It depends on whether the muse is directly witnessing everything the player character is doing at every moment, or is humming along in the background waiting for particular input. I favor the latter; otherwise, the muse is like a functioning autistic 8-year-old (they're "clipped" AIs, if you'll remember, so they're not fully intelligent like an AGI) constantly bothering you, and nobody would want that.

Since Muses on average have less WIL than player characters, Muses exposed to various horrors (say, because you use your muse as an ablative Stress shield to do stressful things you don't want to do yourself) will tend to go (irrevocably) gaga before the players do. This has two consequences; firstly, it means that players are likely to be left without functional muses in mentally stressful situations, such as when fighting TITANs and Exurgents. Secondly, since most people has the same psychological attachment to their Muses as they have to lifelong friends, they'll take the Stress that comes with a losing a loved one when their Muses go gaga... which snowballs the difficulties the players face in the face of insanity. It's a delightful little piece of emergent mechanics that; when the stakes go high, you are left to face them [i]alone[/i] and slightly more stressed out than usual. And the more you abuse your Muse, the faster both of you go insane. Even backing it up has consequences, since backing up as Stressed Muse won't save it from insanity, but old backups get more stressed from trying to adjust...

kindalas wrote:

thepedant wrote:

It depends on whether the muse is directly witnessing everything the player character is doing at every moment, or is humming along in the background waiting for particular input. I favor the latter; otherwise, the muse is like a functioning autistic 8-year-old (they're "clipped" AIs, if you'll remember, so they're not fully intelligent like an AGI) constantly bothering you, and nobody would want that.

Muses and other AIs are limited in how they can grow. Since they have Aptitudes of 10 or more they are actually far more capable then average modern humans. They just aren't as good as the average transhuman.

I thought that 10 was supposed to be average human, and 15 was supposed to be the average transhuman.

Muses and other AIs explicitly have lucidity and make stress tests. Muses especially are highly complex emotive and psychological programs which regularly interact with people. They could easily be placed in their equivalent of "distress", especially if they have conflicting program issues. Weak AI aren't "people", but Emergent AI is a thing, so they can have very complex elements of personal feelings which probably don't go well with rigid codebase all the time. After all, AGI and anybody using a Cyberbrain are just using an emulation of a human mind (even if that's a direct complete copy of one's mind and the emulation is just hardware). This emulation is just like the real thing, it's an explicit conceit of the setting (for most people anyway). Muses may be a complex collection of preference sliders, but that doesn't make the personality they project "fake", and transhumans rely on Muses for a lot. That being said, I don't think that Muses and other AI should take stress from the same sources as people. Just like a Synthmorph shouldn't necessarily take Stress from the same sources. If a Synth has the pain receptors turned off, unless someone is hacked into their cyberbrain, it's a little weird for them to take SV from say, being in a situation with would cause a biomorph terrible pain. Or if they lack a stomach, it'd be weird for them to take stress and puke their guts out over some horrible stench of death which would bother a biomorph with a real nose and digestive tract. AI Stress should focus on actual situations which would trouble them directly. Conflicting programming or directives, existential crisis, prevention from proper execution of duties, etc. Also, in the setting of Eclipse Phase itself, if somebody called my Muse, my constant boon companion and personal digital assistant, a "fake person", one of use would probably be taking a trip to the healing vat.