Alright, so, first off let's talk spoilers for other series:

For The Outlands, things are rather more distant than Swarming Sovereignty, so the characters you see are going to be at the "end" of their arcs, so to speak. Their interpersonal relationships will be mostly set in stone relative to how they are in The Outlands, and you can expect some spoilers on their power levels and abilities. There are also some spoilers in regards to changes Amy has made on her planes because of the events of The Outlands, but these are relatively minor.

For Swarming Sovereignty, this takes place in the immediate future; expect spoilers in relationship progress, in progress of their conquest, and some references to events that haven't yet happened but will happen in the relatively near future (though, for the ones I can think of off of the top of my head, that they'll be happening at all isn't a spoiler, it's pretty obvious that those things will happen). I half-expect to get to the point in Swarming Sovereignty where the events of Administrator's Assistant occur, but in that case we'd be looking at different PoVs for those events and the focus being different. Really, we'd only have a few events overlap and what is focused on during those events will be different, since Administrator's Assistant is focused on completely different things than Swarming Sovereignty, but there might be some overlap there.

With that out of the way, I have one other thing I want to talk about, namely, the use of AI art for the cover. If anyone is wondering, I used Dezgo to generate it, and it took quite a while to get something I was happy with. Yes, that is Lilith in the picture, no, it's not perfect, but it's close enough.

Now, I know there will be people that disagree with this decision, who believe AI art is unacceptable, and while I understand your opinion, I have to respectfully disagree. I have a few reasons and some responses to common arguments I see, but please, please keep discussion of this topic limited to this foreword only - if I see comments on it elsewhere, I will delete them. I'm also not going to take to the comments to debate the usage of AI art. I polled it already and the majority of people were totally cool with it, so I'm proceeding forwards. For now, here's my take on the subject. It's stream of thought and a bit rambly, so feel free to skip this if you don't care, it's really not important.

First off, why should you care what I have to say on the topic? Well, I got my bachelors in computer science, meaning that I have taken classes on AI, and, unlike most people, I have actually coded a neural network. It's a rather simple one that simply tries to identify handwritten numbers, and there was some class-provided code (namely, the "background" stuff like file input and other well-understood algorithms that we had either done before in the class or weren't the focus), but I coded the logic, the "brain" myself.

Which is all to say that I'm not your average random person on the internet, I actually have an academic background on the subject. Unfortunately, you're just going to have to trust me on this one; I'm not going to post pictures of my degree so I don't accidentally dox myself, but it's not exactly an unreasonable claim either, so please bear with me on that.

Anyway, I don't see a problem with AI art at all. I know there's a lot of fear regarding it, but at the end of the day, AI is just a tool, and it's reaching a kind of people that haven't had their work impacted in this way before. Or, at least, not to this scale. You may be interested to know that this isn't the first of these scares to occur, not by far; with many big advancements in tech, people have their livelihoods impacted, and the kind of fear and outcry we're seeing against AI has happened many times before.

The example I always like to use is cars; back when cars were becoming popular, the Teamsters' Union, the people who dealt with transportation, had a really similar crisis. Everything was done via horses or train back then, so introducing a new, more convenient form of transportation naturally upended their work. There was a lot of commotion about it, but in the end things settled down, and I think that most people can agree that we would rather not go back to the time before cars. And, indeed, the Teamsters' Union is still going strong (in the US) - they lived through it. In the same way, art, writing, music, and other creative pursuits will live through AI. AI is simply another way of creating something, and one that is more accessible to people.

There will be changes. People will be forced to adapt to the new landscape, but they will adapt. And, no matter how advanced AI gets, there will always be a demand for human-produced goods; you can see it today, how there are still plenty of people who sell handmade goods, and often handmade goods go for a higher price than those made in a factory. People like the "authenticity" of it. I don't say this from a position that is unaffected by AI, either; coding is hugely impacted by AI, just as much as art is. I'm not worried about losing a job or having my education become worthless because of it, though, not so long as I am flexible and learn how to integrate AI with my work.

As for the validity of it as art, the picture I made took hours to get right, with dozens of iterations, some manual editing of the image, and toying with keywords and values to get what I want. In many ways, I would argue that that is just as valid a piece of art as any other; it wasn't something I just generated and was done with, I had to put in work, and I'm sure there are artists who could draw or paint something just as good, if not better, in that time.

One common thing I see said is that AI art is art theft because it was (probably) trained on art without the artist's consent. And, if you hold this opinion, I'm sorry to inform you that you, too, are an art thief. In fact, we all are art thieves. We only know things based on our experience; if I was to tell someone to draw something in an anime style, it would be meaningless if they had not seen anime-styled art before. AI being trained on an image is, roughly, the equivalent to a human looking at it, the same sort of process happens. AI is not lifting pixels from an individual piece of art or anything, it's generating probabilities and putting the most likely pixel in a place based on the instructions it's given and what it's been trained on. Most AI probably doesn't even keep what it's been trained on in any form of storage, it just tweaks numbers in its calculations and moves on.

Now, I want to make clear that I don't think AI art is never art theft, I just think the line between art theft and not is...basically the same as it is with a human. And, personally, I feel that if the art is out there on the internet, publicly available for anyone to see without a paywall, and the artist doesn't explicitly say not to train AI with it, then it is completely ethical to train AI with it. Yes, that person probably didn't give explicit consent for their art to be used for training, but they probably didn't give explicit consent for you to view it. Private or paywalled content is entirely different, though, but I doubt any big AI is trained using that sort of content; there's no need to pay for something when there's a ton of free stuff elsewhere that's just as useable for their purposes.

Anyway, that's all for me, I hope you enjoy this series, and thanks for reading!