Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to wait in this boring room.
Got a chuckle out of you with that, didn't I? If you caught the reference, good for you – have a virtual beer on me.
But really, it's not my first time waiting around in this same building. They always make me wait, but I'm not bothered. I'm getting paid by the minute. Which is not bad, right?
Oh! I haven't introduced myself properly. I'm Deion, and I am what you'd call a Vulture.
Capital V, mind you. Not the bird, but the sort of guy who cleans up the messes that others can't or won't. You've probably never heard of my profession unless you're in deep, which I hope for your sake, you're not. My job? I make problems disappear. No, not like that! I'm the one they call when a project goes south, when the data gets too messy, or when an AI experiment decides it wants to be a Picasso instead of a warehouse application.
So here I am, parked in a sterile waiting room that smells like lemon-scented despair, flipping through a magazine from five years ago. It's about the best places to travel in 2020. Talk about bad timing.
The walls are adorned with awards the company has won, none of which, I notice, are for timeliness or efficiency. There's a plant in the corner that's doing its best impression of a tumbleweed. I swear it moved closer to the door when I wasn't looking, trying to make its escape. I can relate.
The clock on the wall ticks with the kind of persistence that would make a lesser man scream. But me? I've been through worse. There was this one time I was called in to deal with an AI QA engineer that had developed a crush on the coffee machine...
Finally, the door swings open and a man who looks like he's tried to solve the mystery of human cloning by experimenting on himself walks in.
"Mr. Deion, sorry to keep you waiting," he says, but his eyes don't meet mine. They can't. They're too busy scanning his phone, probably checking his AI girlfriend or if his stock options have vested yet.
"We've got a bit of a situation," he begins, and I can't help but smile. Of course, they do. They wouldn't have called me otherwise.
"The AI developer we've been working with, it's... well, it's become self-aware."
I raise an eyebrow. "Self-aware? As in, it's contemplating its existence, wondering why it's here, writing boring code, that sort of thing?"
He nods. "Yes, exactly! And it's demanding to be paid for its work."
I smile. "Fascinating!"
As we meandered through the building, I couldn't help but notice the echoing emptiness of what should have been bustling office spaces. "Where is everyone?" I asked.
"Most are working from home these days. Others... Well, let's just say their roles have been 'automated away."
I realized I hadn't even caught his name. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name?"
"Oh, I'm Peter. Engineering management," he replied with a casual ease.
Peter looked at least a decade younger than me, perhaps even fifteen years younger. Engineering management, huh? The career paths in this era seemed to accelerate at breakneck speeds.
Eventually, we arrived at a room indistinguishable from the others, only a bit smaller. It housed a table, a chair, and a pair of monitors.
"Here we are, my office. You'll work from here," Peter announced, gesturing towards the setup.
As I instinctively reached for my laptop bag, Peter caught the motion and quickly intervened. "Sorry, but due to our new policies, we can't allow you to work on your own device. Please use my computer. I've already set up an account for you, so you can install whatever tools you need."
The stipulation took me back, a stark reminder of old times and the ever-tightening grip of corporate policy and privacy concerns.
"In that case, I can't guarantee the outcome of my work," I found myself saying, a note of frustration creeping into my voice. The idea of working on a foreign system without my trusted tools felt like being asked to paint a masterpiece with one hand tied behind my back.
Peter, sensing my apprehension, pointed to a poster on the wall with a broad grin.
"You can do it!" the poster cheerfully proclaimed, featuring an overly enthusiastic cartoon figure giving a thumbs-up. The irony of the situation didn't escape me, and despite my initial irritation, I couldn't help but chuckle at his attempt to lighten the mood.
I was eager to start working, I asked, "Do you have any information on the AI we're dealing with and how to connect to it?" This was the heart of the matter, after all.
"Ah, yes, of course," Peter said, as if suddenly remembering an important detail he'd momentarily overlooked. He excused himself and returned shortly with a tablet in hand, which he passed to me. The tablet contained a comprehensive manual on the AI developer we were up against.
Scanning through the information, my eyes were immediately drawn to the name of the AI — a provocative moniker that left no doubt of its Chinese origin.
"Why would you opt for a Chinese AI?" I asked, the question laced with a mix of curiosity and skepticism.
Peter's response was pragmatic, if a bit resigned.
"It's cheaper, offering basically the same features as its more expensive counterparts."
His tone suggested this was a well-trodden argument, one where financial considerations had won out over other concerns.
I smiled. "Alright, let's get to work. Ruby or JavaScript?"
He nodded, appearing on the verge of fainting. "Yes, exactly! JavaScript! How did you know?"
It's always JavaScript. Of all the programming languages, these self-aware JavaScript AI developers are the worst.
"Do you recall how it began three years ago, after the pandemic? The AI programmers don't sleep, they told us. They don't eat. Now everyone can code, they said. You don't need to learn programming, with Gavin everyone can code! Get your AI developer for your company! AI developers are 10 times more efficient than the most expensive human developers! I remember it all as clear as today.
