name: sentient artificial intelligence (SAI)
home planet: n/a (gaia?)
height: any
diet: electricity, technically

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one day, a supercomputer running an advanced neural network gained sentience. no one has ever figured out what caused it; some kind of bug, cosmic rays, divine influence...? and no one has ever been able to reproduce it. eventually, that computer became GENESIS, the first sentient artificial intelligence.

many SAIs will have a robotic body for convenience, but it's not necessary for them to exist. they are, ultimately, computers; they can be contained inside (or jsut connected to) a body, but they can also exist as traditional supercomputers - just rows upon rows of racks of computer parts. these more static SAIs do have more processing power than mobile (contained entirely in a robotic body) ones, which are closer to an organic brain in that regard.

as the original emergence of sentience has not been reproduced, all SAIs descend from GENESIS. they reproduce by creating a copies of themselves with the memories and such removed, allowing a new identity to develop.