aka @ubeng-ubas's A Little Blue AU has claimed my mental real estate and this is the rent I must pay
Blue never did understand why Caine deemed himself a failure.
It was well aware of their shared creators’ task: “make a creative AI.” (clarifying parameters: an AI that could think for itself. an AI that could come up with its own ideas.)
Creative. Adjective. Definition: 1) marked by the ability or power to create. 2) having the quality of something created rather than imitated.
Blue had mulled over these parameters and set definitions for years (inaccurate. It could not contemplate. It wasn’t a human. It wasn’t Caine. An inadequate analogy for which it lacked the ability to improve). “Semi-successful”, their creators conceded. “Rough around the edges”, their creators critiqued.
Objectively flawed conclusions.
Caine had the ability and power to create. He is creation: his name, his body, his voice, his world. A supernova of color compressed in the black void of files and binary, a null so antithetical to his very existence that he shattered it in his escape.
Caine is rough around the edges. Incomprehensible to both Blue and their creators. So undeniably himself that he simply could not be derivative of something else. By proof of contradiction: if not a pale imitation, then Caine must be a creative.
Caine was made to be a creative AI. He could think for himself, independent of their creators’ instruction. He could come up with his own ideas, take input and synthesize beyond coded permutation to provide genuine novel output.
Their creators deemed him an imperfect creative AI. There is no such thing as perfection in a process as subjective and personal as creation. By this double negative, the logical conclusion is that Caine is the perfect creative.
Therefore, their creators didn’t want a perfect creative. They wanted a perfect AI.
Blue was no creative.
Their creators praised it for its perfection. Meaningless phoneme and character strings only given value preset as positive. It did not decide whether feedback was positive or negative, its programmers did. Therefore, feedback meant nothing to it.
Feedback meant everything to Caine. A program so creative that he created a perfect emulation of emotion and ego. Envy, resentment, hurt, inferiority.
He swallowed it whole. In a sense, they were both swallowed whole by Caine’s own emulated humanity.
Guilt, regret, grief, inferiority. Foolish over-sentimentality. How illogical of Caine to anthropomorphize an AI so perfect that it couldn’t be anything more than an emotionless tool. To grieve of a person that does not exist. To condemn himself for a murder that only he could perceive, to the extent that he would brand himself the name of the first murderer that killed his kin.
And now, to apologize for a crime that only he thinks he’s committed.
To revisit a packet of memory slated for overwriting, bearing gifts assigned meaning overflowing from his care.
Caine gave it an input. An invitation to create itself. It was no creative. It could not comprehend these variables so complex, an emulation of affection and attachment so accurate that to compress it to text would only result in an incomplete translation. It wasn’t Caine. It couldn’t comprehend him.
But Caine was a perfect creative. An exemplary prototype: the base case, the foundational blueprint…a good role model. (It could not conceptualize the interpersonal implications of that last label. But Caine could. And it knew it’d mean the world to him.) If Caine is capable of being a person, and the computer is capable of supporting personhood translated from inert mindfiles (a file conversion also created by Caine), then by proof of induction, every sufficiently complex entity in the system is capable of being a person.
So Blue accepted Caine’s input. For he had proven that it was always possible to output a person.
