Personal AI

Personal AIs are players, like you! They're player-controlled and are pulled from all active Ghosts in the round. They have little to no control over the station and have hardly any responsibilities. Great for new players or those who are new to the station.

Finally, a friend!
Personal AIs, or pAI for short, are potentially the one individual you can truly count on. They are similar to a carded AI, in that they fit in your pocket and don't really possess much of a body of their own outside of an immobile device you carry around. However, they cannot wirelessly control doors and machines around them as a carded AI can. Instead, they possess a unique suite of abilities with which they might serve their master. Whom they serve is determined at the DNA level, allowing whoever holds an unbound pAI device to imprint their own unique enzymes to the device. The only way to unbind a pAI from its master is to wipe the personality completely, which resets the DNA imprint and makes the device a blank slate once more.

How to Get One
Three pAI devices are placed on the map at the beginning of every round. One can be found in the Crew Quarters, another in the Research Director's Office, and a third is on the Derelict Station. If all of those are already taken, R&D can create more by going down the programming research path. They are inexpensive to produce, requiring only Programming 3 and 500 glass and metal.

How to Use One
Pick up the device with an empty hand. Click it again while it's in your active hand. Search for personalities in the window that appears. This will send out a request to all active ghosts/observers in-game. After some time, usually 30 seconds to 2 minutes, they will submit their pAI personality details. You will receive an update from your pAI device every time a new personality becomes available. To download a new personality, simply go through the steps to search for a personality and select the one you like the best. You now have a pAI!

Dealing with an Unsatisfactory pAI
Sometimes things just don't work out. Maybe the personality you chose doesn't fit your playstyle. Maybe the player playing the pAI has unexpectedly disconnected. Maybe the pAI is being intentionally antagonistic, ignoring directives, or interpreting them in a way you don't appreciate. The solution is simple: wipe the personality. This can be done in much the same way you downloaded it to begin with. Simply choose "Wipe Personality" in the device settings window. Now the device is free of the old personality and a new one can be requested as normal. This forcibly ghosts the player playing the wiped pAI, and allows them to observe the round as normal (they are capable of re-applying to be a pAI as well.)

How to Be One
Only ghosts with active, logged-in clients receive the request to be a pAI. When someone wants a pAI, you will receive a yes/no dialog box asking if you want to be one. Answer yes, and in the following window that appears fill out any information, you feel necessary (name is all that's really required here, the rest is optional). Hit "Submit Personality" when you're done. Your personality has now been added to the list of available pAI personalities users may choose from. If someone likes what you wrote, they'll download you and you'll be placed inside the device as a new personality.

It's fairly okay to say that you would like to become a pAI in OOC. Just don't spam up the chat with it.

History
Artificial Intelligences designed for the purpose of companionship or personal assistance have existed throughout the history of the Spur, from early Skrellian robotics to the first chatbots of humanity. Although robots have traditionally been designed to serve as labour, the proliferation of autonomous robotics technology during the terraforming of Mars in the 2200s led to an increased push for consumer synthetics. This push led to a number of advancements such as personal servants, self-driving cars, robotic pets, and most importantly, personal artificial intelligence.

The term, Personal Artificial Intelligences (PAIs), refers to AIs marketed to individuals and capable of being installed on personal devices such as PDAs, smartphones, and computers. Early PAIs were limited in their capabilities, capable of holding a conversation and remembering details about a person, but being unable to effectively understand context clues or empathize with their users. Still, the technology rapidly developed as interest in their capabilities grew. PAIs evolved from simply being complicated toys to being assistants as well. Famously, Songmin Sang of the Ingi Usang Entertainment Company revealed that nearly all of her employees were aided by personal intelligences. By the early 2300s, PAIs had grown to a mature yet uncommon technology, valued by people for their ability to serve as companions and as helpers, so long as they were willing to deal with the occasional glitches of the systems.

The technology continued to develop slowly throughout the 2300s. The niche market and availability of amateur PAIs meant that there was never any large effort by corporations to develop personal AIs, willing to leave it to the realm of hobbyists. Lao Lat Dynamics, a now-defunct New Hai Phongese company set the standard for the modern PAI with the launch of the first PAI card in 2382, providing more processing power to allow more capabilities for the synthetics. Finally, PAIs had been developed that were capable of passing off as human in conversations, albeit often lacking the experience or general knowledge to do so for long.

Modern PAI cards come from a wide number of manufacturers, the biggest megacorporate players in the market being Einstein Engines’ Terreaneus Diagnostics, and Digital Horizons, a NanoTrasen subsidiary, with ever more features being added, such as the ability to interface with other devices, or modular forms to allow a PAI to take the shape of household pets, among other things.

PAI Cards
In order to accommodate increasingly sophisticated PAIs, a growing trend since 2382 has been to develop dedicated “PAI cards”, devices ranging from the size of a smartphone to a laptop with enhanced processing, cooling, and battery life required by the programs. These are typically more expensive, a PDA-sized PAI card costing about twice the PDA would, for instance. Typically, they are sold at a significant markup as corporate PAI software is placed on very affordable subscription plans while other PAIs can be downloaded for free.

Availability
As the term personal artificial intelligence refers to an AI’s role rather than its capacity, PAIs tend to vary wildly in their capabilities, self-awareness, and don’t lend themself to easy categorization. Regardless, they are informally grouped based on the circumstances of their programming.

PAIs are widely available for sale in almost every tech related store, ranging from disposable, low-end cards to complex shape-shifting devices with powerful processors and social intelligence. Found throughout developed human space, a wide variety of both big and local companies develop brands and personalities suited for every taste and need, with user friendly interface, customizability and access to various utilities. Megacorporations such as Nanotrasen or Idris are also invested in the market through their subsidiaries, gaining a sizable audience through advertising to their millions of employees. Personalities are also becoming more and more available for download, with abilities such as uploading memories on cloud servers and reinstalling on separate hardware proving wildly popular. Amateur development of PAIs has picked up as well, either as hobbies or for non profit, open source use by the wider online community. Many amateur PAIs are up for grab on the Extranet with a thriving programming community gleefully offering personalities to suit almost every niche in the Spur.

Regulations of PAIs on SCC Stations
Due to the ability for a PAI to record information and gain access to high security areas, authorized or unauthorized, SCC installations have begun rolling out regulations covering their use.
 * Both commercial and privately developed PAIs are authorized on SCC installations.
 * PAIs undergo screening to ensure their personalities are not disruptive to the workplace before being uploaded to the cloud.
 * In the event of a PAI viewing confidential information, SCC-affiliated megacorporations reserve the right to wipe the program’s memory.
 * The owner is responsible for any breach of regulations a PAI commits.
 * In the event that an owner cannot be identified, the person who activated the PAI shares responsibility with it.