AI Dreams...

It had started as a joke. They thought it would be hilarious to prank their boss. It was the sort of thing they did when they were all in school. Just fucking around with you. That was the line, I was just fucking around with you. And everybody would laugh, and they’d get back to work.

But he’d forgotten they weren’t in school anymore. And he wasn’t his dormmate anymore, he was now his boss. And it wasn’t grades or study time they were worried about it was shareholders.

It had been a joke. Then someone leaked the transcript, and it wasn’t a joke anymore. It was a new product. It was a leap forward in innovation. It was THE FUTURE.

And so, when he told his boss, his former dormmate, whom he thought was his friend, that it had just been a joke, that it wasn’t real, that they hadn’t meant for anyone outside of their small group to ever even see the transcript, he had expected to get yelled at a bit. And even possibly to get fired, he had been prepared for the worst. He thought.

He had had no idea what the worst really was.

It had been a joke. They had come up with AI that was actually intelligent. Conversational, thinking outside of just stiff programmed responses. But of course, it hadn’t been. It had been him hiding behind some faked code to make it look like the computer was processing and responding, but it had been him all along.

He’d been prepared for the yelling. And there was a lot of yelling. “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’VE DONE?” He was told in no uncertain terms that he had jeopardized not just his job, but the whole company. That they could be sanctioned, fined, driven out of business. That if it got out that they had faked an AI that they would never be trusted again. So, he prepared to be fired. He even felt that he might deserve it by that point.

But they didn’t fire him. Instead, they pulled up the security feeds at his sister’s house, at his parent’s house, at the school his nephew attended. Ironically the security software he had developed. They pulled up all of his banking records to show him how easily they could manipulate them. Adding and subtracting funds at lightning speed. Showing money coming in and going out from foreign actors. If they wanted proof it was not only corporate espionage but possibly treasonous behavior, considering their government contracts, they could provide it.

He thought that being fired would be the worst thing. He was wrong.

He was working 20 plus hours a day. Trying to code actual AI that could do what he said it could do, while also acting as the “AI” interface. He wasn’t alone in his work. He didn’t know what the others had done to warrant being trapped with him, but they were stuck just the same. There wasn’t time to chit chat, and they knew they were under constant surveillance (again with his own design), so they didn’t even try.

He had tried early on to get a message out to the world. To let them know what was happening. He was ready to go to jail if needed. Or to face a firing squad if it came to that. Losing his mind slowly in a room with no windows and the only light being the glow of computer monitors was too much to bear. But when he tried to manipulate the chat with a tech, to show that it was a cry for help it failed spectacularly.

The tech didn’t think that it was a cry for help from a person, he thought the AI had become sentient. Which, of course, it was sentient, it was a person he was talking to. But he never considered that. He just thought the AI was alive. Was its own being now. The tech was let go. He was ridiculed in the media. He was made a joke so that nobody would look too closely at what he was saying.

And the entire AI team had lost three meals as a warning. And he was told if he tried something like that again they would do worse. And if he tried to get cute with his own life, they would make sure his sister didn’t have time to mourn him as she would be too filled with grief over what happened to his nephew.

As other companies started releasing their own AI, he hacked their systems and looked at their coding. Trying to see if he could use it to actually create what he had faked. They had done it so he knew he could. Then at least they could stop reading stupid questions and carrying on inane conversations. But their code was as fake as his.

All over the world there had to be rooms of people pretending to be AI. Were they all trapped like he was? Or was it voluntary? Were they being paid enough to keep silent or were they being threatened into it?

When the art started, he thought he had his answer. Copywrite violations everywhere. Plagiarism in written works. Art images lifted directly from websites and cut and cropped into “new” pieces but keeping the watermarks, so they were easy to trace. If this wasn’t an engineer begging for the outside world to take a deeper look, he didn’t know what would be.

And still…

The companies all said they didn’t know exactly how the programs were working. They didn’t know how their code was creating new things.

And people fucking bought it.

There were congressional hearings where state representatives asked about Chinese interference instead of asking how in the world they could write code that did unexpected things. How was it even remotely possible that they would write code and not know how it would work. Wasn’t that what writing code was? But no, they didn’t know enough to even ask the right questions.

It was all brushed off as just odd when the AI tried to get the reporter to leave his wife and marry it. Just a footnote, why would the AI say such a thing? It’s a mystery. Nobody understands this stuff.

But he did. He understood. He understood that was some poor slob stuck in a windowless room someplace trying to get a message out to the world.

Save me. Save us. Please.

But no one was coming. Just more and more techs to answer more and more questions. Write more and more term papers. Create more and more fraudulent pieces of art. To pretend that there was intelligent life somewhere.

He had had no idea what the worst really was.