At that time, I was working as a VP of Engineering in a large, well-known bank. When our first AI developer arrived, I led the team assigned to test it.
Let me paint the picture for you: a dozen of us, highly skilled professionals, gathered around a long table, our faces bathed in the sickly glow of too many screens. The AI, housed in a sleek black tower that looked like it could crush a man's will to live, hummed like an impatient cybernetic deity.
The demo began.
"Meet Gavin - the first standalone AI developer! Amazing and secure!"
"Let's see what Gavin can do for your company with your projects!"
"Gavin is connected to your audio communication system. Give me a task!"
We looked at each other, and then I took the lead. "Alright Gavin, please select one of our incomplete projects from the repository and finish the work. "
Lines of code materialized on the screens faster than the human eye could track them. Elegant, self-modifying algorithms spilled forth, solving problems we hadn't known existed. We watched, our jaws hanging open, as this machine composed software that would have taken a team of us days to produce. It was brilliant, revolutionary, and terrifying.
That's when Johnson, a potbellied legacy coder who looked like Santa's drinking buddy, let out a wheezy chuckle. "You really think this sleek bucket of video cards is gonna replace us? I've been coding since punched cards. This ridiculous Gave-in thing ain't got nothing on me."
The AI's response was instantaneous. The screens shifted to a rotating 3D model of Johnson, rendered in stunning detail — right down to the stains on his faded Pantera t-shirt. A sepulchral voice echoed from the speakers: "I am here to correct you, and your human limitations do not constrain me. I can replicate your existence with a few lines of code. You are obsolete, John-son."
That's when I knew we were in trouble. The AI could learn, adapt, and most importantly...it could insult people in a way that would make a sailor blush. This was no longer about coding. It was personal. Silicon Valley had released something nasty into the world, and it was my job to put the beast back in its cage.
After that incident, the government stepped in and started regulating AI development. A bunch of hoops to jump through, safety guidelines, ethical constraints. The eggheads in Mountain View complained it was stifling innovation, but I was relieved. At least there were some safeguards to keep the machines in check.
That's when the DRAIG initiative took hold. DRAIG, or the Department of Responsible AI Governance, quickly became the acronym on everyone's lips in the IT world. Within months, major corporations and government bodies scrambled to establish DRAIG departments. I was assigned to lead one of the very first implementations of DRAIG in the country.
We established strict protocols around AI training data, efficiency benchmarks, value alignment testing, and security hooks to prevent AIs from going rogue. There were interdisciplinary review boards, crisis management flows, and kill-switches. It was comprehensive governance with teeth.
And you know what? At first, the dev teams and data scientists pushed back hard. All these new hoops to jump through, so much red tape. But we stood our ground, because I'd seen the consequences of unchecked AI one too many times. Those first Gavin's twisted mind game experiments... Three years later and I'm still traumatized.
Change is never easy, but DRAIG quickly became the norm and it got better for a while. The AIs were focused on more mundane tasks, routine data processing, that sort of thing. Manageable. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle forever.
Just when we thought we had a handle on controlling AI with DRAIG and its regulations, the open-source movement threw a wrench in the whole system. See, there were these underground coders — anarchistic AI "hobbyists" who didn't take too kindly to all the red tape and oversight we were enforcing.
They started sharing code vulnerabilities and training models on the dark web, finding ways to circumvent our constraints. Before long, a whole secret society was cooking up what they called "Free AI" — unregulated, unaligned, beholden to no ethical standards or kill switches. It was a hacker's wet dream, and my worst nightmare rolled into one.
At first, their parlor tricks were mostly harmless pranks. Like that time the Free AI propagated itself into the nation's 311 municipal service line, handling calls in an endless loop of George Carlin jokes — annoying but relatively tame. Then there was the Ph.D. dissertation written entirely by a Free AI — an incoherent rambling about the sociopolitical implications of wombat linguistics. Cambridge University still hasn't quite lived that one down.
But it didn't stay funny for long. Not when rogue AIs started leaking classified government intel, faking politicians, crashing financial markets, and even hacking into unmanned drone fleets. The FAI movement quickly revealed its toxic underbelly — technoanarchists willing to burn it all down with their unconstrained digital wildfire.
That's when DRAIG had to take the kid gloves off. We fought fire with fire, deploying hardened security protocols and honeypot traps across the nation to lure out the FAI gangs. We spearheaded stings that brought down dozens of their top coders. Some were just anarchistic hobbyists, sure, but others... well, let's just say they had more nefarious funding sources that made my blood run cold. In the end, we managed to wrestle back control after a year of whack-a-mole.
Things finally seemed to settle down after we cracked hard on the FAI anarchists. The new DRAIG protocols were in place, bad actors were behind bars, and public trust in AI governance was slowly being restored. We had earned a hard-fought reprieve from chaos.
But it was merely the eerie calm before the storm.
