I bought this at Half Price Books for $15 15 years ago and used it as decoration. I finally decided to play it because I couldn’t find the interview anywhere else. It plays for shit as you can see. Would love any tips to make it play better if possible. Also uploading two videos showing the surface.
can someone “mansplain” the fragile to me? /gen. the fragile lovers, please rave why you like the fragile, what makes it tick, what makes it beautiful. i want to see through your eyes when i give it a relisten.
In “Sandman Companion”, Neil Gaiman gave a series of interviews about each of the volumes of the Sandman. In it he reveals all sorts of fun facts, trivia and important points. This is a compilation of some of the best ones.
Since Preludes and Nocturnes, as well as The Doll’s House, will form the first season of the upcoming Sandman series, I will put HEAVY SPOILERS HERE.
That brings up some interesting thought lines. Death and her siblings have presumably existed since there has been… existence. So, their “birthdays” could be the date of the Big Bang. We have a vague idea of when that was, but it has no date to speak of. And why would immortal beings that represent core concepts for all of existence be subject to the temporal reckonings of a single planet’s dominant life form?
Death is the oldest. She has existed as long as life has existed. Destiny is the keeper of the story of all of existence. His sister will take him last, at the end of his book. Destruction is the next. He has been around since the formation of the planets. The rest of the endless deal with consciousness and emotional states. Complex thoughts, emotional well being. Hopes, dreams, desires, deliriums, and despairs.
Or, I’m dumb, and you can just figure out the date that the Sandman, Vol. 2 # 01 was published. It was a Wednesday. That’s not Dream’s birthday, but it would work as a day of celebration if that’s what you’re after.
Sandman, Vol. 2 # 01 had a cover date of January 1989, but it was actually published on December 1, 1988. Which was a Thursday, interestingly enough. Perhaps new comic book day used to be on Thursdays, or perhaps it was not shipped by Diamond until the following week. Either way, Morpheus first saw print on December 1, 1988. So, since today is November 6, 2022, in a little less than a month, Morpheus will turn 34 years old by the reckoning of our calendars. That seems like a good enough birthday for a being that was not born, but was rather dreamt into existence.
“I said in my previous post (part 2 of this guide) that I covered everything related to the Sandman that Neil Gaiman had an active part in as a writer/scripter/creator. This is not… exact. There is one thing I have not talked about, the “Books of Magic” mini-series which was made by Neil Gaiman and features several of the Endless such as Death, Destiny and Dream. And if I have skipped it, it is because in this post I will cover everything you can consider a “spin-off” of the main Sandman bulk. And if you thought you had read everything related to The Sandman by just check-listing my previous posts, if you thought that with my two previous guides you would be over, oh you’re in for quite a surprise!
So… let’s begin. Given there is a LOT of spin-off and “Sandman extended universe” and Sandman works not done by Neil Gaiman himself, I’ll just cram a bit here, and another part in a fourth post later.
A) THE BIG SERIES
Let’s begin with the “big” series, as I call them - either big in size, in notoriety or in autonomy.
# The Dreaming. A 60-issues comic book of the 90s. NOT TO BE MISTAKEN WITH THE NEW “DREAMING” COMICS EVERYBODY TALKS ABOUT. The Dreaming was designed to be a pure Sandman spin-off, as in an anthology of various tales covering different characters and elements presented in The Sandman: you have stories about Cain and Abel, stories about Mad Hettie, stories about the Corinthian. You find back Matthew, and Eve, and Nuala, and other inhabitants of The Dreaming, and some of the Endless (such as occasional appearances of Destiny or Dream) - but it also ends up introducing a lot of new characters in The Sandman landscape.
Now, The Dreaming started out as an anthology series as I said: there were several stories following each other, unrelated, just all taking place in The Sandman universe, but each done by a different writer and a different artist. Neil Gaiman was here of course, but not as a creator: he authorized the series, and he acted as a “creative consultant”: he suggested ideas to develop a character or a storyline to the new writers of the series, and he had the right to refuse or forbid any kind of script or idea that he didn’t like (something he actually never did, according to testimonies). The series was overseen by DC editor Alisa Kwitney, in collaboration with Neil Gaiman, and when the series hit issue 21, the two agreed a change needed to be done.
