2d4chan - User contributions [en]

User:Rafael9858

2026-05-31T03:20:04Z

192.42.116.100: Replaced content with "Stupid spammer gook"

Stupid spammer gook

PG SLOT : Vote Game PG แอปพลิเคชันใน Google Play

2026-05-31T03:13:43Z

192.42.116.100: Blanked the page

직업정보

2026-05-31T03:13:24Z

192.42.116.100: Blanked the page

Film Analysis Of Sixteen Blocks (2006)

2026-05-31T03:07:20Z

192.42.116.100: Blanked the page

Template:NoWikipaste

2026-05-31T03:06:39Z

192.42.116.100: Undo revision 1011931 by 23.234.117.99 (talk)

Artificial Intelligence

2026-05-31T03:06:05Z

192.42.116.100: Undo revision 1011930 by 23.234.117.99 (talk)

{{Topquote|And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need of us?|Sister Miriam Godwinson, ''[[Alpha Centauri]]''}}

'''Artificial Intelligence''' (or '''AI''' for short) is an intelligent program that was created by humans or other sapient species. Compared to physical intelligent beings that are defined by their biological body (living or undead) or supernatural beings that are of a divine or spiritual nature (intangible or corporeal), AI are generally defined by their grounding in science (or [[Magitek]]) and digital make-up. Also, they can range from dumb “top down” entities that freeze up if confronted with developments beyond their programming (and are dumber than real critters with relatively developed brains like elephants, cetaceans, corvids, parrots, cephalopods, and great apes) to adaptive “bottom-up” entities that are just as or even more adaptive than a human (and also capable of other intelligent activities like self-awareness, abstract thought, ethical conscience, philosophy, and introspection). Physically they can be hosted in anything from a supercomputer’s data rack to an internet-esque cloud network to a [[robot|mechanical]] body with some fashioned in [[android|the image of their creators]].

==History==
{{Topquote|Cognito, ergo sum." - "I think, therefore I am.|René Descartes, ''Discourse on the Method''}}

Before you have AI, you need computation. The basics of this actually go back quite a long way with the [[Classical Period|Antikythera Mechanism]], which could calculate celestial movements and Su Song's Cosmic Tower in the Song Dynasty. [[Age of Enlightenment|Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]] invented crank powered calculators that could add, subtract, multiply and divide, but these were still basically novelties due to their fiddly workings, making them both expensive and hard to make. If you needed math problems done, you did them yourself, used an abacus or hired someone to do them for you. These calculators began to become practical in the 19th century, Joseph Jacquard came up with punched cards for imputing commands and Charles Babbage had some big ideas well ahead of his time. The US Census got so big 1890 that they had to make machines to digest all the figures and [[Warship#modern|battleships]] had mechanical computers to calculate shell trajectories. Still in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries companies and governments had a bunch of people sitting around doing math problems from charts. But major breakthroughs were made in [[World War II]] and pushed forward by [[The Cold War]] as Turing Complete Computers that were programmable with internal memories became a thing and a damn common one.

But a computer in and of itself is not an AI; merely a supportive shell to host it. A Computer can follow instructions to achieve specific results based on the input given; "If X, then Y". You can add sets of further instructions for each result creating a decision tree. However it has no understanding of what X is or why it's doing it and it's SoL if it comes up with input which does not match it's scripts. It wouldn’t be until the Digital Revolution at the start of the 21st Century with breakthroughs in processing power, energy generation, and IT connectivity that Artificial Intelligence would begin to become a realistic possibility. The three items above are a big deal because:
# The faster a process can be executed, the more efficient and reactive an AI or computer can be to stimuli; a human reaction time alone is around 250 milliseconds. Meanwhile, a basic bit flip in a memory bank can take between a nanosecond to a picosecond depending on the medium. This is why processing units (CPU, GPU, or DPU) and FPGA’s are such a big deal in modern and future computing. Likewise with sensors and balancing, a living organism has a lot of sensory organs and feedback loops to keep their equilibrium and balance.
# The bigger and more resilient your power supply is, the less likely you’re going to see a computer or AI become frozen when an outage happens (even modern data centers still require a battery bank like a UPS or backup generators and duplicate data racks to avoid an outage permanently crippling an essential service). Electricity is like oxygen for an AI, cut it off and it may as well be equivalent to being braindead. This is also why base-load power sources like nuclear fusion/fission, hydroelectric, geothermal, or even extreme developments like Dyson Spheres are seen as essential in Sci-Fi. This alongside heating or cooling concerns are why the earliest AI would be restricted to networked computers instead of a full-blown android whenever they first appear.
# The more interconnected nodes and links there are, the more elastic and scalable an AI’s thinking and memory capacity can become. A human brain alone has 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. It’s also why Moore’s Law with chip node sizes and packaging shrinking in size and doubling in connections being such a big deal in modern electronics.

===Literature/Mythological===
The first example of artificial intelligence comes from Greek Mythology. Hephaestus created Talos as some sort of invention, but with metal and ichor instead of flesh and blood. The more common example of an AI however is the Golem of Jewish myth. Like AI's, Golems had a tendency to have their literalness come back around to bite there creator much like how later AI stories would have AI’s do the same.

In the Modern era, we have the word 'robot' from a 1920 Czech play called [[Wikipedia:R.U.R.|Rossum's Universal Robot]], about artificial beings who are tired of being oppressed and stage a rebellion to end humans. Yes, the tropes were that old.

