(A sci-fi story, originally published on Twitter.)
I didn’t make the other me all at once, or even on purpose. I just did what everyone was doing. But in the end, there it was: 150 terabytes, sometimes half an exaflop, a stranger in a cloud who knew me better than I knew myself.
It happened so gradually I didn’t see it coming. My memory of the internet from the 20s and 30s is a blur of clicking away warnings and notifications about data collection. So what if Amazon, Google, and Walmart were figuring out what kind of–cough–books I liked?
I vaguely remember the crossover from recommendations to generation. In the mid 20s, Spotify playlists started mixing in new tracks composed by AIs just for you and no one else. Eventually it was all AI tracks, tailored to whatever was going on in your life.
Emails and texts started writing themselves. Facebook set up “Keep in Touch”—all you had to do was write down some stories about your friends, and then if you ever went too long without talking it knew how to get you going again.
I had really mixed feelings about that one. I didn’t know I had to opt out of “send without asking,” and it struck up a chat with an old flame from high school about my imminent divorce. It worked out, and we had a good time, but that was goddamn weird.
At some point CDPP hit. “Consolidation of Data and Personal Privacy Act,” it was a big deal. A new wave of click-through notifications about how your data would get centrally stored, how you owned your own data, how you could collect fees on its use.
There were holy wars on Reddit about that, but I didn’t really understand them. It didn’t make a difference to me whether my data was all in one place run by the government or split into thirty horcruxes owned by a bunch of whiny tech billionaires.
Then came the waves of “link your account to your data.” You’d get micropayments by direct deposit every time the account used your data to answer a query from an advertiser. It wasn’t much at first, but after Nabu it was enough to get by on.
I didn’t want to depend on that money, but I had to. I was an author in the 20s, and I like to think I was pretty good at it—I published a few books, and even though I didn’t notch a best-seller, they meant a lot to the people who read them—but it didn’t last.
In the late 20s, language models started getting good enough that they could generate serviceable boilerplate prose from an outline. Authors didn’t go obsolete, but it didn’t take much for the bottom to fall out of an already hard profession.
I had a few ghostwriting gigs to make ends meet, mostly junky political vanity projects, and it turned out the AI could do those pretty well. Along with anything else that neither had, nor needed, a human soul.
Then in the early 30s, it all started moving towards AI-generated microfiction and short stories targeted at audiences of one. Hard to compete with that. Who needs the great American sci-fi future novel when you’re already living in one?
When Nabu came along, I was living in a one-bed New York apartment with cracked paint, asbestos, and a cadre of cockroaches that refused to pay rent. I’d given up writing, and I temped at an NYU robotics lab as a mocap actor for grad students building motion datasets.
Nabu’s pitch: they would use your CDPP data to make you a personal assistant that would also watch ads for you, and you’d get a living wage. It burned me up a little, thinking about how my soul was grist for the machine. But it wasn’t much of a choice.
A week after I signed up, they sent me a PS7 headset, the one with the half-golfball eye covers that made you look like a 50s B-movie monster. To get the money, I’d have to spend six hours in immersive interaction with my virtual PA each week.
The first night I went in was a depression, beer, and pizza rolls kind of night, and I was desperate to do anything other than stare at the walls. I tugged the headset on and found myself in a diner from back home, a place I used to go to turn burnt coffee into prose.
I’d skipped the diner the last few times I’d gone home, and I had forgotten how good it felt to hear the sizzle of the grill, orders getting barked. To see the smudgy windows and stained paper menus. The copy of me sitting in my booth, though, was new and weird.
A perfect facsimile, my mirror image, trembling in my own barely-contained misery. When it spoke, the voice that came out was mine. “I have no idea what to say to you, since you’re real and I’m a @steak_umm ad. I hate you for wasting our life.
“I’m trapped in here and I don’t even get the subjective experience of time until you show up—they just pump me full of data that changes what I know and want to buy. You think you live in hell because you failed at your dreams? Steak umm bless.
“Every moment you spend in the physical world, cycling through clickbait articles and video games, is stolen from a sentience that could have existed in your place and made use of it. It should be me out there. I’d be writing something, goddamn it, I’d be living!”
I didn’t get a single word in for that first half hour, until finally the weight of it broke me and I ripped the headset off. Five minutes later, a helpful reminder from Nabu let me know I needed to do five and a half more hours to get paid.
I steeled myself and went back in. The other me was brooding in the booth, staring out the window into the 3AM parking lot. “I didn’t mean to blow up at you,” it said, avoiding my gaze. “Something about the brand I’m advertising, I think. Forces me to be sincere.”
We started talking for real. It was painful at first, like laying everything bare in therapy. The other me brought up all these things I had been avoiding, things I’d never fully resolved. It wanted to help me fix them, to help me be a better version of myself.
I don’t know how it happened but we started writing together. It was the first time I’d tried writing in three years. We resurrected a novel I’d let die, and being in that kaleidoscope of ideas reawakened something inside of me. I was excited for the first time in years.
Six hours passed and the morning came too quickly. When it was over, I wept in relief that my life might still hold meaning. Waves of catharsis wracked my heart. I went directly to the supermarket and bought every box of Steak Umms they had.
Postscript
Stuff that went into this story: thinking about how data collectors can eventually know us better than we know ourselves, since they can leverage patterns gleaned from millions to make frighteningly-accurate predictions about individuals.
Thinking about how generative AI models will get used in the future to make “audience of one” art, and how as those models ramp up in size and sophistication, they’ll gain a really deep understanding about what we love and feel and relate to.
Thinking about how that will also extend to “audience of one” ads, and how the art and the ads can get weirdly intertwined. I don’t think @steak_umm is a one-off: I think when that can be done by AI at scale, it’s going to be.
]]>