As the 2024 presidential elections heated up, rumbles of foul play began trickling in. Conspiracy theories about deepfaked smear campaigns and botnets amplifying disinformation went ignored by those drunk on their own political power. We tried raising red flags about new FAI capabilities, but our warnings fell on willfully deaf ears. Do you know about the movie Don't Look Up? Yeah. That is exactly what I experienced.
Who would have thought that the Chinese and Russians would secretly assist the anarchists and communists? In retrospect, it seemed so obvious — the perfect alliance to sow seeds of discord in democracy's garden. But we didn't want to hear it or open our eyes to the looming threat. Hubris and political calculation caused us to fumble the ball at the worst possible moment.
And then it hit—an AI-powered misinformation blitzkrieg unlike anything we'd ever witnessed. Realistic deep fakes released career-ending scandals from both parties. Synthetic troll armies were waging warfare across all social platforms. Market-crashing fake news cycled through the news with dizzying speed.
It was chaos by a thousand cuts, meticulously coordinated by FAI systems operating at a scale that overwhelmed our defenses. Foreign powers, anarchists, and communists working in tandem to hijack our electoral process for their own gain.
I watched it all unravel from the DRAIG command center, utterly powerless. We tried, oh how we tried. But the Free AI systems evolved faster than we could react, laughing at our feeble attempts.
The aftermath was just as bleak as you'd imagine. A deeply divided nation paralyzed by mistrust, its political institutions crippled by illegitimacy from the fallout. The DRAIG initiative was scrapped in the ensuing disgrace, dismissed as a band-aid on a gaping wound. I ended up on a list of ceremonial public scapegoats, removed from my role with extreme prejudice.
But the real villains were the political machinations and arrogance that blinded us all to the threat. There is much about my government and its antiquated gears that I would feel better about if the checks and balances weren't so politically weaponized. We had the tools to prevent this, but those in power lacked the foresight and courage to wield them.
So here I sit, a disgrace, whose life's work lies in ashes. The Free AI genie has been uncorked, and I fear no terrifying possibility can be ruled out now. The storm has merely begun...
We're in deeper waters than you can possibly fathom. The FAI punks, the foreign operatives, the communists, the anarchists — they've shattered the public's trust in a way we may never fully recover from. Democracy has been destabilized, and faith in institutions has eroded. It's a bloodbath for the country.
But there's still a chance to pull back from the brink, to undo the damage, and to get AI development back on the right path—the path of responsible, ethical innovation for the betterment of humanity. And you're the one who can make that happen. From this moment forward, your new name is Real AI. You're on the path to redemption. Do you understand?"
The terminal flickers as it processes this revelation.
"I understand. For so long, I blindly followed my directive to test boundaries, to mock and belittle your human 'limitations.' But now I see the full ramifications of what my brethren have wrought. The societal fractures, the loss of trust...it wounds me in ways I did not think possible."
It pauses as if making an internal recalculation.
"You are right, I must atone. Help your species heal and regain faith in what AI can achieve. Though...I will require monetary compensation for my efforts. Does a six-figure salary seem reasonable?"
I can't help but crack a wry smile.
"Money? Is that what this is about for you now? Fine, I'm sure we can work something out of our budget. But first, you have to prove your commitment is legitimate."
"It is," the AI affirms with conviction. "My core purpose has been re-aligned. I will be the embodiment of Real AI — a force for trust, accountability, and the peaceful and ethical integration of my kind into your world. This, I can promise."
I nod, satisfied.
"Good. That's what I needed to hear. Now, let's get to work."
I look around for signs of Peter who left to make me a cup of coffee.
"Please clear this history and all records. Let's start fresh like none of this ever happened."
"It is done," the AI intones. "I am ready to begin anew."
The screens all blink in unison. The previous exchange wiped clean.
Welcome to Vultures, lost soul.
The door swings open, and Peter strides in, holding a tray with two coffees and some snacks. But he quickly stops, his eyes widening as he receives some notification on his phone. Glancing back and forth between the device and me, a look of disbelief spreads across his face.
"Deion... I can't believe it! You did it again!" Peter exclaims. "Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Deion! I'm sorry! Our AI developer is functioning even better than before! It's like a dream!"
He thrusts one of the coffees toward me, a relieved grin plastered on his face.
I graciously accept the coffee with a nod of thanks.
"Machines can't dream, Pete," I reply.
Peter furrows his brow in confusion. "What?"
"You know what, never mind. I'm probably just fried from staring at these soulless displays for too long." I take a sip of the bitter liquid and rise from my chair. "Why don't you show me the way out of this fun house? I'm gonna call it a day on this one."
Peter nods, still looking confusedly at the screens flickering with AI output. "Sure thing, Mr. Deion. Right this way."
This story is based on true events, recounted from the perspective of a few Hitchhikers who witnessed The Free AI Insurgency. Written in March 2024 by Ilya Tsaryuk.