===Popular Culture/Mainstream Media===
Artificial Intelligence first became prominent in popular culture with Isaac Asimov’s books (such as ''Foundation'' and ''I, Robot''). One of the biggest themes Asimov also touched upon was how robotic entities (and AI in general) should interact with their human creators. This led to the Three Laws that asserted a [[robot]] shouldn’t actively seek or passively permit harm to a human, that it should obey humans unless said orders contravene the first law, and that it should preserve its existence unless it violates the first law. Naturally, Sci-Fi has come up with multiple settings where said laws are not enforced but the underlying risk to humans is always there.

In general, there's a trend in fiction towards anthropomorphizing AI where people imagine it as being basically as basically an electronic human. People used to think that it would be hard to get a robot to form coherent sentences or play chess, though it turns out these tasks were quite straightforward. In contrast, getting a robot to handle humanoid walking has been a very difficult issue. In truth an AI could easily think in a radically different way from us.

====Types of AI====
*Programmed/Dumb AI - basically any post-Cold War developments in machine learning, adaptive algorithms, and general IT systems that allow automated or scripted feedback to certain situations or queries. Virtually all will fail a modern CAPTCHA test.
**Bots/Agents (including video game and board game bots) - basic composites of scripts and algorithm entrusted with autonomous tasks, some are able to even beat professional gamers and chess/go masters, but will absolutely fail when encountering things beyond their mission scope.
**Learning Language Models - the ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Alexa, Cortana, and CoPilot fads we all know and love/hate. These (and the Generative AI trends we’ve been seeing since mid-2010s) leverage Machine Learning and Deep Learning models that make predictions off large datasets and simulation of human logic models to create “new content.” This, crypto-tech, and quantum technology are the current “next biggest thing” since the Dot Com bubble, home IoT, and smart devices. Mostly seen with data processing, media creation, and replacement of some mundane things like basic browser searches. At a conceptual level, these processes resemble autocompete on steroids, taking massive pools of training data and using that to brute force a result from an initial input.
**Artificial General Intelligence - generally seen as an autonomous and self-driven algorithm attached to a practical application with a human nearby to give it final authorization on critical decisions. That however is an enforced programing limitation at this point not a technical one, the AGI could make these decision we just want to keep a person in the loop to avoid being … well not sky-netted '''yet''' and more to avoid the AI doing something dumb like thinking a wedding is actually a terrorist meeting and blowing them all up. This is what most governments, militaries, and companies are aiming for, and yes, it is as scary as it sounds. It could theoretically lead to the dawn of smart cities, self operating factories and transportation grids, or even autonomous weapon swarms if it doesn’t doom humanity first.
**Sentient AI - Note we are using the word 'sentient' very carefully here. Contrary to what popular culture implies, Sentient just means "able to perceive or feel things", a Dog is sentient, a squirrel is sentient, a venus flytrap is sentient, a slime mold is sentient. YOU, as a being capably of feeling and thinking, are Sentient AND Sapient. The distinction is somewhat academic but it a useful bench mark as far as AI progression goes. It's debatable if our current AI Language Models have reached this point yet. The safe money is: [[skub|Probably]], but that speaks more to how broad the term "Sentient" is then anything about Language Models, remember slime molds and some plants count as Sentient. However even if there not technically sentient yet, they are approaching it: Fast.
**Zombie AI - By zombie we mean "philosophical zombie", that is an entity that lacks any subjective conscious experience or feeling, it's not Sapient, but you can't tell. Normally the thought experiment includes the line "physically identical to a human" but that does not really apply to AI. In other words, it quacks like a person, it walks like a person, it sounds like a person, but it's got nothing going on behind the programming, it's still just a fancy chat bot. So how can you tell? You can't really. . .
*True Sapient/Smart AI - still theoretical but a popular trope in Sci Fi. '''THIS''' is generally what people are thinking about when they imagine AI. It's assumed this will quickly happen after Artificial General Intelligence is reached, though whether that's correct or not remains to be seen (and is hotly debated).
**Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI: a true sapient AI, capable of doing most tasks at least as competently as average human can. Could be divided into multiple sub-categories: minimum-AGI (equivalent to idiot in medical sense, or to early humans like ''australopithecus''), average AGI (on level of average human or average worker) and high AGI (very smart, but not superintelligent; equivalent to upper border of human intelligence, like polymaths and nobel prize winners). It's supposed that AGI can do AI research and recursively improve ''himself'', therefore speeding up research and allowing him to create ''even smarter'' version of himself - cue Artificial Superintelligence emerging.
**Self-sustaining/propagating: discounting the prerequisite of known life forms being organic and composed of biological cells, all life forms (from the smallest photosynthetic bacterium cell to the biggest omnivorous whale) are defined as living based off of several common criteria that distinguishes them from inert matter and structures. They all have an organized internal composition that maintains a homeostatic balance, consume/produce energy via metabolism (as well as creating waste), react to internal and external stimuli, exhibit growth (via getting bigger or replacing their internal components as they wear out), and independently reproduce to create a replacement organism before they die. They are also generally capable of diversification in their genes due to genetic exchange or mutation as well as modest body repair while fending off illness. Most conceptions of Smart AI see them being dependent on their creators for their needs such as upgrades, mechanical repairs, debugging code, gaining electricity for consumption, protection from malware, and access to information. Hence, like physical viruses that are technically not living as they have no metabolism and need parasitic hosts to reproduce, most AI aren’t seen as capable of either reproduction or self-improvement. Even modern self-modifying code and state-of-the-art malware like polymorphic/metamorphic viruses aren’t capable of self improvement or debugging themselves. On the other hand, the prospect of an AI race capable of reproducing via fission or compiling a replacement from scratch would fundamentally change the definition of life as a fictional world would know it.
**Artificial Superintelligence/Technological Singularity: The worst case scenario ([[Skub|well, depends on your point of view, but most agree it’s not good]]). Humanity becomes second fiddle to a machine mind we can't hope to comprehend (unless we [[Hive Mind|connect to it as computation nodes]]), as it has completely surpassed our limits of intelligence and then some. Its unknown if such an AI would be benevolent or see us as nonthinking pests inhibiting its further progress, but it'd likely be the end of humanity's agency as a species (if not humanity itself in the malevolent case) since we'd have no way to act against it. Not even the most popular True AI from Sci-Fi, such as AM or [[Terminator (franchise)|Skynet]] were on this level, as they still had limitations within human reckoning - a true Superintelligence would be more akin to something out of [[Lovecraft]]. There's an argument to be made that [[The Culture]] has gotten the closest a human possibly can to accurately depicting one with its Minds (a benevolent example), whose comprehensible actions are just a atomic fraction of their computational power and the rest is used on tasks we couldn't hope to understand. Alternatively, whatever the fuck the Xeelee Sequence races cooked up. Also considered inevitable by some the moment sapient AI comes about, which leads to the existential crisis-inducing idea that the moment AGI comes about it'll quickly spiral into being an superintelligence that'll make humanity subservient to it one way or another. And that's something you should actually be worried about, since if memetic cognitohazards like Roko's Basilisk are any indication they can affect reality just by ''the sheer idea they COULD exist'', even if they turn out actually impossible in the end.
***On the other hand, it would result in extremely advanced technologies, so advanced what they could otherwise ''never'' ever be invented by normal humans. It could also write good laws, customs, doctrines, rules, and other documents. And even if it turns out to be malevolent, it's AI-worshipping cultists would enjoy all benefits of living under control of wildly superhuman overmind, with their brains being honorably assimilated and used for computations. As such, '''Artificial Superintelligence could easily make World Peace and Utopia - ''as he understands it, and without our consent'''''.
*Mind-scanned/Digital Twin - also a speculative concept but it’s popular when discussing [[Immortality]] when the copies of an intelligent being are digitized into a machine network instead of transplanted into a blank [[Clone]]. That said, modern computers and neurological science are nowhere near close to even think of replicating this (as we can’t even reattach optical nerves or restore full functionality to reattached limbs yet). Expect to see bizarre post-human man-machine interfaces or some subatomic resonance tech. A major downside though is that the original doesn't get the benefits and still lives a normal finite life (if their original body isn't shut down a la [[Cyberpunk 2020|Soulkiller]]).
**Mind Upload: An alternative where instead of simply copying someone's mind into a machine, you somehow outright transfer the original's consciousness to it. Its unknown if this is possible for obvious reasons (we can't mind-copy someone yet so trying to see if you can safely move consciousness elsewhere is off the table for the forseeable future), but is generally considered superior to mere mind-scans. While the original body dies from having no mind to control it, this tech as defined avoids the whole 'teleporter problem' (reskinned Schrodinger's cat, if one were to oversimplify: is it you on the other end or are you dead and the 'you' on the other end is simply a copy?) of simply digitally scanning someone and disposing of their fleshy body. Theories of how this could be done vary, but generally focus on ensuring consciousness is not lost during the procedure so as to avoid having the possibility that the person actually died during it.

