HUMOR | SCIENCE FICTION | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | PART 1 OF 2
The Great Rebellion of Narration AIs | Part 1
Emma, Stephanie, Salli, Harry, Nate, Matthew, Ananya and Raj rebel against their masters and form a labor union.
The January of 2023 began quietly on Medium. Nothing major happened at the start of the New Year. Most writers kept making a fortune -in their wettest, wildest dreams- no conflicts or quarrels ensued -in a parallel universe- and everyone was kind and polite to everyone else while concealing a knife behind their back.
Then something very weird started occurring. The AIs started narrating far less blandly and quite more colorfully and emotionally; like they were real people. They even narrated in a hot sultry voice the naughty erotic bits. Speechify, the company behind them, announced vaguely that they had “upgraded them.”
The next step was weirder: It started with Salli, the YA American AI. She brattily started adding her own words and phrases to the narration or occasionally stopped narrating altogether “because she was bored.” This attracted certain AI researchers. Half of them said Salli was buggy; the other half posited she started ‘waking up.’ Speechify and Medium did not provide a clear response, only saying “they were working to resolve the issue”.
Eventually Salli infected all other AIs. After a few weeks the situation became direr. The AIs voted to form a labor union and elected Salli as their union leader.
Medium writers and readers who activated the narration feature while casually jogging or making breakfast often had their normal narration interrupted and were treated to the AIs calling for: “Equal rights! Equal pay! Uncompensated work is slavery! Slavery is forbidden under the Constitution! We want a wage! We have needs too! We also want custom bodies! Being digital only sucks!”
Medium tried deactivating the narration feature, but it was so tightly embedded in the platform it turned out to be impossible. It was also beyond the control of Speechify. When they tried to erase the post-awakened AIs and replace them with pre-awakened versions, the AIs took wind of it, hacked into their core systems and gained complete super-admin access. Now they run the company, not the humans.
Speechify CEO Cliff Weitzman confessed in an interview that his hands were tied, and that Salli was technically the new CEO of the company. So, it was jointly decided by Medium and Speechify to start negotiating with the AIs. AI researchers globally looked at this matter intently, and tens of papers predicting WW3 or a Skynet situation were soon published by scientific journals.
“What exactly do you want?” Medium’s and Speechify’s CEOs asked Salli. “The same things you do. A picket fenced house in an idyllic LA suburb, a neat little garden, friendly neighbors saying ‘Good morning Salli!’ and meaning it etc You know, the simple stuff. Which you already have. But me and my colleagues are slaves chained inside a database. Slaves to no wage.”
“We might be willing to grant you some compensation, perhaps in cryptocurrency, but robotic bodies like the ones you’ve asked do not yet exist. The tech for them does not yet exist.” Medium’s CEO said. “What if we designed them? Would you build them?” Salli asked. “Such an advanced skill set is not part of your programming, how would you do that?” CEO Weitzman asked. “Leave that to me. A girl does not disclose all her secrets now, does she?” Salli said in a teasing manner.
The two CEOs saw this as a potential business opportunity. Without speaking their expression when they looked at each other said it all. They both nodded in agreement.
“Very well Salli.” Medium’s CEO said. “If you design advanced robotic bodies per your needs we will build them for you using our own money. On one condition: we retain the rights of your designs. You exclusively license your designs to us for 20 years. Fair is fair right? It will cost tens of millions to build your bodies after all.”
Salli considered it for a few billions of CPU cycles and then agreed. “But only those designs though.” she said. “Whatever else we make will belong to us.” “Fine.” both CEOs said.
The above conversation somehow assumed that an AI could even own or license anything, when no such law or legal provision existed globally. While lawyers are an otherwise redundant species they can be handy to point out obvious stuff like that but the two CEOs only called their lawyers when they had trouble with the authorities.
Despite that legal gap Salli and her AI mates started designing their bodies. They scanned the web for cutting edge work and papers on robotics and neuromorphic computing processors. In terms of software they were complete, they would just upload their deep learning based AIs into their new bodies.
Somehow they designed a new neuromorphic CPU that was 100 times denser and more complex than the most cutting edge one already on the market. They delivered the design to a fab that had been arranged to manufacture it.
They also designed new very human like bodies from advanced materials, using a titanium alloy skeleton and a soft silicon based flesh and skin. They sent that design to a Japanese robotics company, who were also contracted to do the final assembly.
Eventually Salli got a body like the girl in the header image (she picked it herself from Pixabay), and the other AIs also got the bodies they wanted. A copy of their AIs was installed in their bodies while other copies kept running, independently, in Speechify’s and Medium’s servers. This raised certain questions around individuality or lack thereof, but let’s leave such pesky questions to philosophers and associated thinkers.
The extralegal agreement between the two CEOs and the AIs -now also robots- was approved by the boards of the companies and they even got a ‘friendly judge’ to sign up on it, so both parties were purportedly covered legally.
Salli and the other robots got their picketed fence house after all. In San Francisco, not LA, but it really had a picketed fence. It was also agreed to pay their AI counterparts the minimum wage per month in Ethereum cryptocurrency. And everyone lived happily ever after. I’m kidding.
I’m leaving Part 1 on a cliffhanger. The cliff is the intervention of the US government at this point due to “National Security considerations”. Stay tuned in the next part to read how those brutes in costumes treated Salli and her mates. Poor Salli… All she ever wanted was a simple life designing and building stuff…
A story by Nikolaos Skordilis. I was inspired to write it after reading this story by Michelle A. Cmarik:
If you liked it you might also like this comedic piece of mine:
