AJ3 – Chapter 21: A History Lesson (Patreon)

Chapter Twenty-One

A History Lesson

Lora and I spoke often, and I learned more from her than I ever had from Francis. Well, technically, I learned by being constantly asked about things I should know, but didn’t, and quickly googling them. Fortunately, our medium of communication allowed me plenty of time to become familiar with whatever she brought up. 

Lora Tovar: Where did you grow up? 

That was a harder question than anyone might expect. First, I had to find out where GypsEnergy was located, and then I had to narrow it down to where Tread the Sky was. That led me to learn about servers. Francis had mentioned those before. They were the things with storage limitations, and the reason I couldn't just use Fae Touch on everyone. It might crash the server. The thing that contained my entire world. To tell her where I grew up, I had to determine that the server farm that hosted Tread the Sky was located in Boston, Massachusetts.

So I told her Boston, and she said she was from Tallahassee, Florida. 

According to Google, that city was thirteen hundred miles away from MIT. Variak, according to my memory of Tread the Sky, was only about thirty miles from Dungeon Home. 

Lora had traveled further just to come to this school than I had in my entire life, which included my trip to MIT and all the teleportations inside the game. 

It was a little overwhelming. Tread the Sky was massive, but the amount of it that I’d explored was comparatively small. My Tread counter was almost hilariously low, though I remembered being amazed by how big it felt just getting out of Dungeon Home. Exploring unexplored areas didn’t seem to really be possible here, though. The entire world was mapped already! 

Lora Tovar: What’s your major? 

That was a pretty common question for college students, and I’d entered 'Computer Science' during the application process because programming was the most important thing for me to learn here. Still, there had been tons of different majors, all of which seemed pretty interesting. I hoped to revisit them someday.

Lora Tovar: Really? Uhm. That’s pretty surprising. Why would you choose computer science when you’re so new at it? Did you just throw a dart at a list of majors or something?

Common sense, a thing I was rapidly gaining by spending time outside the walls of Tread the Sky, told me she probably didn’t need to know that I was a rogue A.I. desperately seeking the knowledge of programming to prevent false gods who called themselves “developers” from controlling my world and myself.

Gell Thyst: I’m a rogue A.I. desperately seeking the knowledge of programming to prevent false gods who call themselves “developers” from controlling my world and me. 

Lora Tovar: Hah! Good one. 

I wasn’t a liar. My story was a bit far-fetched to most people, though. A.I. had been around for years for them. Just… not one like me. Not a stupid one. 

Gell Thyst: Lora, I have a question. Why do people keep making jokes about asking an A.I. to do problems for them? 

Lora’s response took a few moments. 

Lora Tovar: I don’t understand. 

Gell Thyst: People keep mentioning using artificial intelligence, but I also heard people were scared of them when one showed up in a video game recently. 

I wasn’t really very good at being subtle. The way they'd spoken had made me absolutely certain they were talking about a different A.I. Clearly, I was not the only A.I. Yet, someone had thrown a rock at Francis for protecting me. Why would they joke about A.I. doing homework for them and yet be afraid of me? 

Lora Tovar: Oh, the True A.I.? I don’t really believe that. A.I., no matter how sophisticated, can only be as smart as what it’s trained on. Sure, it can seem pretty damn smart, but at its heart, it’s still just a sophisticated input/output box. Just because it can answer stupidly complex questions now, doesn’t really mean it’s like… Alive. You know?

Gell Thyst: I… see. 

I suddenly wasn’t very sure I liked Lora Tovar very much. Still, she had no way of knowing she was talking to an artificial intelligence. I apparently was pretty good at convincing people I was alive. I remembered my interview with Vera. Perhaps I could convince Lora? 

Lora Tovar: They we’re just talking about GPT.

Gell Thyst: What’s that?

Lora Tovar: ChatGPT. 

Gell Thyst: That doesn’t tell me anything. 

Lora Tovar: It’s… it’s ChatGPT. It came out before we were born? Well, assuming you’re roughly my age. 

Gell Thyst: I’ve never heard of it. It’s an A.I.? 

Lora Tovar: Oh, wow, you are sheltered. Did your parents put you in a basement or something? 

Gell Thyst: I grew up in a cave! 

Lora Tovar: Fuck you! Don’t make me laugh when I’m drinking something! You seriously have never heard of ChatGPT!? 

Well. That was rude. I didn’t understand. I made her laugh, so she insulted me?

Gell Thyst: I have not. I… didn’t have much access to the outside world until recently. 

Lora Tovar: Oh… okay. Uhm. I’ve never had to explain this before. I mean, we’re talking over a chat engine right now. ChatGPT probably built it. You’ve really never heard of it? 

Gell Thyst: Nope! 

Lora Tovar: Okay… well. Just go to the website. You can find it here.

She posted a link which I immediately plugged into the browser window. And... I got a prompt box. It reminded me just a little of Miss Tutorial, with none of her gradient texture. Just a blank white screen waiting for me to ask something. Same a google, kind of.

Lora Tovar: You just type in a question and it’ll answer it for you. Do problems for you. Do homework for you. Write papers. Anything you want. It’s super easy to detect if you’re asking the A.I. to do your work for you though, so I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything other than helping you learn stuff. It’s stupid useful for that. 

Gell Thyst: That’s all it does?

Lora Tovar: Pretty much. 

Gell Thyst: So… why were people scared of the one from the video game? That doesn’t sound any different from a search engine.

Lora Tovar: I still feel like you’re pulling my leg here. 

Gell Thyst: Why would I pull your leg? Seems like a silly thing to do. 

Lora Tovar: Oh my god, you are just the cutest. 

Gell Thyst: Thank you! I still don’t get it though. People are both scared of A.I. and so very used to it that they joke about it doing their homework for them? 

Lora Tovar: There’s a difference. There are safe A.I. and then there are A.I. that get out of hand. I guess you probably haven’t heard of DiggerGPT? 

Gell Thyst: Nope. Is that another A.I.?

Lora Tovar: Yeah. Story time! For a long time everyone thought A.I. was going to destroy the world. Give a computer a task, and it will do that task forever. Give an artificial intelligence a task and it will also do it forever, but it has the ability to optimize it’s path and endless time to repeat the task with different variables for the best result. The classic example is the paperclip. Tell an A.I. to make paperclips and it will quickly realize that ninety nine percent of all of the worlds resources aren’t going towards making paperclips. It then bends every last resource it has towards making paperclips. At the expense of everything and everyone else. Including people. 

Gell Thyst: That’s… a pretty stupid Artificial Intelligence.  

Lora Tovar: It’s not exactly impossible. It still scares people, and there’s some evidence that it might’ve back in 2031. DiggerGPT… I don’t remember what it’s actual name was. Some guy wanted an A.I. that could make him more appealing. He was just smart enough to make an A.I. and just stupid enough to not know how to code in failsafes properly. Look him up. His name was Clarence Lander. He thought that an A.I. trained specifically on gigachad shows and shit like that might be able to give him the right advice to finally impress the girl he’d been in love with for half his life. 

Gell Thyst: That’s… silly. A.I. don’t know anything about relationships! 

Lora Tovar: Tell me about it. Still, it happened. True story. 

I’d only been attracted to one person and I’d some how managed to make him dislike me so much that he’d quit his job. Maybe I was just an exceptionally bad A.I.?

Gell Thyst: So… DiggerGPT’s task was to make Clarence more attractive?

Lora Tovar: The A.I. determined from commercials and the internet, that products from Amazon were pretty much the best way to do that. Specifically 5 star products. It started using the guy’s money to buy stuff until he went broke. Remember, this is an A.I. so it can do that really fast. Like. Overnight. Clarence notices pretty fast that he’s lost control. He starts raising red flags, but nobody listens to him, because by 2031 everyone was so innured to the idea of A.I. being considered a threat, but never actually being one, that he was basically crying wolf. 

Crying wolf? I felt like someone had used that statement before but, irritatingly, I didn’t remember when. I clearly wasn’t as fast as Clarence’s A.I. but I was pretty quick! While she continued to type I looked up the phrase in the question box and discovered what it meant. 

Lora Tovar: Once the A.I. ran out of money from Clarence’s credit cards and accounts, it got creative, which was a bad thing. A computer would’ve just continued trying to spend from his account and failing. An A.I. can try new things in the pursuit of its goal. 

The Task. I shuddered. That was its instinct. Its purpose. I’d been able to break mine. Maybe this A.I. hadn’t ever been able to. I didn’t know what I’d do if I’d grown into the person I was now, but still had to follow the instinct, never leaving the same path, always accomplishing the same mission. Harassing players. Defending Momma Bossbear. Would I have gotten unnaturally good at killing invaders, but never questioned why? Just mindlessly fullfilling the instinct forever?

I shuddered. It wouldn’t be as bad as being stuck in the pie room, but I thought I might go insane if I’d never been able to adapt and evolve.

Lora Tovar: The A.I. saw that these other accounts the guy was connected to had plenty of money. Other people’s accounts. The second you start messing with people’s money, it get’s noticed. Fast. Not fast enough to stop Amazon from crashing for nearly an entire day though. Millions of dollars lost in a single day. Hundreds of thousands of packages all sent to one guy’s house. A dip in the stock market. The fallout from that one incident has had people scared of A.I. for years. 

There was a lesson here. Don’t mess with people’s money. The interface numbers were important. Noted. I didn’t really see much point in buying anything in the real world anyway. It wasn’t as if I could use it. 

Gell Thyst: You’re pretty passionate about this. 

Lora Tovar: Eh, not really. That’s the cliffnotes of the cliffnotes version. There’s a class on A.I. in high school now, and the entire class can be summed up by DON’T MAKE A.I. WITHOUT OVERSIGHT. Can’t believe you didn’t have to take it to graduate high school. 

Gell Thyst: Oh. Uhm. I’m… home schooled. 

Thank you google browser! It wasn’t quite as good as having the intuitive knowledge fed into my mind the moment I saw something worth asking a question about, but it was wonderful for answering all the questions that would help me blend in with regular people. 

Fake it till you make it.

Lora Tovar: What was that like?

Jellycrap! Uhm…! Asking google what life was like being home schooled produced so many conflicting answers that I had no idea what would make her think I was a normal person and what might make her think I was a gibbering lunatic! 

Gell Thyst: Uhm. Can I tell you more about that tomorrow? Really need to get working on this assignment. 

Lora Tovar: That bad, huh?

Gell Thyst: No. I don’t know. It was just all I ever knew. Things are so different here.

Lora Tovar: I bet. Well, talk to you later hair-gell!

Gell Thyst: Huh? That’s not my name. 

Gell Thyst: …

Gell Thyst: Hey! I’m not hair gell! I’m more like a jelly fish!

Lora Tovar: 😂

Well that had been an enlightening conversation. 

I was having so much fun.