The best-laid plans of mice and men, per Robert Burns, can often go very wrong indeed, as the System Shock remake publisher Prime Matter has just learned. The company embarked on a little marketing stunt that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, which has been met with fierce pushback: It used the AI software Midjourney to create a  picture of Shodan.

We’ll get to the pushback but this isn’t the worst idea in the world: As the post with the image says, it’s “designed by an immortal machine for an immortal machine” and, y’know, you’re not supposed to like Shodan or what she represents. You can even see why this felt like an appropriate experiment.

But us meaty fleshbags didn’t like it one bit, and the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Partly this seems to be coming from the fact that System Shock is a remake of a much-loved game from decades ago that was very much made by meatbags, and partly it’s reflecting the wider social unease about just what exactl…