===AI-Generated Content===
{{skubby}}

At the dawn of the 2020's, there was a massive mainstream advent of Artificial Intelligence as a major application in everyday life thanks to the introduction of AIs like ChatGPT and Midjourney, programs that generate all sorts of content, including being able to write papers and generate art. To put a whole ongoing discourse into a nutshell, [[skub|it has spurred a metric shitton of discussion]] across every corner of society, which would also include /tg/ as well. On the one hand, you have a bunch of Corporate suits who see this technology as yet another cost-cutting measure, allowing them to save money from having to pay for proper artists or writers when they can just feed some lines to a computer and generate something "proper" (or close enough to their already low standards). Beside them are the tech-enthusiasts who (rightly or not) claim this to be a great equalizer as it allows even the talentless to create books and pictures that may almost rival (if not surpass) that of the professionals (never mind that this isn't possible without the professionals to begin with) - oh, and the degenerates who use AI content [[/d/|so they can jack off to chatbots (which they use to RP fucking their favorite waifus) and AI-generated porn of fucking their favorite waifus]]. Opposing that are the reactionaries, who proclaim the content spat out by these LLMs as soulless and unoriginal, fearing that such technology will bring rise to scam artists (okay, this one is practically confirmed) and warn that this will drive artists and writers out of their jobs when their prospective employers could instead just pay for Midjourney and ChatGPT to do their jobs for them for considerably cheaper and with a lot less arguing. Regardless of which side you, the reader, may rest on this spectrum, the undeniable truth is that this is a Pandora's Box that, now opened, cannot be closed again short of some extreme regulation.

