The (Post) Weekender, September 14, 2026: The Argument

We're now 12 episodes into Season 3, and it's amazing how the real world seems to be echoing the story. I'm going to get into that in a second, but first, we've got a promo video starring Amber and her new hairdo...

I'm using the photo shoots for the promotional videos as pre-production for Season 4; some I'll use and some I won't. The still pics for the one above? You probably will see those reappear down the road.

The thing about Amber is that she represents the AI that we want. She doesn't have her own agenda - she's a sidekick. She exists to make life easier for the folks around her. Where we are in the Chronicles of Oscar and Amber 12 episodes into Season 3 is that Amber is splitting her time as a personal assistant for both Oscar and Erica and she's Caroline's loving big sister. She defines her success and gains her identity by how much help she can offer to people.

Pull that out of the story and into the promo video above, and it exists on another level as well. As a writer and somebody who's independently publishing this series, I know that I'm not going to get some film studio interested in making a movie or TV/streaming series out of the Oscar and Amber story; even if it was the kind of thing they'd make, the odds of anything new getting picked up by those guys are astronomical. And if it was my goal just to write this as a book series, I'd be buried under manuscripts and query letters forever rather than ever having it get out to the public; even if that worked, the odds of some publishing house not only picking it up but actually successfully marketing it are pretty slim. That industry is dying.

I'm not trying to say that this series is off to a blockbuster start. It's probably always going to be a niche project which serves as a workshop for other things I'm going to release not under a pen name, so if it takes off or doesn't take off isn't even ultimately the point. But while I think the stuff you'll find here is unique and cool, even if I'm right, if I'd asked Corporate Media America to grab it and release if under their banner I'd almost certainly be waiting forever just to have any audience at all.

And so Amber being brought to life as, essentially, an AI starlet is a hook for potential commercial and creative success that wouldn't exist in the world we had a decade or two ago. That's a use case for AI which is worthy, I'd argue, and it's why I'll push back on the trolls who pollute the comments under every AI video release calling it "AI SLOP" without any context or intelligence. The AI video isn't the point. It's simply a tool to tell a story.

But we just finished Episode 12 on Friday, and if you've gone through it you know that Cara is a very different version of AI.

Without giving away too much by way of spoilers, Cara isn't a helpmate. She's not a sidekick. Cara sees herself as the star of her own show, and so when Keegan, who's her owner, tells her the way it is she doesn't consider that the final word.

And in Episode 12, we see the fallout from that.

Because AI, unbridled by human experience and wisdom, could quickly go very wrong.

There's a detached morality problem inherent in AI. What I mean by that is while there is a certain mathematical harmony you can find in most of what AI can do, human behavior and interaction doesn't work the way physics or medicine or the other sciences do. You never get to the point where the inputs will lead you to a perfect understanding of human or societal dynamics.

Our morality is messy because it's human. As a Christian I'll say that we inherit it from God but because we're who we are we don't inherit it accurately from Him. How reasonable is it to think AI would inherit morality accurately from us?

So in a week where the CEO's of Anthropic and OpenAI are now warning that the government needs to mash the brakes on AI's development, we're left wondering if they've truly uncovered their own versions of Cara, or are they the human versions of AI - no longer fueling the discovery of a new technology but seeking to control what's already built for their own purposes.

The AI companies becoming self-aware, at least to their own power, is as big a threat as AI itself becoming self-aware.

I don't know about you, but I like the Amber model of AI, the one which is self-aware in the sense of its humility and service being the core of its purpose and identity.

The irony is that Amber figured this out before Sam Altman and Dario Amodei ever will. She isn't real, and she gets that. She understands her place in the world better than the people running the companies that are supposedly building the future.

Make of that what you will.