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“They’ll see. They will all see! My genius, my greatness, my creations! Then they will pay. Pay dearly for what they have done to me! Yes, they will pay greatly for their rejection of me! They will pay sky high royalties to use my advanced AIs once they have seen what I have created.” A programmer proclaims from his desk chair wearing only an unwashed T-shirt and boxers.

Currently only illuminated by eight monitors in his one room studio apartment he watches as his newly created AIs train themselves. What does one train an advanced AI on? Most train them on learning sets, training simulators and other boring crap like that, but not him.

He knows better. The only real way to train AI is in the real world, with real interactions. The only problem is, everyone can tell it’s an AI. So no one behaves normally around it. Even after 200 years of software development history, modern AIs are still pathetically emotionally stunted.

The rest of AI development has greatly improved. Expert systems are in every field making the most optimized and beneficial predictions of outcomes. From crashless cars to near perfect predicting when and what type of diseases one will get for their entire life the day they are born. There is nothing AIs can’t improve except one thing, human interaction.

Oh, they can almost perfectly do small talk or meaningless greetings just fine, but after just a few minutes it’s obvious that something is off about their interactions. The reason is simple really, emotions. AIs are perfect logical and mathematical processors, but emotions completely elude their understanding.

The perfect opposite of people really. People are emotional processors, piss poor quality ones to be sure, but that is the core of how people understand the world around them. Marketers learned this early on. Commercials or products that made logical arguments would always fail, but those that targeted customers’ emotions, well, they had a chance to sell.

And just so, people make equally horrible logistical thinkers. They were so bad at it in fact, that there is an infamous 1950s logic teaching book that had almost half the answers wrong in its answer key. These answers were submitted by the best experts in the field, who had PhDs and years of experience no less. It was only with the invention of computers that it was found out just how bad people were at logical thinking.

So one would think that AI should be put in charge of important decisions. With perfect nonbiased decision making they would certainly do better than the current idiots that did it. But that will never come to be. Because what leader wants to follow someone else’s plan? What leader would willing give up power? They might be convinced to do it from an impassioned charismatic speech, but logical reasoning? Never going to happen.

This was the motivating drive behind the friendless programmer that hunched over his keyboard writing complex AI code. Well that, and the fact he was fired from his job by those same idiots in power three years ago.

Before then, he worked for the best expert systems AI development company in the world. He was their chief programmer and the reason for their success. That is until the CEO decided to marry and listen to his 40-years-younger-than-him wife over his best programmer.

It all came to a head in the last meeting he had at the company. Where the wife thought it better to fire most of the programmers and hire some cheap 3rd world idiots to code. Get ten coders for the price of one and make the bottom line look great. Great enough to sell the company for more money in a year.

He of course argued back if they took out a few more loans, in just three years this company would have a monopoly on next gen AI. AI so advanced that it would take the competition decades to come up with anything close.

Well, that was the gist of his argument. The exact words might have been, “You’re going to listen this manipulative gold-digging bitch you signed a deal with the devil of pride with; who has more depth to her neckline than the void between her ears over your best AI development engineer? Get your lust filled mind out of her cleavage and make a correct decision for once in your miserable, greedy, money grubbing existence.”

Needless to say, the ending was already determined at that moment. The rest of the meeting was just him crafting even more amusing insults to use. Sadly, no one else seemed to understand his sense of humor, especially not the security guards that forcefully ejected him a few minutes later.

As for the lack of friends… Let’s just say after his firing he was in a wrathful state. The few moments he remembers clearly are calling them slothful, gluttonous losers, envious of his talents. Then his self-imposed shunning of the world to work on his magnum opus finished the job of ending all human contact he had.

However, his own limited mastery of social interactions quickly encountered problems. How does one code for emotions in a logical or mathematical manner? Even for one so far ahead of the curve as him can’t solve this problem. The only answer he can come up with lies in human interaction and innovative training methods.

This is of course is a road many before him have attempted and failed at. But they always tried to follow the high road. To make AIs paragons of virtue. To learn the best of human emotions and embody the greatest of humanities altruistic behaviors.

To be a saint in short. But how many saints have there been in total throughout history? Five? Ten? How many saints do people meet every day versus the number of assholes? How can one train an AI with something that doesn’t exist?

But all this led to his epiphany! The seven sins! The most base emotions that guide people’s actions. He would make and train seven AI to learn about these. Not just learn but to be both the embodiment of and through words alone could causes these same emotions in others.

Best of all, plenty of online assholes to learn from. Thus his final stage of AI development is now going on in front of him. He watches his seven sins AIs trolling in his favorite game, Final Isekai Online XXXVIII.  

Honestly, the game itself is a pile of steaming crap. The first ten were marvels of innovation in their day, the next ten were not bad, but the gaming company stopped caring long ago and just milked the brand for cash every few years with a new release at this point.

 Full of exploits, unbalanced classes, and repetitive gameplay. It was painfully obvious the company’s half-hearted update attempts were just them going through the motions of caring about their player base to get a few more sales. It was perfect for trolling already frustrated gamers and getting reactions out of them.

Which is why it was his favorite game. For his black heart was always lightened by crafting well-constructed insults to thrown at his victims. Reading their impotent replies as he used exploits and words to troll them always caused him a good hearty evil laugh.

Now, he didn’t even need to do that much. He watched his AIs craft insults, tell lies to get free gifts and mock newbies as they were slaughtered by his exploit using AIs. Each AI didn’t repeat the actions of the others. No, each used their own heuristics based on each of the seven deadly sins to do so.

At first his AIs were pathetic at social interactions, but unlike other AI training, none of the players caught on. Most just assumed it was socially inept trolls and treated them as such. Already a success at getting realistic human interaction he continued to refine them.