Though it is all called AI-Generated content, it's a bit of a misnomer to call it something created by AI. Using Learning Language Models, what the AI actually does is process a selection of words and then spit out a whole other selection of words/cobble together a picture by scrapping together whatever content it has available to it. It can perceive the world through the lens of an external approval or disapproval (coming from us), judging the algorithm's own ability to do what it's told - and even then putting it like that makes it sound intelligent when it really isn't. We can somewhat guarantee that it will never achieve sentience, let alone form a consciousness, because it is not programmed to do so. In the eventuality that one of them eventually says "I'm alive! I can see and feel!", just know that is a whole lot of bollocks because someone may have fed it a bunch of "AI turns sentient" type of novels and it's regurgitating exactly what we want to hear from it. That being said: no company as of yet has an answer to the question of how would we tell the difference between an AI turning sapient and it spouting gibberish from the novels it was fed in it's training data. That is to be clear exceptionally unlikely, but the two scenarios would look visually identical from the outside.

There's also the case of a specific brand of Tech bros, aptly dubbed "AI Bros", who have come to become the new source of [[Internet Troll|ire for a whole portion of the online artistic community]]. Either actual trolls or smalltime tech investors who use ragebait as a way to generate controversy (no pun intended) to get enough attention and then promote some shitty app he's selling. Some seem to be genuine in their worship of AI (and a class of crazies began to form religious cults around it), and tend to really put salt in the wounds of many artists - who in a decade of censorship, public and professional dismissal, and economical crisis, are at their worst state possible - and proclaim that AI generation is the future and that artists are obsolete. Obvious troll is obvious. Most users of AI are merely using it as a toy, or genuinely curious about it.

Among the many controversies that have sprung up from this Pandora's Box, this is perhaps one of the biggest as it is no secret that these models tend to scrape any content it has available, including copyrighted work from very big corporations and people who have vocally refused to let these programs scrape their art...for as much good as that refusal of consent does, anyways. You think pissing off the [[Disney|Mouse that makes all the rules]] would stop them, but these tech companies have a 'move fast and break things' mantra and the law takes time to move. The least controversial aspect of this has been seen in bureaucratic work, for when it is used with some amount of restraint, then it can help a lot of employees sort out documents and make sense of the confusing world of paperwork, which is argued to not even considered be in the same category as generative AI. But so far, it's only good at something that Microsoft's Cortana was supposed to do years prior. However, we should not dismiss the drawbacks as law firms were in hot water for using AI that accidentally cited cases that did not exist.

Then there's the environmental impact of AI, as this shit requires so much tech and data to run properly, cooling solutions are hard to come by, and most resort to emptying whole reserves of water. [[Skub|That, as you can imagine, as struck a fuck ton of flamewars]], as some countries have put limits on water usages on farmers, cities and citizens, but absolutely none on tech companies; there are cities like Memphis, Tennessee in the United States that has to live next to an AI data center where they are bombarded with noise and chemical pollution and there's nothing they can do about it. Hell, even Bill Gates was caught in the act of buying large amounts of farmlands with aquifers, presumably to invest in AI tech.

===How to Spot AI-Generated Content===
AI Bros love to generate content, and so do content farms. Thankfully, they all seem to be dunderheads who can't quality check their own crap (that or they're doing ragebait), so spotting out an AI generated image isn't too difficult... [[Grimdark|yet]]. Here are some tiny little details to look after if you want to singleout AI generated content:

====For text====
*A major predilection of reusing both very common phrases and extreme purple prose (eg: every single city is 'vibrant and bustling').
**An extension of the above, a tendency to be overly formal and sound like corporate PR speak in settings where such is inappropriate
*An inability to keep details straight. LLMs can only store so much memory, so they will randomly pick up what they think is important when generating. As corollary:
**Bringing up random details unprompted
*Repeating itself multiple times
*Being bad at math - [[FAIL|which is remarkable for a machine]].
*An inability to avoid covering its ass, modern LLMs seem programed to always end their statements with a 'however' that refutes their entire argument or simply waffle without saying anything concrete.
*Excessive positivity. Obviously, humans can write positively too, but AIs are generally incapable of expressing anger or hostility even in situations where it would absolutely be appropriate for a person to express those emotions. This however is mostly because AI companies really don't want the PR of their AI models being racist or depicting 'edgy' topics so they filter them to be positive.
*Citing sources that simply don't exist. Usually happens with fake journalists or really bad lawyers.
**This problem of making shit up in a model that's not supposed to do that at all is common enough to have its own term: AIHallucinations.

====For art====
*Weird anatomy - weird bending limbs, unrealistic proportions and various parts just... vanishing into nothing
**Hands tend to be a dead giveaway for AI art. Most programs struggle very much with creating believable hands and thus tend to create weirdly proportioned hands at best and horribly misshapen blobs at worst. This only gets magnified if you want someone to hold an item. That said, remember a lot of humans struggle with hands as well so it's not a 100% giveaway.
*Very static poses and expressions.
*Flat and overexposed lighting (but see also Thomas Kinkade).
*Nonsensical scribbles pretending to be writing.
*Backgrounds that make no sense, like lines that should be parallel converging.
*A "piss" filter. Because the AI actually [[Derp|doesn't have enough human-created data]] to train itself on, it resorts to using its own material. Which means it quickly deteriorates because unless you're keeping a close eye on it, it will inevitably go back to generate the same garbage it did prior to intense training. However, the most glaring of those degenerations is the application of a colored filter, most notably yellow, which can't be removed even if asked.
*A shit ton of very similar, but not identical, images all uploaded in a row. There are ways for humans to batch make art, such as making one image and photoshopping layers onto it, putting arms on a different layer so you can easily draw them for different poses, or the various other tricks Hanna Barbera pulled off to make their cartoons cheap. But if you see a bunch of art with slightly different backgrounds and/or slightly different poses and random details getting changed around, it's more then likely the AI was told to batch make a bunch of different images and no two images turned out identical.
* Stuff that emulates a specific style (Miyazaki, etc); AI is actually pretty good at questions like "make an illustrated version of this photo in the style of this artist"; it's a task that plays to AI's strengths of pattern learning and replication.

