We are so close to the end of the story itself, that I suspect our earl and Sebastian to end up having their big battle against Queen Victoria and John Brown. According to Mother3 theory, that should happen before the final battle (whatever form that takes) against real Ciel. So far, the theory has held quite well, and I expect the basic framework to continue holding. Partly for convenience's sake, it might turn out that Modri's demon is not Sebastian but is also present at the hotel. Even more conveniently, it might be in the same room with our earl and Sebastian. We've been looking at John Brown for a long time, and not simply because of Ash Landers' role in s1 of the anime. Within manga canon, it has become clear that John Brown is not human; his horse might not be a horse, either, but that's harder to discern from what little we've seen of it.
No, this is not about Layla calling for Al to help her and Al showing up way later than she wished. I'm going off topic and talking about capital A capital I.
(But perhaps stick around or skip to the bottom for an attempt to stretch it back on topic 😆.)
Below the embedded video is a copy/paste of a post I added to my Facebook page last month. Considering it's about how AI could negatively impact what's projected to a wide audience, it seems worth noting here, despite the fact it has little to nothing to do with blogging about Black Butler. Who knows? Someday this topic could become strongly relevant to the series, too. 😵💫
When you ask generative AI to pull up ideas -- to basically brainstorm for you -- there's not much of a protocol in place to keep it from gathering and incorporating info from bad sources, is there? You would have to be quite wary about which ideas 💡 you choose to move forward with, particularly when it brings up some interesting idea completely outside the box your mind might have been stuck in. The problem isn't so much in the ideas you easily dismiss, since those ideas aren't going anywhere but the trash bin 🗑️, but in the ones you seriously consider. You would have to question whether any significant detail of the reply came from any divisive or false source. Mistakes like this can also genuinely be made by real people who "misread the room" or misjudge the target audience/market. However, it's more likely to happen with people all too happy to leave the real/hard work to AI and blindly run with the ideas it spits out. Sadly, this sort of thing is also likely to happen way *more often*, as AI becomes a much more common tool across the board, in nearly every industry. Yet another reason why we should avoid using AI for marketing and ad campaigns.
------
You know, there is one way I can think of to fit this topic into a discussion about the narrative of the Black Butler series. Much like generative Artificial Intelligence cannot tell what sources are right or wrong to pull from, demons like Sebastian aren't really that good at understanding the full range of human emotions or even -- I dare say -- understanding our desires. They could know everything about you but not understand what all that information means.
As I reread my post, weeks after first drafting it, I realize there's something here to be said about Undertaker and how he uses cinematic records to manipulate his Bizarre Dolls. He cannot possibly be sure it's the right thing to do. And what do you choose to use, if that person had conflicting desires? I'm sure he chooses whichever "episodes" he deems most useful for his own purposes. Even worse, he might now be manipulating the cinematic records of living people (like Modri). I just realized this can be seen as a parallel to what anime-Undie does in s1, when he's called upon to edit the cinematic records of a woman who is in the church when Ash/Angela openly turns on their own cultists....
Though I suppose that's an intelligence more "outside" than "artificial".
