#the best i can do for araqiel and iona?

[bloodgulchblog]

halo lost track of ai generations.

(i, on the other hand, have lost all control of my life.)

all recent smart ais in lore are identified as 5th generation as recently and authoritatively as the 2022 encyclopedia. black box is 4th generation. cortana has been identified as 3rd generation since halsey's diary at the very least, and even if it's not set in stone earlier (digging through digital copies of fall of reach and first strike is dicey if the copy doesn't identify which edition it is) it's supported by ackerson's ai araqiel and blood line/saint's testimony character iona both being specifically identified as 3rd generation.

however, ghosts of onyx also established a 5th generation ai, deep winter, that had been in service in the 2530s (and this longevity is canon as of infinite-era lore, see link.)

(2009 encyclopedia also names deep winter's predecessor eternal spring as a 5th generation ai, but 2009 encyclopedia is noted to be suspect on some details/assumptions and to have borrowed fan speculation from halopedia.)

this would mean the "top of the line" of smart ai tech is 20+ years old, which is hilarious but also strikes me as unlikely.

so. here's what i think happened.

i think 5th generation being called out in ghosts of onyx is legitimately a fluke that was forgotten about, or slated to be corrected in a later printing that never happened due to some combination of the shuffle of establishing 343i/halo cutting nylund off/maybe someone sitting down and looking at the inconsistencies between ghosts of onyx and halo reach and deciding maybe they should just gently nudge it all under the rug and pretend it's not there.

then, the kilo five author (notoriously not somebody who sticks to lore of established franchises and who was probably just going off a then-recently-established list of details when 343 commissioned her) established black box as 4th gen following the logic that this would make him the next better step after cortana, who was firmly established as 3rd gen at that point.

now, because this is how making numbers bigger works, everybody's 5th gen.

...and i think it's possible someone by now has noticed this, because if you look back at concurrent material (like waypoint's old character profiles) for halo 5, cortana's generation is just quietly not mentioned. (this is also true of 2022 encyclopedia.)

i think it's just a straight up oversight that ended up unsolvable because it got ingrained in some firmly-established materials and now, because just-not-mentioned isn't enough to discredit an old detail to a fandom/especially to a wiki, it's just kind of like this.

but, as an in-universe idea, it's very funny to me because you can also go:

oh, catherine halsey was so particular about her smart ai design that she built her magnum opus on top of 20+ year old architecture because she didn't like two whole generations of volitional ai development and did a shit ton of custom work.

there's something fun about that as a thought, to me.