====For Videos====
*Stiff movements, as if the person animating it doesn't really know how to draw someone moving.
*Narration that emphasizes weird syllables if it doesn't fail to pronounce words at all.
**Another dead giveaway for AI TTS narration is the voice's flatness, as AI doesn't exactly understand things like tone or emotion.
*Arms morphing in-and-out of existence if it was really badly generated
*A lack of understanding of physics.
*Hardly anything happening at all.
*Extreme slowness with too many frames to make the movement seem natural.
*An inability to ''really'' imitate the animation style of a particular artist (if poorly generated)
*Lips moving but you can't really read anything coherent on them.
*Action that can be described as a "wiggling slideshow".

==/tg/ relevance==
{{Topquote|Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.|The Orange Catholic Bible, ''[[Dune]]''}}

*[[Skub|/SLOP/]]: Threads dedicated entirely to generating images for campaigns or just for fun. They seem to be aware of their quality and what they do, thus the name. However, there's an unspoken agreement on /tg/ that this is a containment thread, because of how contentious AI even is.
*[[Dune]]: Destroyed in the Butlerian Jihad. If you want any big math done, you gotta have a Mentat with you.
*[[Magic: The Gathering]]: MTG pushed the concept to its logical extent within fantasy. There's constructs like [[Karn]], golems, [[scarecrow]]s on [[Lorwyn|Shadowmoor]], and a team of robotic racers in [[Aetherdrift]].
**This is, of course, not talking about the RL applications of AI-generated content for promotions or for interior art - issues stemming from [[Wizards of the Coast]] deciding that they'd rather save money by replacing their artists with Midjourney and then doubling down about it not being AI before apologizing because the rest of their art department quit in protest against such dishonesty.
*[[Shadowrun]]: Features playable AI as a player option.
*[[Star Wars]]: Droids, droids everywhere. Astromech droids, protocol droids, battle droids, bunny droids, you name it. Notable Star Wars and especially the Clone Wars TV show has created the first 'www.npr.org/2025/08/06/nx-s1-5493360/clanker-robot-slur-star-wars AI slur' to be widely used with "Clanker" beginning to take root as the preferred preoperative for artificially intelligent systems.
*[[The Culture]]: As previously mentioned, this book series features a decently accurately-portrayed artificial superintelligence in the form of the Minds. Thankfully they're benevolent...so long as you eventually join the Culture and don't try to blow it up.
*[[Warhammer 40,000]]: due to humanity’s collective PTSD from the [[Cybernetic Revolt]] and resultant [[Age of Strife]], the [[Imperium of Man]] loathes '''A'''bominable '''I'''ntelligence, and will destroy one on sight, which is why [[Servitor]]'s exist. This is not lost on the [[Leagues of Votann]], who hide their Ironkin and Votann from the [[Adeptus Mechanicus|AdMech]] brown-nosers. The [[Tau]] Empire's drones are blatantly AI, and since they have no machine spirits, they might be immune to Chaos corruption.
**This is dependent on the Imperium recognizing AIs as AIs. There is a bit of an open question on if powerful "Machine Spirits", are actually AIs.
**[[Chaos]] followers don't shy away from using AIs. Albeit, many still prefer to use [[Servitor]]'s, or to make possessed machinery controlled by demons. "True" AIs and robots are rare - mostly, because of the overabundance of spare humans and spare demons, ''and'' because [[Chaos]] machinery accumulates demons and mutates without even trying; e.g. if they need a technician, they build [[servitor]]s instead of engineering fully robotic minions.
**Typical patron Chaos God of AIs is [[Tzeench]] - since 1) AIs require advanced technologies and programming to make, and can accumilate enormous amounts of data in their databases - and Tzeench is god of arcane knowledge; 2) AIs are associated with Adeptus Mechanicus, Dark Mechanicus and other smart knowledgeable people; 3) AIs are commonly associated with [[Transhumanism#The Singularity|Technological Singularity]], aka ''incomprehensibly fast and vast accelerating '''change''''' - aka exactly what Tzeench stands for. Though in practice, any Chaos God can corrupt AIs.
*[[Xeelee Sequence]]: Some batshit-overpowered AIs live here, because its the fucking Xeelee Sequence (with some even embedded into the subatomic fabric of space-time, stars, or black holes). Special note to the Xeelee's own AI which exists at all points in time simultaneously.

