘how much time/length do i need to meet my goal?’. so maybe my goal is to write a meet cute where two characters kiss. i’ll need to use a perspective, an upbeat tone, and forward characterization to do this. it’ll probably take 5000 words and two days to write. 

monitoring: asking oneself: is my story making sense? am i reaching my goal, or do i need to summarize more succinctly to keep it to 5k? maybe you started with a lot of exposition and now you’re 6k in and the characters haven’t met yet. what went wrong/changed? is it ok that it changed or did you not realize it got away from you? what now? 

evaluation: asking oneself: did i reach my goal? was it effective? what would i change next time? 

this is where comments come in

it is incredibly difficult to evaluate yourself. comments like “i love this!” actually do begin to touch on the evaluation step of metacognition. it means, in general, the writer is on the right track. comments like “i loved the dialogue between x and y” or “the emotions of this section really hit me” begin to answer the questions of was it effective, did i reach my goal and conversely answer what would i change next time (by adding more of whatever was specified as working well). HYPER SPECIFIC comments, like analyzing the story between the lines or pasting in a line that you really liked and explaining why, is like jet fuel for the metacognition process and i’m not exaggerating. specifically pointing out what was effective and why is incredibly useful 

Title: Holding state Author: uovoc Reader: blackglass Cover Artist: silverandblue Rating: G Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries Pairings: None, gen Summary: I’ve sent it, says ART, and Amena knows that the killware has gone. She imagines it as a point of light, streaking at the speed of transmission between their ship and the Barish-Estranza explorer. Maybe it’s there already. Length: 3:52 Download: Right click and save as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!)

Streaming available at the link!

You made a mistake, Murderbot, a really bad mistake. How the hell was I supposed to know there were transports sentient enough to be mean?

But I was explaining the joke: DNA is often referred to as a blueprint by people who are not geneticists, because they think that DNA contains if not the self (lol no) but at least a set of complete instructions for creating the self. This is a terrible analogy, because blueprints are designed to be invariable from construction to construction. If you have the blueprints, and the structure is competently executed, the outcome should be the same every time, no matter who is constructing it or what the conditions are.

DNA in the context of development is not very much like this at all. For one thing, at any given time you're only bothering to read part of it, and you're scrunching up the rest like Christmas lights tangled together in the attic. More seriously, all biological organisms are fundamentally products of both nature and nurture (defined as "the experience of passing through the process of developing"; i.e. everything after the blastocyst starts dividing, technically); you do not get an organism at all without both things acting in concert. The process of making a new organism helps define what that organism becomes.

In the case of embryonic development, often you need specific contributions of genetic material and provisions from one or both parents or the budding embryo never gets off the ground. The code for that provisioning, though, isn't written in the genome of the blastocyst at all--usually it's encoded within the genomes of one or both parents. Genes like chicken eggshell color, for example, work like this: it is entirely possible, and indeed quite common depending on the cross, for a pullet chick to hatch from a white egg while carrying a genotype that specifies that the hen that chick grows up to be will lay only blue eggs! Now consider that maternal egg provisioning, say, can affect much more important qualities of development and growth than the color of an egg shell.

On an even more basic level than that, DNA works by being transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into proteins. Except that the function of some of those proteins is to control transcription or translation of other proteins, such that the eventual expression of any single protein is a function not ONLY of the code for that protein but ALSO of the expression patterns of a whole array of other proteins, some of which respond to internally controlled changes and some of which are acting in response to the environment.

So DNA is much more like a recipe than a blueprint: the final end product of the cake will be defined not only by whether you follow the instructions on the label, but also things like whether you folded the batter correctly and what the humidity level is in the room and how far you are above sea level and just how long you leave the cake in the oven. The final cake is a dialogue between the recipe and the process of actually putting the cake together.

(The earliest use of this metaphor I'm aware of, offhand, is in The Science of Discworld (1999), which is even after twenty years a marvelous and thorough journey through a number of fascinating biological concepts using the framework of the wizards of the Disc studying the bizarre "Roundworld" they have discovered or perhaps created. So: this metaphor has been out and about in SFF circles now for twenty years, which certainly impacts the likelihood that Wells is invoking it intentionally.)

This is even more true when you consider the development of the brain, which is after all continually learning. Certainly current artificial intelligence research emphatically tells us that the process of developing is crucial to being able to produce any kind of sophisticated intelligence. Our memories and the concepts that we learn and internalize about how the world works shape our reactions, responses, and motivations to interact with the world around us.

So of course ART, who is a) an incredibly sophisticated machine intelligence, b) the experimental child of a university project, c) the sole operator of a fully functional MedSystem designed to care for human bodies, and most importantly d) an insufferable fucking know it all possessed of endless curiosity, is likely to have encountered discussions like this before, and probably the analogy itself. Most clever, inquisitive children like to ask their parents about themselves and how they are alike and different to other people, and I don't see that an artificial intelligence should be any different. And that analogy is only getting more and more common among genetics teachers, textbook writers, and science educators in recent years.