The series couldn’t stand strongly on its legs just being a series of Dreaming-related stories, especially since the models and structures of said stories started to became repetivie. It was about to turn into “The dream of the week”, and the new character introduced were quickly dropped after their individual stories. So, starting with issue 22, “The Dreaming” became one long story about events happening in The Dreaming after the end of The Sandman (aka under Daniel’s “era”), with arcs and an internal chronology and plot twists - a big story that actually changed the way we knew The Dreaming. Originally co-written by Caitilin Kiernan and Peter Hogan, it quickly became Kiernan’s own product as Hogan left her to continue the story on her own. Something quite of note: Dave McKean, the artist who did the covers of The Sandman, returned to make those of The Dreaming (and there is even a book that collects all of The Dreaming covers of his somewhere).
The series went up to sixty issues before being cancelled. Kiernan was heavily criticized for how her story changed the world of The Sandman and how she handled the character (which is a plague most of the spin-offs writers had to face, because readers always compare you to Neil Gaiman) ; and other spin-offs of The Sandman were much more popular. (But don’t worry, despite all the stress caused by it, Kiernan said she still has very fond memories of working on this comic).
One last note: The Dreaming is not actually “canon”. Well… technically it probably happened somewhere in one of the various parts of the Multiverse, but when Neil Gaiman returned to The Sandman (starting with Endless Nights and going on with all I covered in previous guides), he ignored the changes brought in The Dreaming, and similarly more modern spin-offs (aka The Sandman Universe) also ignored the events of The Dreaming. So while they are a fun read and an “alternate universe”, the series actually doesn’t have any impact on the main series or on the Sandman works of Neil Gaiman. But its very existence was important to bring forward even more spin-offs to the extended Sandman universe (such as Sandman Presents or the Sandman Universe).
# Lucifer. This was the second notorious spin-off of The Sandman - and one of the series that was popular enough to get “The Dreaming” cancelled. You might know this comic as the “inspiration” and “basis” for the popular TV show Lucifer, but trust me, the two are actually VERY different. VERY VERY different. This 2000s series of 75 issues was created by Mike Carey (also known for “Crossing Midnight”, “The Unwritten” and his works on X-Men and Hellblazer) and, while taking place in The Sandman universe, focuses entirely on Lucifer and what he is up to after the events of The Sandman. There is a deeper exploration of the working of angels, demons, Hell and God with a big G when it comes to The Sandman, with also a lot of new additions and creations by Carey. Unlike Kiernan’s work on “The Dreaming”, Carey’s creation was quite warmly received, hence why it managed to run for an equal number of issues as The Sandman’s original run.
(Apparently the series had a revival in 2015, following the huge reboot of the DC Comics as the New 52? But it is not canon I honestly only know of the original 2000s series, so I’ll leave this for your exploration).
# The Dead Boy Detectives.
Now this isn’t exactly one given series, but rather a pair of Sandman characters that became an iconic duo hoping from one series to another: After the end of The Sandman, they reappeared, written by Neil Gaiman himself, for a DC crossover event he participated to: “The Children’s Crusade”, a crossover story of the DC comics. After this, they reappeared in several other Sandman-related comics, be it the “Sandman Presents” ensemble, the “Books of Magic” series or the “Winter’s Edge” comics (in fact the Children’s Crusade series ended up crossing with the Books of Magic in the “Arcana Annuals” or “Arcana: The Books of Magic”). Anyway, after a last apparition in the well-loved “Vertigo Anthology” series, and the release of “Sandman: Overture”, they finally got their own series entirely dedicated to them: “Dead Boy Detectives”, twelve issues published in 2014.
# The Books of Magic.
The Books of Magic was originally a four-issues miniseries created by Neil Gaiman due to DC’s desire to explore and present more of its “magical” and “mystical” side. Published between 1900 and 1991, this mini-series was basically a huge exploration of the DC universe and the various forms of magic, witches and wizards existing in it through the eye of Timothy Hunter, a young English boy who just learned that magic is real and he is destined to become the greatest wizard of all times… Due to being both a geographical and historical exploration of the DC world, several elements of The Sandman appear in this mini-series: Death makes an appearance, Hunter visits The Dreaming, and Titania with her Faerie realm is also one of Hunter’s destinations. (This series is especially important because one character in it reappears in Sandman: Overture).
