Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries by Matha Wells (5 stars)

The amazingness continues, although I'm now wise to the scheme. Carve an amazing novel up into 160 page chunks and sell them all for the price of a full novel. I paid it because the books are great, but I'll grumble along with everyone else on amazon. They aren't novellas, they are just sections from an awesome novel that cost $10 each.

 This is more of the same brilliant AI, now off on an adventure of its own choosing.

I didn’t care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after

I'm fairly confused about how it can use TV shows to bribe other bots. Why can't ART just download its own media from the same place as Murderbot? That aside, I loved the scenes of two AIs sitting around critiquing soap operas as unrealistic, while devoting bazillions of compute cycles to watching every single episode:

The depiction is unrealistic.

and getting emotional

When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

and then using the made up action as advice for real life

I asked ART, How did you know to do that? though I already knew the answer. It knew I knew, but it said, Episode 179 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

 5 stars.