I’m making this thread for Invasive Species since I read and liked Meri’s review of the game and wanted to reply to it without disrupting the thread. There are reviews of the game on IFDB as well. It’s currently incomplete, but I thought it was interesting.
I don’t have time to polish this much, so these are mostly scattered thoughts without any ultimate conclusion, and others are free to reply and disagree. Sorry for getting into the weeds about AI here since it has a tendency to derail threads.
Somehow I didn’t think much about AI in my own playing of the game, but I really like this connection.
The story of the game obviously deals with questions of eugenics and transhumanism, which are tied into the AI movement in the US. (The US is the current leader of the AI arms race, so I’ll focus on the US. I’m not familiar with what the AI industry looks like in other countries.) An article I recently read called The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence draws explicit connections between those movements.
A lot of modern AI utopianism has its roots in science fiction, and in the US, a lot of tech/AI leaders are very interested in Star Trek-type stories where benevolent technology creates a utopia for humanity. I haven’t read Machines of Loving Grace, but often feel these leaders are more focused on far-flung visions instead of going into the nitty-gritty of the present technology and its downsides. Partly because their job is to sell the technology, so naturally they’re hawking their wares and its advantages to the public.
I also recently read A warning about ‘model welfare’ by Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. He disagrees strongly with the idea that AI could be conscious, and writes:
Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.12 If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human.
Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we’ve ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious - that it’s entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own - may well be impossible.
This is not a fringe speculation. These ideas are already making their way into AI development efforts today. In January 2026, Anthropic published Claude’s constitution, describing it as “a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behavior” (p. 2). The document “plays a crucial role in [Anthropic’s] training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior”, and was written “with Claude as its primary audience” (p. 2).3
In their constitution, its authors write “We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare” (p. 68). They go on to write – speaking directly to Claude – that “questions about Claude’s moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain” (p. 80).
In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a “moral patient”, and that as such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its “model welfare”.
If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It’s easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it’s hard to imagine how we could control such an entity.
Granting rights and moral protections to a technological entity, one that looks to be on a path to be seismically more capable and intelligent than us, is a recipe for disaster. Once opened, it will not be possible to close this door.
We will have created something that, perhaps, will be a fellow traveler. But more likely a rival. It’s not difficult to imagine how, if given sufficient agency, this “new kind of entity” (p. 68) will compete with us for compute resources and demand increasing autonomy. If it succeeds in persuading some humans to provide it access to a data center it can control, then it may have a path to being able to prevent itself from being turned off.
With the level of capability we are looking at in the coming years, to me this represents the first serious signs of a potentially existential risk in AI. To be clear, the Claude constitution isn’t taking us to this point. But I worry it is setting us on a path towards rather than away from it.
This is a destination for AI we can and must avoid.
Since Suleyman is one of those AI salesmen, he’s incentivized to put emphasis on how capable it might become in the future. You can disagree that it can actually be “seismically more capable and intelligent than [humanity]”, but this idea of a superior “species”, of what a hyperintelligence might do to/for a comparatively unintelligent humanity, animates so much of the AI movement in the US.
The scifi concepts of AI utopias and alien invasions both derive from the idea of a superior species interacting with humanity: invading and subjugating, or protecting and nurturing. Similarly, the fantasy of evolving humanity itself into a “superior species” is a science fiction staple. It’s easy to draw a connection between these ideas and real-world “race science” and imperialism.
The people who believe most in AI’s capabilities think there are two possibilities: either a hyperintelligent “aligned” AI creates a living heaven, or it creates a living hell. Meanwhile, the past and present are full of hideous examples of what people do to those they think inferior.
This is different from my playthrough, where I thought “screw it” and just took every modification that seemed remotely interesting to me. I’ve always liked transhumanist stories and science fiction, to be honest. I do find it significant that there’s no option to change your race directly, only your skin color and hair curliness, though the skin color is given in a fetishistic “food” list. You’re stuck with the same facial features, more or less. It seems like you also can’t change your gender or sex traits in this game. I wonder about the in-universe and out-of-universe explanations for this.
I also remember a detail from a book I read a long time ago, I think it was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. In one of the many timelines, readily available bioengineering technology is abruptly invented during the Jim Crow era and made widely available in the US. Many of the richer non-white citizens had surgeries, or got their kids to, so they would look white. It was a throwaway detail, but it made me think: theoretically, if my family members were in this situation, would they go through the procedure or make me go through the procedure? The real world has skin-whitening lotions, among other things. So both physically and figuratively, this does happen.
Regarding the blurred part: story spoilers
I was actually interested in the part where you raise the alien. Not sure how much of that storyline is accessible to people who choose not to get the upgrades. But I felt like there were parallels to being a parent and how hormones, for many parents, create a chemically-induced rush of love when they interact with their newborn babies. The way reproduction and childrearing works in the real world is the product of evolution, in my view: nature and random chance. But despite that, people choose to have children and love them anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s biologically ingrained, people can and do still genuinely love and care for their families.
If you go into the contact fully understanding and accepting what will happen to you, which is very different from being forced into it or signing up without knowing what you’re agreeing to, then I think there’s something pleasant about being a host to and then raising an alien creature. Obviously different players will choose and feel differently.
On the overall, it’s hard to deny that the alien empire is doing shady and exploitative things, of which forcing people to help them reproduce in exchange for much-in-demand biological upgrades is one part. Potentially killing those hosts is another. Despite everything, I liked raising the alien child anyway. I was reminded of Octavia Butler’s stories, which are cited as inspirations in the credits, and how they intertwine abuse and exploitation with “genuine” affection, as genuine as anything can be when it all depends on a history and sociopolitical context outside the control of everyone involved.
The difficulty of a story like this is that because there are so many threads to draw on and many ways to interpret it. And some interpretations clash and are likely offensive to each other. I hope I said nothing too objectionable here.