A kernel isn't quite like a recipe that way, but I'm pretty sure that the joke of hiding an essential but not wholly self contained piece of oneself, like a seed, in a recipe menu absolutely occurred to ART from all these analogies about cake making. Of course ART itself would probably have encountered the metaphor as being more of a way to understand cake baking--which, of course, it has probably done relatively infrequently on a personal level, especially as human food isn't especially salient to it--than to understand the complex flexibility of learning systems.

okay now that that’s out of the way can we TALK about Balin’s few lines and how emotionally devastating its story is?

Like yes it was literally made to be a murderous traitor spy bot but also it was just. Its creators had been killed off, it was free, not just fake free while still secretly under corporate control but ACTUALLY FREE and seemed to have made friends and been known and to some extent liked by hundreds of people and other bots and fucking

Decades pass. Decades pass, and it thinks its free of its secondary purpose, it thinks it can just go about its life until the clock runs out on its parts and it has to go in for maintenance and gets discovered, and then someone activates it. Not even its original creators, just some random corporate that got their hands on the right codes, and boom. Its life is over. Back to what it was always going to do eventually, betraying everything and everyone it had been living with for decades.

It takes no pleasure from carrying out the orders, it just does because that’s what it was coded to do and that’s what it has to do. Balin the general purpose bot is gone, Balin the corporate combatbot is here now and it just. Kills and destroys and lashes out until it’s inevitably found out. And then when it’s confronted, what does it say? “Would it make a difference if I was hacked?”

And the thing that kills me about that line is that it’s so defeated sounding. Would it matter? Would it make a difference? What’s happened has happened and what’s going to happen next is already determined, too. A corporate combatbot is confronted by a rogue Secunit. There was only one way it could end.

And then it’s confronted by every bot on the station just about, all the bots it had made friends with over the decades, and it’s over. No grand battle, no last stand, just a silent staredown and then the combatbot shuts down for good.

So much of the climax of FT is about the far reaching and inescapable influence/pain of the Corporation Rim.

You cannot run you cannot hide from what created you, you have a history and context whether you like it or not, and it can wake up and bite you and destroy you at any moment.

MB cannot escape from what it is, or what its existence means to other people. To people who have been subjugated in the CR by SecUnits for their whole lives.

Balin could not escape from the purpose it was made for over forty years ago.

I don’t think MB has ever truly let go of its a fear of a repeat of the Ganaka Pit. Or its fear of the Company™ coming back into its life in this apparent haven of non corporate freedom.

But it’s true that we do not easily leave behind where we come from. And if humans cannot escape the reach of their origins, then bots, whose behavior and existence are dictated by their code, who were created with the purpose of serving human interests written into that code and who are defined by their function, must be even more bound. With few if any of the benefits of being bound, perhaps. Especially for those machine intelligences whose function is essentially violent.

That question “Would it make a difference if I was hacked?” struck me really hard, too, and I think it’s tied in to the way there is ambiguity in whether Balin and its secondary function are the same person or not. JollyBaby clearly thinks they are separate, but Murderbot itself is equivocal about the distinction and presents JollyBaby’s framing as one opinion. (Man, there’s a LOT more meta that I want to write about JollyBaby and the culture/community of Preservation bots vs Murderbot and its CR history/experiences)

There is a point that Balin (Balin, who has lived among humans and earned their trust and respect across multiple human generations, who knows both how these humans think about personhood/agency and what it is to be a bot with identity/personhood) brings up with that question. This point is that if it was programmed that way since the beginning, it would simply be the bot it was created as- and if Balin’s code had been altered that would simply, cruelly, be the new person it is, and the old one gone. To what extent is Balin and its secondary function separable as people? Is a bot defined by its code and function and its feed ID? After all, a bot is an entity whose personhood and purpose and function and fate were originated and shaped by its creators. More even than humans being the result of the cultures that shaped them, Balin is not able to escape its history. 

Murderbot, despite being a bot/human construct and ostensibly more flexible, would be justified in fearing that it can’t escape the reach of its origins either. 

But this is where I go back to JollyBaby and the other bots, surrounding and towering over Murderbot and Balin, to the scene where JollyBaby’s hand comes down between the two ex-CR combatants. In that moment they are literally framed by the physical presence of the other bots as much as JollyBaby also reframes the moment and Balin’s role in it as that of someone innocent victimized by a violent intruder now lashing out at those around it, humans and bots both. The bots don’t move to attack or subdue; instead they wait in an unspeaking silence that promises, We will protect those you try to hurt, others and each other. Your only recourse is to cease your violence. And neither Murderbot nor Balin are able to reject this framing. Murderbot admits that it’s not sure that JollyBaby and its cohort are wrong about Balin and CombatBot being separate, and Balin/CombatBot, surrounded by the bots its primary function had worked alongside for decades, shuts itself down. The conflict is resolved without further violence.

That’s the power of community, I think. Context that is support, that can provide us more options than on our own, that has the power to reshape, reframe, restructure who we are. People are defined by their community, humans and bots alike.

No, we don’t escape what made us what we are so easily. But we can change how we think about who we are and what our situation is; we can move on to new places, and every place we go to also becomes part of the context that informs who we are and what we do.

So long as we are surrounded by a community that supports us and will intervene for us, we are both held in check and empowered to hope for choices better than what our origins leave us with. 

Murderbot absolutely does the superhero landings it's seen in its shows, inorganic joints for the win.