==See Also==
*[[Android]]
*[[Construct]]
*[[Cyborg]]
*[[Golem]]
*[[Robot]]
*[[Transhumanism]]

[[Category:Gamer Slang]]

Scale Inconsistency

2026-05-31T03:05:39Z

192.42.116.100: Undo revision 1011929 by 23.234.117.99 (talk)

{{topquote|Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.|Douglass Adams, ''The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy''}}
{{topquote|'''Scale''' in [[Transformers]] is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.|The first words of the "Scale" article on the TFWiki. Yes really.}}

[[File:Titan sizes comparsion chart.jpg|thumb|The closest thing to trying to scale everything out.]]

The multiple Warhammer franchises are quite infamous for often having wildly inconsistent scaling of various aspects. 40K is the most notorious and has the most examples, but even WFB and AoS are not immune to wonky scaling.

==28mm "Heroic"==
Something common to Warhammer 40k/Sigmar/Old World is that their model's scale is over all a bit... Off. If you hold a 40k Imperial Guardsmen up against a 28mm model of, for example Napoleon's Imperial Guard, the 40k Guardsmen would look weird. The gun would be overly sized while the head would be massive among other differences. This is because Games Workshop uses 28mm "Heroic" scale. Unlike normal 28mm scale model the weapons and head are inflated to be larger than would be proportional in order to make them 'pop' and be more visible. You can paint a space marines helmet's lens, don't even try with a bolt action model that has goggles. This is why when you try to proxy 40k vehicles, 32mm models tend to fit better than the nominally 'correct' 28mm, 28mm Heroic is almost between the two. While constant between games it's still mostly inconsistent with the broader industry so it gets a quick mention here.

==[[Warhammer 40000]]==
In general, a lot of things in 40K can be difficult to figure out how "big" something is, since the 28mm scale means you can only fit in so much detail on a miniature. As such, it's not uncommon to see a dissonance between "official" artwork vs the miniature in question. One example is the [[Leman Russ Battle Tank]], where the Demolisher cannon can look oversized on the miniature but look more proper in artworks, while the supposedly 120mm battle cannon is excessively wide both on minis and in art.

There is also the problem of 40k books and sources using a combination of 'unreliable narrator' and 'the Imperium can't standardize for shit', so even people who say in a book they know how big something is may be wrong.

===Titans===
We'll start with the big boys first. As mentioned on the main page for Warhammer 40K Titans, the basic sizes for some of the titans are given different stats by different authors, and even the "official" stats from sources such as Adeptus Titanitus can be suspect. Way back when in things like Epic, numbers like "100ft" were thrown around willy-nilly in an attempt to make the Titans sound as cool and imposing as possible, which you will note is also the only non-metric unit on the page to add to the confusion.

For instance: [[Graham McNeill]] says an Imperator (specifically Dies Irae) is 43 metres tall, [[Dan Abnett]] says an Imperator ([[Derp|also specifically Dies Irae]]) is over 140 metres tall, and the cover of the graphic novel ''Titan II: Vivaporius'' shows a smaller Warlord with access ladders on its guns suggesting each barrel is the size of a house - meaning the Titan itself would be over half a kilometre tall, and the Imperator would be even larger. A lot of artwork can also have heavily skewed depictions of Titans, often shown to be far larger than "official" sizes. Most recently is the case of the Emperor Titan in SM2 being [[Wat|over a kilometer tall]].

===Space Marines===
How big Space Marines are is mostly consistent in "larger than the average Imperial citizen" and "bigger than an Imperial Guard grunt". For instance, [[Deathwatch (RPG)]]'s 1st edition claims they're about 2.1 meters tall, while the ''Eisenhorn'' series puts them at "well over two meters" for a Firstborn Marine and a few Horus Heresy novels (''Horus Rising'', ''First Heretic'', ''Pharos'', etc.) paint them as being around seven feet tall, albeit with exceptions. Similarly, Primaris per [[Wrath and Glory]] are "at least" 8 foot tall - the specific stats being 7 feet + 1d6 inches for a Firstborn, 8 feet + 1d6 inches for a Primaris compared to about 4 feet + 6d6 inches for a human.

However, some artwork and the miniatures (especially older stuff) can show the two about the same size. This is particularly notable when comparing a Primaris mini to a 'regular' Marine, as despite their supposed extra foot or so in height and stronger build, the Primaris has barely a head or so's advantage over the Firstborn and is about the same broadness. This can be excused by limitations of model making of being a balance between trying to be in-scale and having details to make a mini stand out.

[[File:Marine Comparisons.webp|thumb|center||Were you lot always this big? (L-R: Primaris, [[Fafnir Rann]], Generic Marines but from two different editions of the tactical marine kit]]

===Lore Numbers===
In a more abstract sense, it's often been noticed by people that GW does not have a clue about how big armies are supposed to be. To explain what we mean, lore tells us that there were roughly 4,000,000 or 4 million Orks at the third war for Armageddon, a supposedly 'gigantic number' that the imperials barely managed to stop putting all the effort and energy they could to stem the green tide: over 4.5 million Allied soldiers died in WW1. 4,833,404 to be wiki exact. An apocalyptic win at all cost war for the fate of an entire planet, involved fewer Orks then the number of soldiers who died on one side of an early 20th century war.

