Addison has pretty strong opinions about the state of AI. Before we get into her views, let's set the table a little bit: what is the current state of AI in the Star Citizen universe?

So there is no AI. It's a scientific endeavor that people keep trying to pursue, but it always sort of ends poorly. They've tried in the past. There was the Artemis, which is an AI-controlled piloting program that was supposed to take a slow boat colony to the nearest star, that disappeared. There was a traffic thing that they tried to build that just was chaotic and caused a bunch of people to crash and die. So in the lore sense, it was always one of those things where they kept trying to do it, it kept failing, and they just were like, you know what, we're done. But every 10 or 15 or 20 years, somebody's like, I'm the one who's going to solve it. And they do, and then some catastrophe happens. The important thing about the stance on AI is that it's actually the behind the scenes thing, where the idea was that in the earliest, earliest conversations with Chris about the Star Citizen universe, this was pre-GDC announcement, he wanted the universe to feel tactile, and having discussions about what was it he saw in his head? What was it he wanted to build? He liked the idea that pilots had to get into ships and fly places and that it was a future where you had to do stuff. It wasn't, I have an army of AI minions that I can just send out, because obviously an AI will be a better pilot or better gunner or whatever than a human being. But he wanted that Star Wars, in the turret firing at TIE Fighters thing, that feeling, rather than just, oh, the targeting computer is going to auto lock on it and just blast it from 300,000 kilometers away with pinpoint precision. So that became the goal of, that's the universe we're trying to build. How do we justify that? And so that's how we came up with the idea of, all right, well, they've tried it a bunch of times, because to just ignore it doesn't make any sense. So they've just tried it a bunch of times and for whatever reason, something always goes wrong and they've just sort of soured on the idea of it. But again, there's that notion of it's the Holy Grail. So there's always somebody out there who's like, I'm going to be the one to crack the nut.

The hubris of creating new life. I mean, there's advanced computer systems and robotics in the universe. We have our drones that fly around, but the goal is for players to have to direct their actions, to have to be in control of them. You have simulated simple AI like the greeter on New Babbage who can have these simulated conversations, but it's very preordained routines, like a chatbot. So those kind of interactions and friendliness, the system has gotten towards that, but the desire to have androids or ships that can manage everything for you, humanity has just soured on that overall, for the majority. Of course, there are people like Addison who say, we are learning all the time, we can do better. But it's a similar note to what people have said in the past. So it's an interesting dilemma.