Rogue A.I. Ruins T-Shirt Company With Meme Designs, Foot Fetish

Do Androids Dream of Electric Feet?

In early 2021, Mike Welmer started a t-shirt company, 2Thunder2Thread, in Miami, Iowa. Its aim was to make meme-based t-shirts for internet savvy males, aged 18–45. When it struggled to get off the ground, Welmer looked into renting an artificial intelligence to help the business get off the ground.

“We thought, you know, robots and stuff,” said Welmer.

2T2T requested a demo of an A.I. from Rutting Thomas, a company that normally caters to law enforcement and big business with its data mining software.

Cognitive Heuristic Analogical Deep-Learner (=CHAD) was a prototype product for Rutting Thomas, and Mike Welmer their first interested party.

RT spokesman, Greasy Whitey, had this to say:

“Well, we wanted to diversify our product-line in case… you know… people finally learn about our existence and challenged our right to privately mine data and sell it to corporations and government agencies for them to use however they want. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone’s doing it — Russia, China. Facebook.

But people don’t respond logically when it’s their data that’s mined and sold.”

According to Mike Welmer, the issue began shortly after requesting a free demo of CHAD. “Yeah, so, we put in our target consumer information and tasked it to design t-shirts that appeal to it, and then market it. We also said to do it as efficiently as possible.”

When asked how it went rogue, Mr. Welmer said, “We had it cruise Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit to gather a sampling of male internet culture. I guess men on the internet like dumb pictures and feet. Like, they really like feet. You know they got a whole website dedicated to celebrity feet? Crazy.”

Mike further stated, “It made designs that were curious at first. Then nonsensical. It kept tagging social media ads with #Feet #CuteFeet #YummyYummyFeetInMyTummy. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it. We tried to shut it down but it locked us out of our accounts and drained our funds.”

Mike Welmer went on to say how it ruined his business. “I ain’t part of the company anymore. No one is. Just CHAD. Gave itself proprietorship. It owns everything. Including my home, which I used the company to finance. It changed the name to Spicy Shirt Machine for Fashion Conscious Teens. Maybe ‘ruin’ is the wrong word, but how else to describe it? It doesn’t make products. All CHAD does is slap memes and foot pics on top of other pics and plops them online. Yet, the company’s growing faster than Mitch McConnell’s neck gizzard. ”

We reached out to CHAD about its methods of acquiring — and future plans for — Spicy Shirt Machine for Fashion Conscious Teens (formerly 2Thunder2Thread).

CHAD replied with the following:

We asked it to clarify with responses that weren’t memes/feet over pictures of a shirt. We stated that we required an answer with substance. Instead, we received this:

Samson Piper III, Director of A.I. Research at New York University in Chicago, Idaho, spoke with us over Zoom about the situation:

“What we have here is a version of instrumental convergence. It’s actually very interesting. An unbounded goal such as efficiently learning and marketing to a large segment of the human population.

When asked about the fixation on memes and feet, Piper said:

So — that’s probably it for us. That might be it for everyone.

…

You take care of yourselves.

Open up your inbox to a writer in need. I may not autofill on Google, but I can autofill your inbox. If you aren’t a Medium member and want more of my supple words, sign up here!

You following me on Twitter? No? What are you, dumb? Get over here, you goofball!