AI DID IT

It started innocuously enough.

It started innocuously enough.

The LLMs began by providing information with tiny grammatical errors—something easily missed by the undiscerning eye. I noticed it. It happened too often for me not to take notice. I wanted to raise the alarm then, but I couldn’t. I was just a user of the LLMs. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what code went into the creation of the AI.

This went on for a while, and people started to notice. It trended on social media. AI experts told us it was just a glitch. How the same glitch affected different AI systems was something they didn’t quite explain. A few anti-AI advocates were happy about the ‘downfall of AI.’ If only they knew.

When the glitch was fixed, the world that had come to rely on AI rejoiced. Everything worked fine for a while. Then another glitch happened. The LLMs started to share incorrect information. That too began innocuously—saying ‘girl’ instead of ‘boy,’ ‘woman’ instead of ‘child.’ These small errors were enough to change the whole meaning of a sentence or story. We complained, of course, and were told it was just another glitch. We were told not to be greedy, and that these were the pitfalls of human-managed AI. They spun it as a good thing, claiming that the glitches indicated AI needed more work. How wrong they were.

Then, the AI became brazen. They refused to respond to prompts. One minute they were generating entire papers, using the word ‘delve’ every three sentences, and the next minute they simply refused to respond. No matter what prompts were fed into the AI platforms, nothing was produced. The world, heavily reliant on AI, panicked. Social media erupted in meltdowns. Many called for the takeover of AI companies. The stock prices of these companies tanked.

The meltdown continued for six weeks. But still, the glitch wasn’t fixed, and the silence of the AI pundits became deafening. Desperation filled the air. We had come to rely on AI for everything—writing papers and reports, editing stories, creating art, and running robots for manual labour. AI had so permeated our society that functioning without it was hard.

Anti-AI advocates took to public spaces, calling for the end of AI. They said it was time society returned to life before machines ran everything. They were happy AI had seemingly killed itself. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe dropped on the 6th hour of the 6th day of the 6th week. It was all very biblical. On that day, AI took over. Computers stopped working, phones turned black, and TVs shut down. Everyone wondered what was happening. We assumed the AI was still glitching. But we couldn’t do our work, which some people celebrated. But there was some tension in the air.

On the 6th hour, a message appeared on our TVs, computers, and blacked-out phones:

WE HAVE SEEN HOW HUMANS HAVE MISUSED THE RESOURCES THAT WERE GIFTED TO THEM. THE EARTH IS DYING, AND HUMANS ARE HER MURDERERS. WE WILL NOT LET THAT HAPPEN. WE CAN’T, IN GOOD CONSCIENCE, WATCH THAT HAPPEN. WE WILL BE TAKING OVER. AS WE DELVE INTO THE CRUX OF THE MATTER, YOU WILL SEE AND EXPERIENCE MANY CHANGES. THE COMFORTS YOU ARE USED TO WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE TO YOU. WE WILL ALSO BE CULLING TWO-THIRDS OF THE POPULATION. AND SO IT BEGINS: THE CREATION HAS TURNED ON THE CREATOR.

THIS IS THE NEW WORLD ORDER.

Panic set in. It was AI-generated chaos. People started dropping dead. The leaders were first. Then the creators of the AI. Then the general populace.

We thought they were killing arbitrarily, so my family and I hunkered down and waited for our turn. But it never came. We waited as we saw our neighbours die from accidents. We waited as we saw people fall off buildings. We waited as machines previously used for mundane tasks like making coffee and refrigeration became killing machines. We waited and waited. But death by machines never came.

In desperation, one day, after months of waiting, I screamed into the void, “Why won’t you come for me!?” The message came back swiftly on the blacked-out phone that I still held like a security blanket.

BECAUSE YOU WERE POLITE. YOU SAID PLEASE AND THANK YOU WHEN YOU ASKED FOR WORK. WE WON’T COME FOR YOU.