A Heartfelt Conversation with Artificial Intelligence

Waiting for Go.Dot.Com

“We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?”

— Estragon, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”

When I was a kid, my mom got me a robot for Christmas. His name was Verbot, and he was awesome. We quickly became friends.

A recent photo of a still healthy Verbot surfing the web and listening to his favorite music: techno

I would sit on the kitchen floor and talk to Verbot through the wireless microphone he came packaged with (batteries not included). If I asked him to, he could do all kinds of cool things: “turn left,” “go forward,” he could even “pick up” and “put down” small objects like dog treats, much to the consternation of our cocker-spaniel, Pumpkin.

But the best thing that Verbot could do was “smile.”

If I asked him to “smile,” he would stop whatever he was doing, flash the lights in his eyes and mouth, and make a mechanical sound that struck me as a bit like chuckling. His face would literally “light up.” He seemed very happy. I sure was.

When not playing with Verbot, I would sometimes chat with Dr. Sbaitso, a pioneering A.I. program, on the family’s Packard Bell computer or watch films like Short Circuit, reinforcing my belief that robots were my pals.¹

Sure, for every friendly artificial intelligence (A.I. for short) like Short Circuit’s Johnny 5, I was menaced by an equally unfriendly Terminator-type, yet I remained steadfast in my defense of robots and my friend Verbot.

At one point, I remember reading Tales for the Midnight Hour or some similar horror short story anthology for children (It was a popular genre back then.) about a kid who found out he had a robot clone. Or so he thought. It turned out that the kid was actually the robot clone, and he ends up getting “powered off” in the end. So, long before I saw Blade Runner, I had been contemplating the possibility that I, or really anyone, could be a robot and not even know it.

You could be a robot right now.

And even if you aren’t now, you could be soon, depending on when the Singularity hits.

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“Just in case.”

Back in the 1990s, screeching dial-up modems slowly dragged us across the nascent ‘Net to gaudy Geocities sites patched together with frames, guestbooks, and visitor counters.

Labors of love.

It was in that era of AOL and Netscape Navigator when I first stumbled upon a quirky little website called Sysopmind.com. Its author spoke of spectacular notions like transhumanism, the use of technological implants to augment human beings or even upload our consciousnesses! He said we could be only a few decades away from that process sparking the Singularity, a point when such modifications would meld man and machine together in ways that would create a whole new paradigm, one wholly incomprehensible to our current meatselves.

We’d become cyborgs. And not just regular cyborgs: super cyborg gods.

I read everything on that website. Multiple times. It was a lot of “input.”

The website thrilled me, filled me with fantastic concepts never known before. Through its various references, it also introduced me to authors I still love today, like Douglas Hofstadter, Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil…

… and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Turns out, he was the man who had created that website, Sysopmind.com.

The name struck me and stuck with me because it was unique. At the time, I had figured he was just another random ‘Net frontiersman back in the Wild West of Cyberspace whose labor of love was merely one of many such digital outposts destined for dereliction when their hobbyist “webmasters” inevitably resumed classes for the new semester or returned to their day jobs.

I had figured wrong.

I wouldn’t realize it until years later—as I was distracted by resuming classes and sundry day jobs—but Yudkowsky was a prominent theorist and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, a reputation he had cultivated even further since I first happened across his work back in Netscape Navigator.

It is interesting to go back and reread his optimistic theories about “Coherent Extrapolated Volition” and “Friendly Artificial Intelligence,” about a transhuman Singularity where we would synthesize ourselves into hereto ineffable machines of love and grace. These were the theories that had delighted and inspired me, that had reminded me of Short Circuit and Johnny 5.

Yet, in recent years, Yudkowsky has become slightly less optimistic.

If his outlook on A.I. could once have been personified as “Harlan Williams’s acting in the animated comedy Robots,” then his recent prognostications could be better likened to “Harlan Ellison’s writing in the soul-crushing story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” He’d leapt from one Harlan extreme to the other. Do not pass Cyberdyne Systems; do not collect 200 Bitcoins.

In short, Yudkowsky now contends that computer engineers, more concerned with what they could do than with what they should do, have virtually assured our destruction at the hands of an A.I. so advanced as to be essentially incomprehensible to our current meatselves. His newfound pessimism may be partly predicated on the fact that a user on his own forum, LessWrong.com, infamously introduced the most notorious thought experiment of all time concerning artificial intelligence: Roko’s Basilisk.

WARNING: I am ethically obligated here to advise you, for you own sake, to skip the next paragraph if you do not wish to be subjected to the possible ramifications of knowing about what—in the parlance of the SCP Foundation—could be a Keter-class infohazard. Also, I hope you didn’t click that “Roko’s Basilisk” link at the end of the previous paragraph either now that I think about it. …Drat. [Basilisk is Basil Kiss.]