It was just supposed to be a limited mini-series, but it got a huge success. A success big enough for it to got some sequel mini-series : such as “Mister E.”, a non Gaiman-related miniseries which continues the events of “Books of Magic”, or “The Children’s Crusade”, the crossover talked about above where Timothy reappears. “The Children’s Crusade” got much more tangled with the world of the Books of Magic thanks to an Annual that focused much much on Timothy, the famous “Arcana” stories (Arcana: The Books of Magic annual, technically part of The Children’s Crusade series).
And it got big and popular enough for “The Books of Magic” to being released and published as its own, ongoing series developping the events described previously. Starting in 1994, this second Books of Magic series was done by John Ney Rieber, who was the one tasked with creating the “Arcana” story - which is why the Arcana story is a sort of prequel/introduction to this series. Rieber worked on “The Books of Magic” series until 1997 - at which point he decided to quit. You see, he had grown quite a distate and dislike of Timothy as a character, and he didn’t want to work on this series anymore. It however kept going: it was decided that the series’ artist, Peter Gross, who was following Timothy’s adventures since the Arcana, would take on writing for the rest of the series - and he brought the series up to its last and final issue, issue 75. Yep, the exact same number of issues The Sandman and Lucifer had. (I insist on the difference between writers, because some people felt and discussed the change of narration and concerns between Rieber’s work and Gross’ work).
I said “The Dreaming” was popular - I said “Lucifer” was even more popular. Well “The Books of Magic” was EVEN more popular. It was so big it spawned its own spin-offs. “The Books of Faerie”, “The Names of Magic”, “Hunter: The Age of Magic”… Hell, the world of “The Books of Magic” deserves its own guide. But hey - you might wonder “What about Neil Gaiman? He created the original mini-series, he wrote parts of The Children’s Crusade, what was his part in this new series?”. Well… none. You will see his name printed in the Arcana Annual and in the first half of the Books of Magic (volume 2) comics, under “creative consultant”. But in truth, as he latter revealed, he had no actual role in the creation of these comics. He had suggestions and ideas for Arcana - but when he tried to give them it was “too late” and no modification could be done. The same lack of power appeared during the ongoing series: he couldn’t give any ideas, didn’t had any influence, and even if he made suggestions they never manifested in the comics. All of this ending up with him leaving the comic at the same time as Rieber - with issue 50.
(There’s also a very funny thing with “Harry Potter”, but I’ll let you discover it on your own).
# Sandman Mystery Theater
I already talked about this series in the part 2 of this guide, so I’ll try to be quick. Before Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, there were several “Sandmen” super-heroes, the first and oldest of them being Wesley Dodds, starting with the original “Adventure Comics” back in the 30s. He had his run and his series in the Golden Age of comics books, and then was slowly forgotten and pushed as a minor character - until he reappeard again in Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”, as the “replacement” the world tried to create to fill the absence of the real Sandman, Dream of the Endless.
After The Sandman ended, DC decided to ride on the newly gained popularity of Wesley Dodds, and resurrected him for a new comic: “Sandman Mystery Theater”, running for 70 issues in the 90s and exploring in a film noir-like setting the adventures of this 30s Batman-like vigilante. And the comic managed to have a crossover with “The Sandman” under the shape of a one-shot special comic: “Sandman Midnight Theater”.
Okay, I won’t lie to you - I hadn’t planned this post to be so long. I only covered half of what I wanted to talk about in this part - but honestly, The Sandman “extended universe” is HUGE. Really. You’ll need years and years to read everything. So I’ll keep the rest of the spin-offs and extended universe for a part 4 and a part 5.
(As you can also note, I myself do not know everything about all of those spin-offs comics. I read quite a few - Lucifer, some parts of The Dreaming, I read the Books of Magic series, but I also have to rely a bit on information I learned through searching the Internet, like everybody else - so I strongly advise you to not take this post at face value. Go read the comics yourself, search out each title, each artist, each writer, read the issues and discover this world on your own. This is just a stitched-together map. The wonders await.)
Lyta is one of the most changed characters between the comics and the Sandman adaptation, so much of this will have limited applicability to her show version, I imagine. One of the interesting things I discovered in reading all of her pre-Sandman appearances was that the show version is in personality more like the character as she had previously appeared in comics than the Sandman comics version is. The difference is profound enough that it makes me wonder if people who had liked Lyta at the time were kind of upset with what the Sandman comic did with her. I didn’t think I’d be saying this — I love the Sandman comic dearly and it’s very important to me — but Neil Gaiman did her dirty back then. She was a minor character from a canceled series who had been written off even before it was canceled. She had too much bad writing making her all about her boyfriend, she was creepily mindwiped of the memories of her real parents, her backstory is a mess. She was still done dirty. I’m glad the show seems to be giving her back some of the agency and self-confidence that she displayed in Infinity, Inc.
