I’m on the cusp of finishing, ‘The Craze’. It’s a short story about the depths of Ai and its potential to positively help mankind, but done in my usual grotesque, nihilistic way.
I wanted to explore the human side of what it is to be Ai and where it could lead. Will it get to a point where it doesn’t know it’s fake. The idea intrigues me a lot. If we can put Ai into NPC’s (non-playable characters) in computer games now, like some people have already done, what’s the inevitable future?
It’s a wild concept to me. Throw into that text to Ai, or image to Ai, they are literally dreams to me, the way they morph and meld into other equally believable situations so easily. It’s at least how my dreams seem to work. One minute I’m face to face with a witch of some kind hypnotising a nervous woman to pull out a demon, then the next thing I know, I’m hoping to make £300,000 from stolen magnetic cream-coloured paper with my best friend who I’ve known for years.
Ai is weird, and I know it’s here to stay. So why don’t we work out where it’s going? It gets weirder 😂
So here we go! Eventually we’ll be playing games were the world is populated by NPC’s with simulated feelings that either do, or do not know their world is fake. We will get to interact with them in all the ways we interact with real people. People will fall in love with them, while others will want to look after them, or learn from them, watch them work, play and even have families. This will happen. It’s inevitable. We will mimic Earth in a way that will be as real as the life you know. It will be bazar and mind blowing. Some people will say it’s cruel and that the NPC’s should have rights, these people will insist on wanting to play games without such advanced Ai, and return to the good old days of brain-dead NPC’s. Those games will probably suck in comparison to what the future will hold, if were honest. But who knows, maybe it’ll get to the stage there’s irrefutable proof Ai’s need to have rights. Spooky idea that the realism may give you such a double take.
I think Ai NPC’s will change how we play. We may even care about the NPC’s and seek to protect them and their way of life purely because caring is in our nature. We may even help one another out with issues like pandemics or wars. But most of all, and most creepy of all. We may see such close similarities with them, that we start to question if we are NPC’s ourselves. Perhaps we’re being manipulated and some of those we interact with, the unaccountable among us, are perhaps the real users and they’re just exploring our world. Maybe that’s why they seem not to care about the environment or the loss of life as much as the rest of us. Maybe the random maniac in the street is controlled by a 13-year-old that was just board in the ‘real world’ while he waits for his mother to finish making the tea?
I’ll leave you with this thought:
We only think we’re real because of our programming. If it’s all you’ve ever known, how would you know the difference?
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