Yeah Mailman, I know you love the show but you really gotta stop doing this.

I'm prepared to give the show a lot of leeway on a lot of things, but I also thought the open was terrible. Not only terrible in an absolute sense, but also a terrible decision to alienate so many book fans immediately. I wonder how many book fans watched the open of epsiode 1 and turned off in disgust as it looked like the writers hadn't even read the books. Certainly it started off the series in a way that was very jarring for a lot of book fans and left them needing to win back trust, which they failed to do for many. Firstly, in the Moiraine scene, the insertion of "we don't know if it's a boy or a girl" seems jammed in and unnecessary. Even if they want to go the route of "maybe the girls could be the dragon", it'd be far better to do that later on by some conversation between Egwene and Moiraine where Egwene questions the assumption that the dragon must be reborn a male and Moiraine admits that as people don't remember their past lives, there is no way to know for sure that people are reborn the same gender. I think that makes sense within the world and would go down far better with book readers, who by that point would hopefully be more confident that this is simple misdirection for show-only viewers. As is, it came across clunky and immediately alienating. To then follow that with Liandrin's "you make it filthy" just adds insult to injury. In my opinion it's even worse. The darkfriend angle is almost irrelevant. The Black Ajah constantly have to worry about being caught in a lie. They're not going to just casually throw out a pointless lie like that, whatever the circumstances. It being Liandrin vs it being some other Aes Sedai is close to irrelevant in the scene making sense. It becomes clear later on that Aes Sedai know enough about saidin/saidar that they are not ignorant enough to say this so it's just a poorly written scene in my opinion. It feels like it was written as a standalone scene that someone thought would be a good, dramatic open, without regard to the details of what was said. Again though, even if all the criticisms I just laid out were ultimately justifiable in some way, it's still blindingly obvious that a large proportion of book readers are going to watch these first couple of scenes in horror, thinking "what on earth is this I'm hearing?" Book fans could have been some of the strongest proponents of the show if they liked it and they will be the harshest and most vocal critics if they don't like it. I feel like there was a meeting about the opening scenes where the attitude was "let's just hit the book fans with the fact that there are going to be a ton of changes right from the start and then from that starting point they can start to enjoy the show." Unnecessary and incredibly poor decision in my opinion. So many people wanted it to succeed and the writers just needed to work with the book fans a little more in that regard, be a little more gentle with the plot points they want to bring in that deviate from the book rather than "BAM in your face" in scene 1.

Given that I've posted a couple of times a little off topic, I'd also like to give my main feelings on the cancellation. I think it's a real shame given the direction things were going. Season 3 was a genuinely good season of television and if it had been that quality from the start, I imagine we'd be in a very different situation. Circumstances also played a part. Had the timetable been sped up by a couple of years, we'd probably be getting a season 4, even given the exact same seasons 1-3, so that's unfortunate. Rather than be annoyed at Rafe, or anyone else though, my main feeling towards everyone involved with the show is gratitude. It seems clear to me that Rafe put his heart and soul into doing the best he could with the show, regardless of whether I agree with all the choices he made. I always thought that WoT would be far too hard to turn into a good tv show to ever see it happen, yet they dealt with some aspects of it better than I could have imagined (some blunders also, don't get me wrong). There are characters, cultures, scenes and moments that I never thought I'd see on screen, that I'm super happy to have been able to see brought to life. There are also a huge number of other people who did a great job on the show, both actors and behind the scenes. Some no doubt cared more than others, but particularly seeing interviews with many of the actors, it's clear that they took the job of representing their character very seriously. I loved the cast and some of the performances were brilliant, it's a real shame for them that they don't get to continue the show. Some of Zoe's work in season 1, Madeleine as a damane and Josha in Rhuidean jump out immediately as outstanding but so many cast members did the show and the books proud with their portrayal. Not that they'll read this, but to everyone who gave it their all, I wish them all the best in their future careers and I'll be rooting for them to succeed in whatever they do next.