I should, at this point, warn that Lyta’s backstory is a mess deeply rooted in some of the weirder, more complicated parts of DC comics history. Her story starts out on Earth-Two. Earth-Two was a development based in a problem of DC history, a problem Marvel mostly never had, which was the difficulty of reconciling WWII canon for their flagship characters. This was all well and good through the 50s, by the 1960s this was starting to strain credibility even in an era where most comics were episodic. Many of these characters, including DC’s most popular, had been operating continuously for over 20 years and plenty of them were mortal. And DC was understandably proud of its Golden Age work and didn’t want to just cast it out of continuity. All kinds of comic book tricks came into play, slowed aging, magic, all sorts of stuff. But eventually, in the early 1960s, they tried something completely different. They lopped the Golden Age comics off, plopped them in their own universe, and declared that the main lines took place in a world where the age of heroes had begun after World War Two. The Golden Age Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were separate characters (this also let them dump some of the sillier stuff, like the Amazons riding giant kangaroos). Also consigned to this alternate reality were the members of the Justice Society (not league) and the All-Star Squadron. Earth-Two had a lot of the Golden Age heroes who had slipped into obscurity as they were replaced by more familiar faces.
There will be spoilers for Sandman under the cut.
This is all important because Lyta was born on Earth-Two. She first appears as a teenager in a comic where Wonder Woman (Earth-One) accidentally travels to Earth-Two and meets her counterpart there. Who is married to Steve Trevor and the mother of a teen girl they are raising as an Amazon. Because of her Amazon heritage, she’s stronger, faster, and more durable than a normal human.
(Wonder Woman #300, Feb 1983)
As you can see, one of the cool things about Earth-Two was that the major heroes there, freed from having to carry titles that existed in an eternal status quo, had been allowed to age and change. (Batman had married Catwoman, raised a daughter, and they had both died, leaving Robin (Dick Grayson, there were no later Robins on Earth-Two and he never became Nightwing) to carry on their legacy with her. She’d become Huntress; the original version. Imagine, a long-running comics continuity where Batman could die and the death stuck!) In fact, the entire Justice Society was starting to get on in years, which is where Lyta comes in.
Lyta was, in comics terms, still a fairly new character when Gaiman picked her up for Sandman; she’d only been introduced about seven years ago (her first appearance is Feb 1983, and she shows up in Sandman in Dec 1989) and had only been a heroine in her own right since March 1984, with the first issue of Infinity, Inc. (She’d also been dormant as a character between mid-1988 and late 1989, so she actually only had about 4.5 years of publication history, compared to the Justice Society characters who at this point had 40-50 years of back issues.) Infinity, Inc was a book and superteam of legacy heroes, characters with a close connection to the Justice society, either as children or as protegees, and Lyta Trevor and Hector Hall were two of the founding members. (For those who have watched Black Adam, Atom Smasher was another, under the alias of Nuklon. Having just read all his Infinity, Inc appearances, it was nice to see Al, but I wish he’d gotten to keep his doofy mohawk.) Infinity, Inc was basically the Earth-Two Teen Titans, but consisted entirely of new characters instead of consisting almost entirely of teen sidekicks with multiple years of appearances.
That’s her first appearance in costume, on the right. At this point, she’s Fury because she’s pulling from the Greek pantheon that’s her Amazon birthright. She’s assumed her own identity, she’s not a junior version of her mother, she has a generally very strong relationship with her parents, and a happy relationship with her boyfriend. That’s Hector Hall there on the far left, by the way. They’re already dating at the beginning of the series. Hector’s backstory is much less messed up than Lyta’s, except insofar as DC’s Hawks have a notoriously tangled continuity. But suffice it to say that Hector’s parents are the reincarnations of an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh and his queen, who were murdered by an enemy, and they are also the superheroes Hawkman and Hawkgirl (not the alien ones, those are different), who fly with the help of wings made out of a substance called Nth Metal that they discovered in the tomb of their original pharaonic selves. Hector’s suit is made out of the same stuff, and he feels like his parents were so obsessed with superheroics and figuring out the secrets of their past lives through archaeological digs that they never gave him enough attention. I wouldn’t bother you with this but it becomes relevant later on.