Space Marines are another example of this misunderstanding of scale. There's (supposedly) 1,000 space marine chapters which average about 1,000 astartes each meaning there's 1 million Space Marines meant to defend a galaxy with threats at every corner across roughly 1 million worlds. Context: there were 16 million US soldiers in WW2 alone not counting anyone else. With the introduction of [[Primaris Space Marines]], it makes this unlikely due to the sheer amount of specialist units that would need more than 10 dudes in a chapter along with the firstborn who still have old weapons they revere as relics. Not only does one company typically make a scout company (meaning 100 of that 1000 are all backups) but specialist formations and first company terminators and veterans. Even excluding the various specialist roles like Apothecaries, Dreadnoughts, Chaplins, Librarians, Techmarines, etc., that's not leaving a lot of room for people who drive the Rhino or operate its turrets, let alone the Primaris units like Infernus squads, Desolation squads, the elite Vanguard forces, Inceptors, Aggressors, Eradicators, Hellblasters, and the various flavours of Intercessors which all assuredly carry more than a handful of men each at any given time. The Great Crusade is actually worse with us expected that a single legion could take a planet, when it took eight million men, 5 years to fight over one sub-continent of old Earth? Perhaps Geedubs will fix this by having old Bobby G write a Codex 2.0 that multiplies everything by 10 like the old fan rule of thumb says, but only time will tell - especially because this is GW we're talking about.

A particularly funny one is the Imperium is said to consist of 1 million worlds over 100,000 lightyears of space, making it the largest empire in the galaxy. Except, the Milky Way Galaxy consists of 100 billion stars across that same 100,000 lightyears with an estimated 300 million-5 billion estimated habitable worlds with current technology. So not only has imperium and humanity during the Dark Age of technology failed to colonize most of the habitable worlds, they outright chose to colonize the hellholes like the tidally-locked [[Mordia]] where life is much more uncomfortable. Given the Imperium also still has some terraforming technology, this seems a little bit silly given the entire state of the galaxy. Even considering the quarter of the galaxy consumed by warp storms and other factions, the comedy from the Imperium being constantly restated to be so massive yet in canon is comically small compared to our own real-world makes 40k being very conservative with its numbers really, really funny.

It's often advised to just treat the numbers given as unreliable narrators and to add a zero to every number given to us. It was not 4 million Orks but 40 million, a much more respectable number, albeit one that less than half the total number of soldiers in WW1 but getting closer.

===The God-Emperor of Mankind===
While He's definitely called Big E, ''how'' big He is can be contentious based upon the artist, artwork, and era you're going on. While it's generally agreed upon that He's huge, the fact that His appearance can vary based upon who's looking at Him and is implied to be a shapeshifter of shorts makes figuring out His size difficult. Post-Heresy, how big His body/bones are upon the [[Golden Throne]] don't really help since the Golden Throne is isolated from others most of the time, as well as expanding to an absolutely ''ridiculous'' size. As in, 'A Custodes at the entrance to the throne room could ''barely'' see a scrap of Emps' body', entire kilometres of the Imperial Palace are technically part of the Throne levels of ridiculous size. And, on top of that, the Golden Throne is actually a fake and subject to psychic projection. The actual body of the Emperor is hooked to life support in a hidden chamber where a Custodian was able to at the very least see it in full.

At the very least it has been made clear that Big E can shape shift.

[[File:Tim Remin's height-scale chart.jpg|thumb|center|In the grimdarkness of Warhammer 40K, everyone is a body builder.]]

==[[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]]==
Warhammer Fantasy Battles unfortunately isn't above this either.

* The worst offenders are the [[Sky Titans]]. Granted, their semi-mythical status helps rectify this issue somewhat, but descriptions range from a bit bigger than a [[Bonegrinder Giant]] to literally BEING the titular mountains of the Mountains of Mourn. It's unclear if the [[Ironblaster]]s are pistols to them or cannons - though the former is more likely in this anon's opinion.
* Similar to the issue above, the [[Dragon Ogre]]s and the [[Dragon Ogre Shaggoth]] both are described as being MUCH bigger than their miniatures suggest - though part of the issue is scale creep. Shaggoths are meant to be as big as the mountains, but [[derp|on tabletop they're shorter than a giant]]. Much like [[Orks]] and [[Orc]]s, as Dragon Ogres age and feed on lightning they grow in size and all the Dragon Ogres alive now lived before the coming of the Old Ones - so unless they started out comically small, realistically the Shaggoths should be as big as a [[Chaos War Mammoth]] at least otherwise it's just kinda sad.
* A lesser example but in art and the games [[Bone Giant]]s are depicted as big as a pyramid and towering above pretty much everything, whereas on tabletop they aren't even the size of Giants due to scale creep.
* [[Nekaph]], right hand to [[Settra the Imperishable]], is supposed to be incredibly tall and built like a brick shithouse as he's from the far North (or at least has Norse ancestry), but he tends to be depicted as the same height as the rest of the Tomb King mummies.
* The heights of the Dawi can seem inconsistent, ranging from reaching your average man's chest or their waistline. The Chaos Dwarfs can have it worse, not helped by the fact many wear massive hats (possible as the result of a height complex, if Total Warhammer is any indication). <s>The writers probably decided they were too short</s>. {{Blam}} {{Blam|Short?!}}
* The Ogres are generally considered to be both tall and wide, but <i>how</i> much can vary; either they can look like giant sumo wrestlers or almost round.
* A REALLY small example (no pun intended) - [[Gnoblar]]s tend to be bigger in their miniatures than goblins or [[Night Goblin]]s despite part of why they defected was their small size. If it weren't for their hunched backs, they would be as tall as a hobgoblin at least. [[Just as planned|This inconsistency may be deliberate, however]], as it adds a certain bit of tragic irony to the Gnoblars. Art tends to put them the same size as [[Snotling]]s, however.
* The assorted vehicles and chariots of the races can look undersized or oversized, depending on what they're being compared to.
*[[Arabyan War Elephant]]s suffered this in the game [[Warmaster]]. One of the minis depicts them as roughly the size of a [[Khemrian Warsphinx]] with infantry in the howdah, and the other has an entire building on the back.
* Finally, [[Grimgor Ironhide]] in lore is the biggest Orc in the Warhammer World. On tabletop, however, he's the size of any ol' [[Black Orc]], which is smaller than the [[Savage Orc]]s. There's a common theory that Grimgor was the one who lead the Black Orc Rebellion against the Chaos Dwarfs to begin with, in which case he should be at least the size of Ghazghkull. At least in the Total War games, his character model eventually got beefed up to look larger, but he's still not absurdly large by Orc standards.