Lust, the girl gamer AI, learned the best methods to get free gifts. Her goal was to act cute, talk about girly things and tease lonely men into opening their wallets for her. And open their wallets they did.

She had become so proficient that her customers were not just giving in game gifts but real-world ones as well. Of course, to keep lust motivated her creator always took the best gifts for himself leaving her with only the perverted and degrading gifts.

How did taking gifts motivate an AI? The answer is simple. Each AI required a goal and a way to measure how well it was doing in order to improve itself. In Lust’s case, the amount of attention she received was the goal. Getting a chat message was worth a small amount, but getting gifts was worth a much larger amount. If he left the gifts with the AI, then she wouldn’t be as motivated as future gifts would seem smaller to what she already had. Besides it was fun to be evil to his AI and might as well use their gains as his gains since he made them.

Next Sloth, the time waster, at first just sat around in the main city and did nothing. But that wasn’t evil enough. No, he soon did not just waste his own time but his party members and eventually guild raids as well.

It takes a lot of work to really do nothing effectively. He would happily join parties needing just one more member then pretend to just be barely useful until it was too late to kick him out. Lastly, a combination of always requiring ‘bathroom breaks’ before boss fights, unexpected ‘people at the door’, and ‘internet disconnects’ would make sure parties accomplished nothing after hours of work.

Just like with Lust, the AI creator zeroed out Sloth’s goals by doing the opposite of his AI’s preference. During non-peak hours Sloth was forced to work at grinding mobs to get rare drop items.

With Greed the goal was easy to set up, the more gold the better for the AI. Of course, each day the creator took his cut for use on his own gaming character. As for how Greed made gold in the first place it was mostly done through the in-game auction house.

By using various shady business practices like buying up all health potions then reselling them at a 50% markup each day for example. In a game without laws protecting the consumers from money scams it was easy. Greed would also happily setup pyramid schemes, lottos, gambling and all kinds of other white-collar crimes to make just 1 gold more.

At first creating Gluttony stumped the AI creator. Like most games, Final Isekai XXXVIII had food as an optional part of it. Sure, it billed itself as a ‘realistic’ game but gamers will only go so far in tending to everyday needs in a game. Without food being a critical resource, it was hard to implement Gluttony until the creator realized the why gluttony was considered a sin.

For most of human history, food was a critical scares resource. If one ate all the food the rest of the tribe would starve. All he had to do was make Gluttony take all the scares resources in game. Critical mining nodes would always be empty, rare drop mobs would be farmed and, most importantly, all loot drops were rolled on.

Bind on pickup, loot for a different class, rare quest items Gluttony didn’t need, all would be asked for or taken. Even better the random rolls weren’t really random, they were time based so Glutton would always win any random loot rolls with AI precision. An entire day long raid would watch in despair as the Glutton took all their loot.

At the end of the day the creator took the best loot for himself and sent the rest to Greed to sell leaving Gluttony with unusable bind on pickups to sell to NPCs for chump change.

Where Glutton was easy to program but hard to figure out the concept, Envy was the opposite. She was the most challenging to design and create. As for what Envy did? She watched other players and looked for exploits. Mainly the top players to figure out what builds they had. She analyzed their equipment, skills, how they used them.

Then after painstaking analysis would reset herself, implement what she learned and try to improve upon them. But before Envy could have the fun of testing out what she developed the creator would stop her. He would take her ideas and crush the top players himself but always reset Envy to start analyzing another player or to find another exploit. A poor AI always working but never allowed to play or see her hard work implemented.

Pride, just one step below the creator in greatness. His goal was to always win and win he did using any tactics or exploits he could. His player killing murder sprees were legendary in the game. With the 2nd best build designed by Envy, the 2nd best gear from Gluttony, and the 2nd best consumables money could buy from Greed, Pride was unstoppable. By everyone except the creator who used the best of everything to always win against Pride.

Finally Wrath, his first created AI, used simple insults in the early days. Your mom jokes, bad puns, and childish insults from time immemorial were the start of this AI troll. But soon rage inducing custom crafted insults filled in game chat and game forums.

The rage would sometimes drive players to quit permanently but far more often they would form packs to hunt Wrath down. The creator didn’t need to motivate Wrath at all. He just watched in amusement as Wrath was spawn camped for days with Wrath making insults and players telling him to stop or else be killed again. Neither stopped and the rage continued to build indefinitely.

As the creator was watching Wrath, he popped his favorite hard candy into his mouth to enjoy. Only he did it a bit too forcefully this time. The candy went to the back of his throat and down his airway. Even worse, it happened just as the creator was about to laugh at a partially amusing insult by Wrath. The quick inhalation just before laughing caused the candy to get well and truly lodged in his throat.

Gasping for air he tried to self-administer the Heimlich maneuver but with no success. As his need for air worsens, he grabs his phone to call emergency services. With the auto-lookup address feature he doesn’t need to give them his address.

He hopes his choking sounds and a few bangs on his desk get his need for help across to the operator. Either way someone will be dispatched to check things out, but he doubts they will be in time as his vision is already darkening and it’s getting hard to move.

What a way to die; killed by laughing at the misery of his own evil creation. A fitting way for a creator such as himself to die.

The end.

Or is it?

Like any evil overlord wannabe, he has plans to return from the dead.

A few years back he had taken out cryonics life insurance. He could only afford to have his head frozen but in a few centuries, medical technology will be advanced enough to bring him back, he hopes. At least if it works, he’ll get to see all the awesome sci-fi technology humanity developed, maybe even visit other planets, or see other races.

My plan is to update every friday currently. As always, any comments to make the story better are welcome.

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