SCYNXTH

[Drashner1]

Since then, I've been reading some more articles and I've come across a few things :

- My fictional world does have an AI secondary character whose job is to preserve Earth's ecological equilibrium... and I named her Gaia. My own Gaia is pretty different from OA's. Using OA vocabulary, she's a superturing, sentient AI, living in a virch dedicated to hosting sentient AIs like her. She has little direct or indirect control on the physical world. She used to be a lot more involved but she managed to implement a metastable ecosystem and now she just acts as a consultant to help governments maintain this state. It would seem logical to anyone that if the Western World created an ecological AI, they would name it Gaia. (I remember pondering changing her name to Prithvi in the past, the Hindu counterpart of Gaia, as my setting is culturally mixed.)

I wouldn't worry about this much. The idea of some kind of Earth mind or ruling AI for the planet being named Gaia almost certainly predates OA (definitely does if we broaden the concept enough to include the RL Gaia Hypothesis in some form) and would fall under the sort of 'general concepts' that SF runs on or close to it. If you were naming your AI GAIA and the letters stood for something and the AI in question took over Earth and cleaned enforced strict environmental rules etc., then I'd be more inclined to think we might have an issue. But based on what you've written here, I think you're fine.

- Ascension is a thing for AIs in my setting, although only a few of them have achieved it. (AIs are omnipresent in everyday life, they're all turingrade, nonsentient programs. A sentient AI is called an AC, which stands for Artificial Consciousness. AIs can ascend to sentience, which is very unlikely but sometimes happens; generally ACs are born created from AC volition. A handful of ACs have ascended, and all but one have kept contact since then). I'm not sure yet how I'm going to call that in French but the translations of the words I have are "Second Awakening", "Revelation", and "Transmorphosis".

This sounds very different from the OA concepts of Ascension/Transcension. 'Ascension' in and of itself (usually to some non-material form of existence or state of consciousness that conveys superpowers) is a long running SF and Fantasy concept that falls solidly under 'common terms/concepts'. Again - if your description here is accurate/complete, I don't think you need to worry about stepping on our toes.

- Transcendent Burn-out Theory: I didn't think of that one, but it would probably help answering a few questions I had about my story. (This is the kind of situation that makes me think quoting Orion's Arm in my credits is the right thing to do while still feeling somewhat guilty about it.)

(I'm trying to keep explanations about my setting short, as I don't want to bore anyone with that stuff.)

I'd need to know more about how you're using the concept and if you're looking to use the specific term or would be open to using a different term before I could really make a judgement call on this one. Can you please tell us a bit more about this aspect of your setting?

As far as including an attribution statement to OA in your work, we are happy to discuss that and are generally pretty flexible about it (no need to feel guilty, you're far from the first person to do this). But based on what you're telling us so far, I'm not seeing a burning need for such. OTOH if you'd like to work in such a statement just to sort of cover your bases and not have to discuss everything with us, I can understand that. Just let us know what you'd prefer.

Hope this helps,

Todd