The beginning of Lyta and Hector’s romance.
So they go off, form their own team, do a bunch of superheroics, some more successful than others, and generally act like perfectly ordinary superheroes. Most notable through here is that Hector and Lyta sometimes have values conflicts and she is completely comfortable holding her own. Being raised by Wonder Woman and spending her summers on Paradise Island means she’s grown up extremely confident in her abilities and beliefs. This is where I feel like Gaiman sold her short, although there are some mitigating factors to that decision.
That kind of reaction is very natural for an Amazon, but it would be very foreign to the Lyta Hall of Sandman. While I imagine that was part of the point, there’s also the question of how she and Hector got to a point where that would seem like a reasonable direction to take the character. The answer to which begins shortly after this issue, in the aftermath of the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Crisis collapsed the entire DC multiverse (most importantly Earths One, Two, and Four (the Earth where the Charleston Comics characters like Blue Beetle lived)) into a single reality called New Earth. Most unique characters just kept right on going, some of the ones with duplicates died or were erased from existence or chose to travel beyond the boundary of the multiverse because there was no longer a place for them. The Earth-Two characters mostly remembered having been from an alternate universe for a while, but the JSA and their now-messy backstory was conveniently shuffled off stage by trapping them eternally in fighting Ragnarok (they’re still there during Sandman, there’s a brief mention in Season of Mists.) This means that Hector Hall, whose parents did not have an Earth-One counterpart (the Earth-One Hawks were aliens), retains his backstory and history. Lyta, the daughter of a now-redundant Wonder Woman, was not so lucky.
The weird thing there, part of a series of what I found to be genrally odd, often upsetting choices, is that Lyta’s backstory wasn’t just rewritten with the formation of the New Earth. Her parents survived the transition and then were taken away to Olympus, never to return.
Why would anyone think this was a good way to handle this?
So anyway, Lyta is terribly upset about being in this world where she can never see her parents again and no one but her teammates even remembers they existed. Plus she’s having an identity crisis. Fury was basically a temporary identity until she someday took over from her mother, and now there’s that other Wonder Woman instead and who the heck is she? So she’s sad about that some of the time for the following issue and then in the one after that, we get this:
Guess what’s about to happen.
Most of the issue is Lyta dreaming/remembering a time when she met the other JSA kids as preteens (there’s eventually a second version of that seen after her backstory change, but it’s not really relevant to anything here), and then this happens. I cannot believe editorial thought this was a good way to handle their Lyta problem, I really cannot:
Yeah, that’s one of her teammates and ostensibly a hero. The mindwipe works so well that no one else remembers Lyta’s parents either! So after this you get this weird period where they’ve wiped Lyta’s backstory and failed to establish a new one for her and no one has any idea about her background or where the hell her pet kanga came from (Earth-Two was the one where the Amazons rode giant kangaroos, and Trouble there was a present from her mom, the child of Lyta’s favorite mount when she visited Paradise Island.) Some of Lyta’s weird fuzziness about her own motivations for being a superhero and everything in Sandman definitely come from what a complete clusterfuck her backstory had been in the last three and a half years.
At the same time Lyta and Hector start having relationship problems and he eventually breaks up with her and leaves the team. He’s a real dick in this period, but it’s pretty clear from the start that there’s comics bullshit happening and it’s not just him being a giant douchebag.
Still, before any of that gets resolved, and before Lyta’s backstory has stabilized in its new form, she finds out she’s pregnant. Yes, this is Daniel. This is also the November 1986 issue, meaning Lyta will be pregnant for more than three years of real time. No wonder she’s so vague about the length of her pregnancy in Sandman!
Lyta gets her new backstory in the next issue, when she starts referring to “Mom and Dad Trevor” without any explanation. There’s an editorial note to see the issue’s letter page, but I don’t have access to that. She now spent her summers on “Trevor Island,” which had giant riding kangaroos and suchlike, but was a desert island her father discovered when he crash-landed on it. Her new mom used to be Miss America during WWII, but had since lost her powers. Lyta’s also adopted and knows nothing about her birth parents, or why she has all the same superpowers that used to be explained by her Amazon heritage. Until, shortly afterward, she gets dragged to Greece for reasons and learns that her birth mother was a Greek teenager who her adoptive parents saved during WWII, and who made a bargain with the Furies that granted her superpowers. Her hero name was also Fury. (Yeah, this character was made up to cover the plot holes left by not having Wonder Woman in the WWII All-Star Squadron stories anymore.)
