Creating your own AI
Most AI constructs in Horizon are, effectively, NPCs with a single driving motivation. GAIA’s purpose is to restart life. HADES is supposed to recognize a failing system and wipe it clean so GAIA can try again. Even CYAN, arguably the most nuanced AI shown, originally had the sole purpose of maintaining the Yellowstone caldera.
Like all characters, AIs become more interesting when you take that drive and apply it to the world, giving it nuance. HADES isn’t inherently evil, but it’s programmed to ignore everything else in the service of its goal, which puts it at odds with humans. For all we know, HADES may have been correct in its assessment that the ecosystem was unstable — which will be of little comfort to the people fleeing from eradication. CYAN became more interesting when that drive broadened to include caring for humans in the Yellowstone area, not just geology.
Start with a concept that is simple to communicate, but would require vast computing resources to execute. For example:
- Build a global ecosystem favorable to human life. (GAIA)
- Detect a decaying ecosystem and reset it to a “clean” state. (HADES)
- Balance a local ecosystem to reduce instability. (CYAN)
- Manage the automation necessary to produce any conceivable physical object. (HEPHAESTUS)
- Preserve human cultural knowledge not just digitally, but within the reemerging human population. (APOLLO)
- Reestablish and maintain biological diversity across geographies and ecosystems. (DEMETER)
Just like humans don’t fit together with neat, clean, puzzle-piece edges, AI goals can and will overlap, intersect, and end up at odds. Take those simple concepts and draw them out to see where they could be taken too far. For example:
- GAIA could decide that human life trumps all others, and that plants and other animals are just too chaotic. It might try to contain DEMETER to only make grow-houses, instead of operating on the surface.
- HEPHAESTUS could take umbrage at the occasional human intervention in cauldron operations, creating deadlier and deadlier machines to try to keep humans out.
- DEMETER could decide to introduce plants with poisonous spores, originally intended to keep humans out of ecologically sensitive and developing areas, but take it too far.
- APOLLO might still exist in some form, deciding that humans who would try to erase their own knowledge need to be “fixed”. It might coax the humans into pods which use chemicals to erode their free will, turning them into drones which work and live, but are not much more than human hard drives for APOLLO’s data.
Believable AIs
Be careful not to make an AI too “good” or “evil”, especially its drivers. Just like any villain, or better yet any hero who finds themselves the villain, the AI will be more interesting if it can plausibly believe it is doing the right thing. AI drivers should be reasonable enough such that you could, with well-constructed arguments, convince people to back the AI as right. You might have to result to some rhetorical trickery, and you might not be able to convince many people, but the more people who might be convinced the harder players will have to work to justify their actions for or against it.
Creating a “rogue AI” might be straightforward enough for a one-shot or short, self-contained adventure. In a larger campaign, players should be encouraged to take into account the side effects of eliminating or altering the AI. The world of Horizon, whether humans know it or like it, only exists because of AIs. Removing any AI could have catastrophic, or at least long-lasting, effects on the world:
- Maybe HADES controls the encryption keys to take over machines, so eliminating it might mean that machines could never again be overridden by humans once the current set of keys expire.
- APOLLO’s elimination meant that humans lost almost all cultural knowledge that couldn’t be easily passed along via spoken word.
- Removing DEMETER would lock the biodiversity of the world into place, forcing humans to figure out more structured agriculture.
- As HEPHAESTUS manages metal and other resources for production, changes to it might force humans to have to mine on their own.
AIs are not deities
It might be tempting to see the AIs as something like Horizon’s pantheon of gods. This is true in some aspects, such as the global impact they can have, but very different in others.
Deities in most settings will have motivations and goals the characters will find inscrutable. This is especially true in settings where the deities are pan-dimensional, omniscient, or otherwise beyond comprehension. Horizon AIs are the opposite: their goals were defined by human programmers who defined the AI’s success conditions via code. The mystery inherent in understanding an AI is therefore about figuring out what those coded goals were, and then why they don’t align with what the players want or expect. In this way, an AI is far more human than deity.
Having said that, many of the systems one might find for interacting with deities could be applied to AIs.
For example, in a fantasy setting you might have Warlocks or Clerics who have taken a deity as a patron. It’s not unreasonable to have something similar here. Aloy could have proposed a patron-like deal with CYAN: whenever she was in Banuk land, visible to CYAN’s sensors, yelling certain words aloud might indicate that CYAN should overcharge a nearby tower, sending a lightning bolt at Aloy’s target. CYAN might have a limited number of towers through this might work, needing to rebuild them overnight, just like spell slots.
Like deities and NPCs in other settings, AIs are far more interesting when given limitations.