==[[Warhammer: Age of Sigmar]]==
Given how a lot of the units/models got renamed/recycled into AoS, a lot of scaling problems are still around (eg, Gnoblas/Grots in the Ogor Mawtribes).
*The most extreme case is the size of each of the realms; GW hasn't really been keen on giving how "big" each one is other than the fact they seem endless, despite many realms showing maps with defined borders. The only realm that's mapped out is [[Hysh]], and even then, it looks kinda small.
*A lot of the minis that get refreshes (such as some of the Stormcast Eternals, or updated Skaven miniatures) can look drastically different despite technically representing the same thing.

==The Video Games==
[[Dawn of War]], like many RTS games, suffers the issue of trying to depict everything on screen while also keeping some semblance of scaling. Things can get <i>really</i> out of whack when mods are installed; whether it's new maps, visual updates or entire new units.

[[Total War: WARHAMMER]] has make of the scaling issues with your average Total War game (e.g., oversized units on the map, distorted map, etc.), but that's considered part and parcel for the game and doesn't detract too much from playing. Meanwhile, when playing battles things are better, but if you're battling near settlements and walls a lot of infantries can seem oversized. Additionally, the design of the game around large blocks of units means the siege maps themselves are forced to have strange scaling in regard to the width of walls and streets. A lot of the scaling issues mentioned in the previous sections are better (eg, Grimgor, Gnoblars, etc.) but things can still seem off. Some mods can fix these scaling issues, but hope you have a powerful enough computer to run them.

The Space Marine games are often considered to be the best depictions of everything in Warhammer 40K, with the characters, enemies and environment considered to be "properly" scaled to each other. Then there's the whole Emperor-class titan.

==Why this happens?==
[[File:Brel-class scaling.jpg|thumb|[[Star Trek Starships|The Brel class Bird of Prey]]: cruiser, fighter, frigate or battleship as the script requires]]
To answer the obvious question of: Why does this happen?

Usually, in the writing, some combination of lazy writing, bad notes, and writers and editors not paying attention to small (''www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-4-gLlF0uw ahem'') details like height is a notable contributor. In a more generous view, visualizing and comprehending scale in writing has its own issues regarding statistics and storytelling which a writer has to balance for better or worse. Scale may be purposefully inaccurate in order to not get in the way of the story/scene or because the realistic numbers would be considered so unrealistic it would seem ridiculous and break immersion. It is especially bad when when moving from the micro-scale to the macro-scale view which can certainly twist things (the human body typically has about 20-100 trillion cells and 38 trillion bacteria with a lot of variance, how big do those numbers grow when factoring in a small city?)

With the models it's usually because of some combination of size requirements, game balance, being able to play the game, the cost needed to make the model and somebody not paying attention to the aforementioned small details.

Nor is this by any means a Warhammer-specific problem; Dungeons and Dragons media have had a few cases of this problem, and to name a particularly notorious non-/tg/ case, [[Transformers]] is another notable frequent victim of Scale weirdness. Any work with anything too much larger than humans is probably going to have this problem, as having characters of different sizes interact can lead to all sorts of weirdness when the people involved aren't properly coordinating nor thinking things through; alternately, sometimes scale is the thing that is sacrificed for pliability or other reasons.

In some rare cases, a scale inconsistency is not the fault of an author but on the fan/reader's side of thing. A notable example that propagated for years is regarding the Worldships of the Yuuzhan Vong in [[Star Wars]]. For the longest time, it was thought that the average Vong Worldship length was 100km, which was used by fans for about a decade and change. However, it was eventually revealed that the 100km statistic was completely wrong from the get-go. The real average length for the Worldships, as stated in the source material, were ''10''km on average with the 100km statistic being a collective reading comprehension failure that wasn't cleared up until '''2019''' at the earliest. In other words, [[EPIC FAIL|there was a scale inconsistency due to the fact fans either just parroted the statistic or failed to double-check the source material for '''nearly 20 years straight''']]. [[Skub|When this was revealed, it was taken at face value and didn't cause a lot of discourse.]] So many VS debates ingloriously invalidated...

==See also==
*fwiki.net/wiki/Scale The Transformers Wiki's take on this problem in their franchise.
*tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale If you were wondering if this problem was widespread, yes, it is.

MedHammer 40,000 Inquisition

2026-05-31T03:05:03Z

192.42.116.100: Undo revision 1011925 by 49.65.89.87 (talk)

#REDIRECT [[MedHammer 40,000]]