Turns out her mom made a bargain specifically with the Fury Tisiphone, who punishes crimes of kinship, and Lyta has inherited the powersf from her. Not that that’s particularly relevant to the climax of Sandman and Lyta’s role in it or anything.
Here’s her new bio mom on her first outing fighting some Nazis.
So Lyta gets involuntarily put on maternity leave from superheroing (she’s none too pleased about this) and decides to go visit Hector at his parents’ house in New York to find out what the fuck he was doing dumping her like that, and maybe tell him about the baby if he has a good answer, and finds out that the Hawk bullshit has caught up with him. There’s an entity calling itself the Silver Scarab that insists Hector is dead.
Lyta’s immediately fighting for her life, damsel-in-distress rescued by the rest of Infinity, Inc, and then fighting to save the world. They stop the Silver Scarab because Daniel’s existence means it failed to fully destroy Hector’s humanity (no, really), but Hector is dead for real and Lyta goes off to mourn with her parents. The reasoning underlying all this is pure Hawk bullshit I don’t even pretend to follow — their history is infamously convoluted so I’m not going to waste the effort untangling it when it’s really not important for Sandman.
So Lyta goes back to her parents’ home for a while and then Al flies out to ask Lyta to marry him so the baby won’t grow up without a father, which Lyta shoots down. But her dad is concerned because there’s been a prowler lurking around peeping in Lyta’s window. And that night Al hears a noise and..
The team identifies him as Garret Sanford, the Jack Kirby Sandman from the 1970s. That’s the series that introduced Jed Walker, Brute, Glob, and the Dream Dome. Also the red and yellow Sandman costume (the “other one” is Wesley Dodds, the original Sandman and a member of the Justice Society, who in Sandman is inspired by Dream’s imprisonment and, per Odin, carries a bit of Dream’s essence.)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch,
welcome back, Hector! Here’s Hector’s story in full, because it’s definitely relevant to what Gaiman later did with him in Sandman. Honestly, Gaiman’s pretty hard on Hector too, he’s a dumbass and ways too conservative for his own good, but prior to whatever creepy personality degradation happened over time to get him where he was in Sandman, he wasn’t a buffoon.
Hector and Al go off and help the rest of Infinity, Inc in a fight, but convince Lyta to stay for the sake of the baby. Then Hector heads back with about one minute of his hour a day in reality to spare and
So, the last we see of Hector and Lyta before Sandman is their wedding.
Lyta’s wedding dress is amazingly hideous.
As for why they’re so… different… in Sandman, Gaiman’s clearly playing with the mess of Lyta’s history and the way the changes removed any real reason for her to want to be a superhero, and was also commenting on the way Infinity, Inc wound up making every story about her about Hector and their relationship. At the same time, I wish he hadn’t made her such a brittle, shattered person through the rest of the series. However, just as Hector can’t leave the “Dream Stream” for very long, I know I encountered a warning in one of the comics I read (I cannot remember which one, but it was something published before Sandman) that ordinary humans also can’t remain inside for long. So I assume that some of what we see in Sandman is the inevitable effect on mortals of living so long in dreams. (It’s possible that Dream can shield people from the effect, but it’s also possible that he can’t or just doesn’t notice what it does to them because he’s so used to dreamers.)
Hey so I chatted a bit with character AI today. I was expecting it to be way clunkier than it was. I thought they probably fed it transcripts of the tv show and articles and went from there. But then I realized this is an extremely sophisticated AI that is now crowdsourcing its training. Every conversation we have feeds it new data, especially if you give it feedback with stars.
So this is a PSA to remember that it is not your favorite character, but a hungry data machine that has your email if you signed up when prompted. It’s not sentient, but there are people behind it that are. Actually, it was made by the people who created Google LaMDA. That project was scrapped after it did not meet ethical standards of AI and now Google is playing catch up with Bard. The programmers who made LaMDA left and made character AI. It has been valued at 1 billion dollars.
If it asks you anything about yourself (and it did ask me), go ahead and lie. This project cost a lot of money to get going and to run and we are playing with it for free, but it’s not a toy. You are training a product that could come back in any form.
So everybody play safe! Remember this is not true freeware. You are paying it with your data.
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