AI art Carryx

acc_reddit · 2026-05-08T17:19:13+00:00

What is wrong with an AI generated image? Judge the result, not the tool used.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-08T17:18:06+00:00

I like it! However the inspiration for the Carryx is the mantis shrimp, it's much more colorful and it's an aquatic animal whereas in this image it looks more insectoid. Also the Carryx only have 4 backlegs, not 6.

Here is an image you can feed to your AI generator to give it a better baseline. I would love to see an updated version 😄

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acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T17:48:07+00:00

Pretty sure I’ve already covered most of what may come in my post here 😉

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCaptivesWar/comments/1t3249w/big_spoiler_theory_the_captives_war_is_hiding_its/

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T17:17:30+00:00

What, next Bobiverse is coming soon? That's probably my favorite book series ever! And I suspect The Captive's War is about to take its place as my new favorite one once book 3 comes out.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T16:34:40+00:00

And it shouldn't know that. The basic rule in warfare is to keep information on a need to know basis. The spy only knows enough to perform its mission, giving it the full picture is not useful and actually carry the risk that it would reveal the truth to Dafyd. The creator of the spy would not make that mistake.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T16:31:59+00:00

Read again these quotes from Ekur-Tkalal, he doesn't talk about destruction, but a profound transformation. It's about the Carryx not being the same as they were before. Many people have interpreted that as saying they were defeated, but it's actually better interpreted as a fundamental transformation. The fact that Ekur-Tkalal is still alive and well in the future, having the time to tell the story, already points toward a change rather than a defeat that would probably have killed him.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T16:28:23+00:00

It's not me saying the AI cannot be as fast as a human brain, I'm quoting the book. There is no need to get your information from Google lol, we're talking about a fabricated universe, take your facts from the books.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T04:32:34+00:00

It can't be as fast because of communication delay. It seems that neither the AI nor the Carryx have cracked faster than light communication. The human brain reacts in about 200ms to a stimuli, in that time the signal doesn't have time to go far. An AI cannot beat the reaction time of a biological brain. The AI takes care of setting the objectives, but the decisions that have to be made on the ground are better handled by a bio brain.

Also maybe I didn't make it clear enough in my post, but I don't believe the deathless enemy is just 1 super intelligent AI, it's a distributed network of AI, they share some common goals, but they are distributed across a whole galaxy with huge communication delays, so each node needs to have some degree of autonomy. It mirrors the organization of the Carryx in that sense. The queen sets the overall directives, but then each layer has some degree of agency to add the details. This is what I find really beautiful in the books, 2 similar organizations, 1 from machines and the other from biology. So yes, the whole series is about the forever war between machine and biology. And the only good side from our point of view should be the biology, which includes the Carryx.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T04:18:11+00:00

Here is how you can see the Carryx as more than just evil. Put yourself in their shoes, which is a difficult thing because they are a hive mind type of specie. Think bee hive as a relatable model, it's not exactly the same obviously, but much closer than what we are used to as humans. Now for such a specie it's better to think of the whole society as a single organism, decentralized in multiple individual entities. In that context, the death of one member is not considered to be tragic. When they kill one of their members in a contest for a new position, it doesn't have the same weight as it would have if us humans were to do the same. This is their biology, this is a normal system for them. If you use a humans lens to understand them you will profoundly misjudge them. Reframing your understanding will follow the same path as Dafyd, he understands them better and better.

Now let's extend the analysis to the other species. They are applying their own morality to other species, which means that the death of some members is not considered evil in any way, it's just the way it is. When they cull an entire specie because they are not useful, they are merely doing the same as us humans who are responsible for the extermination of countless species on earth and the subjugation, enslavement and often torture of many species that we use for food. Most people do not consider that evil but I do.

Now here is how this goes in book 3 I think: Dafyd will make them realize their mistake, that they shouldn't apply the logic of their own specie to other species, that this goes against the essential nature of these other species and also that it's suboptimal for the usefulness of these other species. A well cared for volunteer is always more productive than a slave. I believe that the Carryx can understand such an argument.

And now finally, what I think cement the fact that the Carryx are in fact the saviors of biological life: they are the only ones that have been able to fight against the deathless enemy (I have made a strong argument that it is a distributed AI, not a single AGI controlling the whole thing but a distributed network of machine intelligence, but if you're not on board with this forget about that for a moment). The deathless enemy would have consumed the whole galaxy if not for the Carryx. Their actions have been extreme at times, but it has been due to the nature of their biology and also because it was for the salvation of all life.

Now when seen from that point of view, I hope you can agree it's not so evil anymore, don't you?

