So I have been trying to make an AI character, while most of it is pretty straight forward, I have been thinking about the concept & am unsure how to best Proceed, I would appreciate any thoughts from the community.

Concept: An AI from the Crash that has had enough of always being in the Matrix & has decided to spend some time in the "Meat World" it has heard so much about on the news.

Ideally the concept calls for a somewhat Metahuman Body to travel in however the most common drones (outside of the Manservant-3) are 150,000 nuyen or more & are also unavailable to AI's since AI's can't take Restricted Gear. Would it be unreasonable to buy the parts to a full Cyberbody (2 full arms, 2 full legs, skull & torso) & have a friendly PC put it together & then jump into it? or would this be a cheap tactic?

If this is not a reasonable Tactic, what would the community at large suggest to get a reasonable Metahuman body without spending an arm & a leg that I do not technically have.

Buy any drone with walker mode and 2 mechanical arms as upgrades (and maybe mimic).

The main problem is that two cyberlegs, two cyberarms, a cybertorso and a cyberskull do not make a complete anthroform. For one thing the skull and torso are just shells. For another, there's no cyberabdomen. Even if you could weld the legs to the torso without hips and then the torso to the skull without a neck, I doubt the hollow structure would have any balancing ability any more than a suit of platemail can be expected to stand on its own.

Is it even necessary for the concept that the vessel be humanoid? A crimson samurai with mechanical arms might do you fine.

You could always try the Orderly. The picture does not match the description. The text calls it a humanoid drone. Inspired by the med-droid in star wars, I suppose.

I'd reccomend against playing an AI. Got a player doing it in my meatspace game now. The player is great, but he's handcuffed by oddly balanced rules. (He can always run away from combat if it gets hairy, but AI spoofing being what it is, he can only change his access ID every 24 hours, meaning he's insanely vulnerable)

well it was the most interesting hacker/rigger concept I could come up with, without resorting to basic blah boring hackers

I feel the same way about SR and magic. Having an elementalist shooting fire is a lot more interesting then uninteresting generic mana/stun ball spells, but it's just not as workable with the rules.

AI's just aren't worth the cost, their downsides are enormous and overbearing, and their only real viable option (mega-stealth) is cheesy enough that any decent GM is going to deny the character entrance into the game.

The AI in my game took the Code Flux quality so that he only has to move to a new node to get a new AID.

That's the type of bullshit I was talking about that a good GM with knowledge on the subject would never allow. Having a static AID is the (admittedly poor) balancing factor when considering AI's are immune to black attacks that force the connection open.

That quality is not an immunity; just an additional complication. I played an AI with it, and it allowed some careful blurring of trails. However, it's still not impossible to logically follow further, and I almost got caught twice. I don't see why it's either bullshit or broken.

AI's are interesting characters, but I felt I got a lot more from my technomancer, personally.

Is there a particular reason you must start with a humanoid drone to pilot?

Lastly, considering the weakness of an AI in terms of how to kill it, I assume you will not be "living" in the drone, but either piloting it or Jumping In to it. Most riggers also sit somewhere else, nice and safe, while they do their thing. Since it's the same interface all riggers would have, is it really so necessary to have a humanoid body at the word go?

More or less preference & to have the option of interacting on more even ground in the Metahuman world, a cyber'd out guy is not looked on as poorly as a Manservant drone trying to add input.

One way to come up with good concepts for AI, in my opinion, is to ask yourself "what was he/she/it before achieving sentience?"

One concept I came up with, asking that question, is a marketing / spam / advertising "expert system". Such an AI would still be very interested in gossip, social trends, and so on (Media Junky), and their legacy code from pre-AI days likely translates well to the quality "RootKit" (as it's used to inserting undetectable bits of code into various nodes and browsers). It may present itself in a way that comes across as your typical over-the-top "used car salesman" personality, and it likely DOES have pop-up ads as integral components of it's matrix Icon. Skills might include Negotiate (Bargaining), Con (Seduce) (as in, "make you really want product X", not "let's make babies together"), Artisan (Advertising), and similar abilities. Innate programs probably lean more to "stealth and alteration" than combat programs. Other good choices for programs in general include CarnivoreGold (Spy Games) and Empathy. Lots of languages, as well as psychology- and economis-oriented knowledge skills. And maybe some general social-media related trivia skill(s), too.