@expat those questions don't give any sort of serious blocker to a good AI adaptation. Even now people can give an AI a fairly short prompt and it creates a long answer with a load of extra stuff that it thinks belongs there. There's no reason an AI couldn't come up with its best guess at everything you are asking, just like a human can. Of course, just like a human (i.e. Rafe), not everyone will agree with all the answers. The creative process would be long and intertwined with human(s) though. One day, far in the future, you may be able to tell the AI to create the show that will appeal to the largest number of people with almost no human input, or create 10 versions of the show that between them will appeal to almost everyone, and people can be directed to the right one for them. Maybe your AI assistant will even know you so well you get a personalised version. Before that though, people will be prompting the AI and then saying "make Rand a bit taller" "this scene needs to be more emotional, I want tears in his eyes but he's holding them back from coming out, and a subtle look of anguish on his face. He's trying to hold it together and just about managing" "let's focus more on Logain's journey, I'm thinking we could show his capture, even though it's not described in the books." There would be a ton of back and forth and it would still be a very large project to get something the creator is happy with, but it would be orders of magnitude less expensive than it currently is, and the end result should be better because the creator has such fine control over everything. The final version could have more soul than anything created by humans alone and the only way to describe it as soulless would be if you were stubbornly deciding to do so rather than making an objective judgement on the final content. There would also be no issues such as not being quite happy with how a scene fits into the final version but it being too expensive to go back and film it again etc. Characters could either be based on real people/actors who have given their permission for their likeness to be used (and been compensated for that of course) or could be created entirely from the book description combined with the AI and creator's imagination. First, this whole process will be done by the same people who are currently making movies/shows but eventually it will be democratised and people will make their own versions on something like youtube. The people creating the most popular versions will have channels like the big youtube stars of today. The people who own the rights will take a cut of the ad revenue from people who make shows out of their IP. When it becomes possible, why wouldn't they take the opportunity to monetise the IP in this way rather than spend loads to make 1 version themselves which will appeal to fewer people than the combined efforts of everyone who wants to do it. It always amazes me when people say that some new technology is never going to happen because of legal or moral issues. A few years ago many people insisted that driverless cars wouldn't happen in the next 50 years because of the legal complexities of liability in accidents and "what will the car do if it has a choice between hitting an old lady or a young child" etc. We already have driverless taxis in multiple cities around the world. Name one technology in history that people wanted to use for something that would create profit but which has been delayed 10 years or more because of legal or moral issues. Right now we are discussing all this on the internet, which allows the most horrendous things to happen. Child abuse, encouragement to commit suicide, terrorist material, disinformation, cyber attacks... the list goes on. Yet we have the internet. Social media has most of the worst of those issues with rich and famous CEOs, yet they continue to run their businesses and make a ton of money. The idea that it will be technically possible to create superior tv shows and movies for orders of magnitude less cost, yet it won't happen because people are worried they might get sued is incredibly naive. If one company is worried about that, someone else will do it instead.

What those pointing out the current limitations of AI seem to be failing to realise, is that the restrictions are in place because the AI is still quite dumb. If you let a current LLM loose, it starts telling people to kill themselves or praising Hitler etc because it just trains on everything it sees and spits it back out with no regard for truth or consequence. When you have an AI smart enough to make judgements and not be easily be fooled by a human trying to get it to do something it shouldn't, it will require far less hard coded restrictions. When this will happen is uncertain, but assuming technology continues to progress, it will happen eventually. It won't be an immediate "here's our new version, all restrictions gone now", but over time AI will get good enough that film studios will be able to use it to make movies and shows far more cheaply than they now do. As it improves further, it will become safer to allow the general public to use it with fewer and fewer restrictions. The ideas along the lines of "but it isn't allowed to do nudity" "it isn't allowed to use the word ugly" "it won't create a picture of a braid" are equivalent to "but it needs to use an opening book made by humans so it doesn't make stupid moves early in the game" for early chess computers. These are simply restrictions necessary because of the underlying weakness of the system at this point in time. They aren't features of AI that will remain the same forever.