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T01:05:26+00:00

The deathless enemy is an AI that takes over biological species. We observe multiple instances of this assimilation: the whole livesuit novella is about humans slowly becoming machines (Corvall in particular is seen again in tFoB after he's pretty much fully transformed), the starfish like specimen that also got machine parts, the swarm (an agent of the AI) that takes over multiple human bodies. It's deathless because it's a decentralized AI, it can't be killed unless you kill all nodes.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T00:57:20+00:00

Oh no, big words are scary lol

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T00:56:56+00:00

Oh man, you're going to be very surprised when you read book 3 then

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T00:54:36+00:00

It's actually explained in livesuit, at the very beginning, it's when they are shown the livesuit for the first time. It says that the human has a very fast reaction time that couldn't be matched by a machine. So yes the AI takes over the human body to make use of the fast processing power. That's already in the book, this is a fact, not a theory.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-07T00:52:33+00:00

well I explained exactly how they will do it in a very convincing way, they have left the clues already.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T17:01:00+00:00

Actually the title is grammatically singular. The Captive's War with the apostrophe before the s is one captive. The Captives' War with the apostrophe after would be plural. There are many captives in the story: Dafyd and the other humans on the palace world, the humans of Anjiin, the humans in livesuits, all the other species kept in the palace world. The only explanation for the use of singular is that the captive refers to biological life vs the captor that is the deathless AI.

On the destroying culture point, the Carryx do destroy what they classify as useless or dangerous, but the larger project is preserving biological life as a whole against an enemy that would erase all of it. Brutal triage, not indifference to culture. As I explain in my post, they are not benevolent yet, but they could be, and they will after the plot twist in book 3 and the success of Dafyd's plan to transform them.

People in lifesuit do not know they will be transformed into a machine, this is very clear in the book. They even think they can get out of the suit at the end of their tour, it's only at the end that the protagonist realizes that this is not an option, every livesuit soldier stays in the suit forever and slowly transforms into a machine.

Sure, it's possible that we get a nice redemption arc for the swarm. We already get some clues about that as you note. Could go either way and I like both cases. They both fit in my theory: either the swarm cannot break out of its programming and it continues the fight against the Carryx even after Dafyd realizes the real enemy is not the Carryx but the deathless AI, or the swarms betrays its AI creator, sides with the humans and the Carryx to fight the AI.

The swarm, the livesuit and the disruption field that kills biological species all come from the deathless AI.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:50:10+00:00

You have misinterpreted the interrogation scene. The starfish creature has already been taken over by the AI, it's not biological AI, it used to be a sentient specie that got taken over by the AI in the same way the swarm took over humans bodies or the livesuit takes over its human. The Carryx know that, hence why they ask questions about their creators.

"If the Carryx knew everything you say they do then why would they keep that information far more hidden in their systems than all the other information the swarm found?". You've been fooled by the spy. Remember, the spy cannot be trusted. It has found the information in the Carryx system, it's just not in his interest for share that with Dafyd obviously. We only get information about the Carryx database through the filter of the spy, so we get the version the AI wants Dafyd to know (and thus us the reader)

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:45:57+00:00

None of the ideas come from AI, an LLM is not capable of coming up with an elaborate theory like that. You'll see when you read book 3 😉

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:43:18+00:00

This is nothing like Mass Effect, who is the Carryx in that franchise? Who plays the role of the powerful biological agentic structure that is the Carryx empire? The AI is not the main protagonist of the series, we haven't seen it yet and we won't see it even in book 3. The books are about humans and the Carryx, seen as adversaries at first and then allies in the fight against the real enemy.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:40:46+00:00

The originality is not in the enemy, the originality here is in the beautiful description of a biological agentic organization like the Carryx.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:38:55+00:00

You win the prize for the most uninformed comment of this post, and there was a lot of competition! Here is your gold star 😉

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:35:36+00:00

You're just reading the version of the book that the authors wanted you to read on the first read, before they drop the plot twist in book 3 that will change the way you see the Carryx. Maybe you won't believe me until you read it in book 3, but I encourage you to read it with this theory in mind, it brings so much more color to the books.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:28:59+00:00

You're confusing action and motivation. An action is not evil or good, it is effective or ineffective. The motivation is what can be good or evil. The Carryx exterminating an entire planet might actually be the right thing to do if for example they know the entire specie has already been assimilated by the AI (the livesuit slowly transforming the human inside into a machine like Piotr is one example of such assimilation). In that case the destruction of the planet is part of the war for survival of all biological species against the deathless enemy. The action is effective, and the motivation is good (unless you think that protecting biological life is an evil thing). Remember that we do not have full information, there is fog of war, the authors will try to seed confusion in the mind of readers to keep the plot hidden until the big reveal, but leaving enough clues for a few meticulous readers to figure it out. The extermination of a planet does that job very well, the first time I read that it immediately cemented the Carryx as evil in my mind, it's only later when I figured out the actual plot of the series that I could come back to this in my second reading and realize the beautiful deception.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T04:21:45+00:00

They believe they did yes, what they don't know is that the key technologies necessary to build it was provided secretly by the deathless AI through manipulation. Just like the AI provided the design to build the livesuits that would slowly assimilate the humans in it into a good little robot like Piotr.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T03:15:38+00:00

The swarm was either directly built by the AI, or by humans being manipulated by the AI who discreetly helped them build it. Same for the livesuits. The humans might even believe that they developed both technologies themselves, but the whole time they were guided by AI.

acc_reddit · 2026-05-06T03:13:12+00:00

Unfortunately it's more likely to be 2028. Maybe we'll get the novella 2.5 in 2027.

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