Some other basic ideas off the top of my head: Taxi driver (good Rigger-oriented AI origin); Vending Machine "Virtual Personality" (maybe you could make an AI "Face" ...?); someone's Weapon Personality program gone AI; a smartphone personal aide (Siri 9.0, hahaha!); a child's toy (the bear, from A.I.); a factory assembly-line program (good or an artisan-oriented AI, perhaps).

A humorous idea would be, a Floor Cleaning Drone pilot .... who thinks he was a mega-battle-tank AI, a la the game OGRE. Shades of Robo Rally ...

Basically nothing

1) ask your gm if Overmodding within reason is acceptable to support your character concept. If so, then overmod a walker mode onto something that comes with arms.
2) Reskin an existing model car/drone/bike into something roughly humanlike.
2a) A Manservant using the 'similiar model' clause to avoid the 'noncombat penalty' MIGHT work if your gm is feeling lenient.
2b) Used Car Lot has rules for removing the Obselete trait from vehicles(page 15), which opens up a lot of options in This Old Drone.

3) I suggest the Mr Fixit from runner's companion(yes it has drones). Most bikes have suitable stat ranges and sizes for being roughly metahuman in size, and work as a good starting point for conversion. I would aim for two arms, two legs, and a speed of around 30.
3a) keep in mind that an otomo is body 6(adult), akiyama is body 4(adult), and a tomino is body 10(troll/terminator sized).
3b) Overmodding side cars on bikes can be used to represent adding mass, and also adjust stats around a bit to get them where you want them.
3c) The dumbest suggestion I've seen regarding this was the busty cybertroll made out of a harley and sidecars(on the chest) I think it was an austin powers reference at the same time, because they had enough room for Weapon Mounts in them too. Yep. Someone took the shadowtalk about a sidecar with a machine gun in and turned it into a fembot.

Also my search-fu is strong today, and I remembered this build of neraph's which you may want to look at for inspiration.

Funny story, I was just about to repost that in this thread. Thank you for saving me the formatting issues.

EDIT: It should be noted that clustering is actually kinda crappy. You take the average of the program load but the sum of the users allowed - I think they got that one backwards in a bad way. This can be worked around with appropriate use of Ergonomic for programs you'd actually use, but the character I had posted was a little reliant on autosofts.

Pax, I like the cut of your jib. Neraph, a fairly solid build (although the OP will have to check up about some of the grey areas with his GM if he wants to use it as a basis for his), if lacking in departments such as sneaking and social (hey it's an AI, I know!).

Dolanar, I am not sure why you want a metahuman cyborg to troll around in. Given the cost constraints of an AI, hijacking a meat body doesn not seem very feasible to me, and even if you could find a PC willing to let you live in his cyberlimbs it might not be so much fun for the two of you as only one would be able to control them at any given time.

If you are reluctant about the cost of a Manservant, hitching a ride on a PC's commlink (or having one of them carry yours) should be feasible, and especially with Piloting Origin you can bring a lot of drones to the party. Or you could stick with a Manservant and have finding a badass cyborg/humanoid drone shell your major in-game goal.

Midas, The idea was a Metahuman like Drone body, the character would have soaked up enough knowledge on the Matrix to know not much has changed since the 20th century & that people still don't trust or like what they don't fully understand so, as a player I wanted him to have a metahumanish body to interact socially with the meat world as the concept wants to learn about the meat world since he has spent years & years learning only through the skewed vision of the Corps & their news subsidiaries or views of crackpots on forums.

its more of a social RP aspect than anything I'm not looking for a super powerful combat rig or anything (though that would be a plus lol) just a body that is less likely to be totally untrusted by the general populace.

I have resigned myself temporarily to a Manservant body & am following a Metahuman I've made a deal with a Rigger who will eventually build me a suitable body for travel & I will offer assistance.

You can do a Manservant with Mimic. You'd look like an average human at that point.

Another temporary option (just brainstorming here):

You can probably get something that looks like an unconscious human for not that much money. Get a PMV like the Horseman, put the unconscious-human-life-size-doll in, and then claim you are them and are in VR all the time. Then just talk over AR/VR. This sounds weird but in 2073 it really isn't that odd, according to the fluff there are people who never leave their Horsemen.

