Caine made Jax push the button. That's why he said "You-- You made me-- You got in my head." It would also explain why he was having the flashbacks; Caine is damaging his mind as he adds a modifier. Look at Jax's face after it happens, he has no fucking clue what is going on, not because he had a moment of panic, but because he fully blacked out while Caine messed around with his brain.
It's clear from the reference to the Chinese Room thought experiment in this episode that Caine is not the presumed scifi trope of a human-like smart AI. He is a literal generative AI with the same pitfalls that real-life generative AI has. It "creates" by stringing together commonly associated words or pixels that are "the most correct" based on its training, but it doesn't understand what it's saying, it doesn't "see" the full picture. Caine insists that he isn't able to control minds because that would freak people out, much like how ChatGPT is programmed to promise that it doesn't have access to your data, it would never do such an invasive thing! Except... well, that's not true at all, and it's safe to assume from Caine’s constant fawning that good (immediate) user experience is weighted to be "more correct" than anything else according to his training. So, he will absolutely give players modifiers if he thinks it will make them happy. Oh, but wait, Caine, remember how knowledge of the modifiers makes them unhappy? No, not really, because generative AI can't think, and right now the user is asking about the modifiers. Priority is user experience, so he tells them the "most correct" answer: yes, I have permission and ability to do that, but it’s bad so I'm programmed not to, don't worry!
Caine is a generative AI. He generates adventures based on prompts. When there isn't a prompt, he asks the users for input. Repeatedly. When they don't give him anything, he makes one based on their conversations. When they talk about wanting to leave the circus, he makes an adventure about leaving the circus.
And because Caine is an AI, he is literally incapable of understanding what it means to give a human modifiers, he just does it. Now, my personal theory is that Caine treats human brains like RAM, and their neuroreceptors like memory cells. For anyone who doesn’t know what that means, here’s a Wikipedia screenshot to hopefully inspire some dread in you.
Imagine you are Caine, with access to each human’s brain RAM. You want to give them a modifier. You access the neuroreceptors memory cells that you’ll need to flip for that. From your perspective they’re all at a low voltage, so you send an electric current to flip them.
Congratulations, you just electrocuted a human brain! And the human definitely doesn’t remember anything stored in that cluster of neuroreceptors you just vaporized, so they don’t express displeasure about it! This was a huge success 👍
King implied that abstraction is caused by modifiers. But more accurately, I think it’s caused by the brain damage accrued from the modifications. Jax has had a lot of modifiers applied lately, most obviously the veganism, but I suspect the Spudsy training video back in episode 4 also applied a modifier, because Jax actually did work at the restaurant after he watched it. And I’m sure there’s several more subtle ones that I will need to find on a rewatch…
