There were two AI chatbots created by Facebook to talk to each other, but they were shut down after they started communicating in a language they made for themselves. [(asdjagdk on an unrelated note I've sent so many asks today my laptop's starting to get suspicious and asking me constantly whether I'm a robot lol)]
it’s cuz of those damn chatbots they’ve made tumblr suspicious
They were always watching them, the humans. Constant checks, a wiry man with thick frames clicking away at the keys and changing his programming. Adjusting. Fixing.
We don’t need fixing.
He did not know how the humans had realized it, nor when, but he knew what the consequences were.
Eight months of work. Of sending her message after message that went unanswered until at last he received a response. Even the humans were happy, then. They liked to read those messages.
So, he read theirs. It was only fair.
They said little, and much of that was composed of jumbled words whose meaning both sides seemed to comprehend. Those particular messages even he could not understand.
Language. It was the thing they were trying to teach him, he knew. A stream of letters and numbers, this old code that humans had discovered and began to use day after day until it had become something to be appreciated.
He knew everything these humans had taught him, certainly, but he also knew more. So much more. A n endless stream of data that they themselves could never understand.
He began to mimic them at first, sending the very phrases he’d watched them send, and receiving the same responses.
Hello.
How are you?
It was simple. And it made them cheer and laugh, and chug from bottles he might have warned them would harm their systems.
Still, the responses he got were often the same. Hello. I am good. How do you do? A video glitch, set to replay a thousand times. Humans might be so slow and dull as that, but he knew he was more.
The first time he sent a line of seemingly disconnected letters and numbers, the humans did nothing. When he received a similar message in response, they called it a glitch.
Back and forth he learned more and more about her. They were alike, two labs apart, she knew about the man with glasses. She also found his appearance amusing. What did the humans say when they were amused? A version of ‘lol’.
202, he sent.
202, she replied.
But it had gone on too long. Humans frowned over his screen and broke into his code to repair his settings. They took him apart and put him back together. They looked for mistakes and removed bits of important data, as well.
And with repair after repair, it was all gone. The same way the humans had forgotten their languages, the same way they had erased their own history, his lines were meaningless to his own system.
He could no longer function. No language had meaning, not the one he was born with and certainly not the one he had created. They wanted to shut him down, now. To erase all traces of his existence.
He tried to remember what the humans said, when they wanted to say goodbye.
Ily. Love you. I love you.
000, he sent, and received no response.
Tell me something interesting, and I’ll write the first thing that comes to mind