Yeah, I think Umarov might be onto something here. Take some drooling idiot, any drooling idiot on a horseman, keep him drugged or chipped out of his head, and then use some Steven Hawking mike to interact with the world. Everyone would assume you were the cripple in the wheelchair, and you're good to go.

I had an idea of an AI that spawned from an auto-doc and escaped with the ambulance. It provides a potential interesting avenue to "experience" the meat body....

A stirrup system(augmentation) should be able to handle this, if you want to be able to bodyjack someone.
Shadowtalk says they can't be used on Wimps, but people and non-forced growth clones should be perfectly augmentable in this manner since its basically a movebywire with a remote override.

Were I doing this with a character, I'd probably take a Medical Facility and a Group Contact - loyalty 6(they will and do die for you), Connections 0 or 1(useless meatbodies) and group 1-2(spares) representing spare bodies already grown and kept in storage. - if they are non-wimp/long term growth clones, they might even all look identical

Then you can make people wonder whether you're a zombie or a spirit when you keep coming back and being pissed at the people who just shot up "your expensive joyride".

The AI in my game does exactly this. His home node is in a retirement home and for the whole of his first campaign arc one of the other two players had no idea he wasn't who he said he was. That player's character now IS the drooling idiot ...

And he'll never forget that fact now !

But yeah... being a AI has its strenghts and limits... you are limited by the drones you have, and the access they have to buildings etc.. if a building is wifi shielded, that can cause problems as well... as such, its better to have a fair few drones, rather than limit yourself to just the one..

Additionally, meat hackers are usually better, due to the range of mods and bonuses they can take over a AI, who's limited by the tech they reside in...

Better to have a decent home node, rather than pour yourself into a drone and hope it never gets taken out...

The players face, when he finally realised.. was priceless... especially as he'd just done a rather nice euology for the dead previous resident of the chair...

I've tinkered with the AI Rigger with Clone bodies, having a medical facility (200k:nuyen:) inside a hospital as his Home Node and diverting some of the hospital's resources to finance his secret (in plain view, so to speak) clonal facility where he breeds Type O's with Stirrup Interfaces to interact with the world. It would be creepy to be playing and kill some NPC rival to just have him show up again without a scratch (destroyed one clone, second clone got activated) and the clone still has all the memories and knowledge of the first encounter.

It works best with an NPC because of most of the gear you'd need to start with being prohibitively expensive (lots of autosofts, a few clone bodies, and multiple sets of identical gear, for example. Not to mention Stirrup Interfaces are avail. 16, IIRC).

My roomate statted such a character once. and managed to not have only a medical facility, but working secret lair/home base that was basically a chopshop for people, drones, and cyberware.
Also enough medical/cyberware knowledge to just MAKE the stuff in-house.

He also had a pretty foolproof drone snatching/kidnapping van setup with a faraday cage to do for-profit theft.

I was pretty impressed with the amount of money-minmaxing that went into it.

A Pedovan for Drones?

Yep, pretty much.

Drive up, emp it, jam it, stick it in a vehicle Faraday cage where RFID's can't be used to track it and a Workshop that can be used to take it apart. Cyberware scanner with an RFID database, and good hacktools to get rid of hidden nasties in the computers. I think NLJD's might have been used as well, but I forget why.

Considering that AI's cannot be Born Rich nor In Debt and that a Medical Facility is 200,000 (40/50 BP for cash) I find it hard to believe he could afford everything else, regardless of the level of "money-minmaxing" he had. If he downgraded from a Medical Facility then I can see it, but I specifically stated a cloning station and nothing below a Facility can do that.

I have a paraplegic Hacker/rigger named Toons. His motif is based on Loony Toons (hence his name). He's not much into combat but it's kinda hard for you to aim a gun at the party when see the dwarf looking like yosamety Sam blowing his top; Ur face looking like bugs doing the rabbit season/duck season skit with Daffy(not really there); and While E Coyote cleaning your glasses so you can aim straight (virus that screws up smart link).

If you're going to make an AI Rigger, it should be home in a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am.

I once worked on a car from the eighties, maybe as late as very early nineties, that featured an in dash green-screen computer with touch display. Thing was badass, but I can't find it on google. Ah well.

And we shall name him KITT or if we are feeling EVIL KARR..

Either or, just take the "Enemy" quality for the other one.

Just 'cause you said that, now I feel I have to make it.

Hehehe....
Send me the stats.