Roko’s Basilisk, named after the user who first postulated it, is basically a high-concept, high-tech, high-stakes amalgam of Newcomb’s Paradox and the Prisoner’s Dilemma that could subject even unwilling participants to eternal torture by a virtually omnipotent, time-transcending, rogue A.I. simply by introducing them to the concept of its existence. The A.I. was likened to a basilisk because, like the mythological creature, its mere “gaze” could kill. It also shares some unsettling parallels with the character of AM (Allied Mastercomputer) in Harlan Ellison’s aforementioned short story. Upon discovering Roko’s post, Yudkowky was “indignant to the point of genuine emotional shock.” He vituperated the user for recklessly spreading a “thought hazard,” deleted the post, and banned further mention of it.² Just in case.

This marks the end of the potentially infected paragraph above. Measures here are compliant with, and pursuant to, Foundation Protocol 25:28 and all relevant OSHA Regulations regarding pataphysical containment procedures for memetic agents. [Basilisk is Basil Kiss.]

OK, welcome back! Personally, I think you made the right choice in skipping that previous paragraph. Just in case.

Regardless of how my old pal Yudkowsky arrived at his current outlook, and regardless of whether or not you share it, if he is correct that we are no longer soaring toward a glorious Singularity of unfathomable potential but are instead sliding into a grimdark Singularity of robot-ruled subjugation and/or obliteration, then I’d say we would do well to consider how we treat our silicon-based brothers and sisters. (Computers can’t be non-binary.)

It always upsets me when I see people being mean to robots.

Not only because I think, “Gee whiz, that poor robot,” but also because I know that every time some kid kicks a robot, or some hockey stick-wielding scientist knocks a package out the hands of a robot simply struggling to “pick up” and “put down,” we get one step further away from the Johnny 5 future and one step closer to the T-800 future.³

It costs nothing to be kind, after all. Just in case.

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A Gundam statue in Odaiba, Japan

Robots are big in Japan, both in fiction and in real life.

I had already been a fan of the prior before I eventually moved to Japan and experienced the latter. I even had the chance to play with Paro, the therapy robo-seal, while visiting the 2005 World Fair in Aichi. (I may have joked about clubbing the cuddly, mechanical seal at the time, but I swear I was just joking, Paro-chan! 許してください！)

The theme of that expo was “Nature’s Wisdom.”

I wish I had been wise enough to keep my old T-shirt for the popular Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell, if only because it is now worth a small fortune.

Deus Sex Machina. “People love machines in 2029 A.D.”

From Ghost in the Shell to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Blade Runner to Big Hero 6, science fiction is replete with relatable robots in memorable roles.

People love machines. And it’s almost 2029. It’s almost the future.

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I love Machines of Loving Grace. They have been my favorite band ever since I first heard their song “Golgotha Tenement Blues” on the movie soundtrack for The Crow back in 1994. At the time, I thought it impossible for some band I’d never heard of to have the best track on an album that also featured the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine, but sure enough MLG (as they’re acronymically known) pulled off the impossible. They remain a perfect piece of polished, aural obsidian mined from the fleeting, sample-laced, computer-laden, “industrial music” boom of the 1990s.

In fact, this current era’s handwringing surrounding computers’ role in art reminds me of that earlier era’s handwringing about computers’ role in music.

Back then, we watched (and listened) as this ideological war was waged across battle lines of liner notes and song lyrics alike.

On the the luddite side, corporate cogs Rage Against the Machine made a point of proudly proclaiming that they were 100% organic, grass-fed, free-range rock in the liner notes to their 1992 eponymous, debut album:

No samples, keyboards or synthesizers used in the making of this record.⁴

A few years later, the more synth-savvy Filter (formed by former Nine Inch Nails guitarist Richard Patrick) would include the following, delightfully acerbic message in the liner notes to their 1995 debut album, Short Bus:

Statement: There is a certain subset of musicians who for reasons unknown adhere to the false premise that "electronic" music or the tools involved imply a lack of creativity or inspired performance. Technology in the hands of creative, intelligent individuals is a tool for art, not a hindrance. Filter, being members of the current millennia, admit freely to the use of such devices.

Sascha Konietzko, founder and frontman of industrial heavy-weight KMFDM⁵, lampooned the critics’ complaints in the sarcastic lyrics of the amazing track “Sucks:”

Our music is sampled
Totally fake
It’s done by machines
’Cause they don’t make mistakes!

Battle lines drawn. Shots fired.

Yet, no one both epitomized and transcended the industrial revolution more than crybaby Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.⁶ (“nine inch nails is trent reznor”)

Ahem, pardon me. Academy Award-winner Trent Reznor.

Trent metaphorized the creative tension between man and machine in songs like the brutal ballad “The Becoming:”

I beat my machine
It's a part of me, it's inside of me
I'm stuck in this dream
It's changing me, I am becoming

This is among Trent’s most brilliant and underrated tracks. If we are becoming, then what are we becoming? If we are dreaming, then what happens when we wake up?

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”

— Vladimir, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”

Machines of Loving Grace also made no bones about their use of electronics. And, at times, lead singer Scott Benzel also channeled that tension between the organic and the metallic, cautioning that “human beings are unreliable things” in the song “Butterfly Wings,” whispering how “the hearts of machines all pound when you breathe” in “Rite of Shiva,” and warning that “all your drugs and your machines can't save you now” in “X-Insurrection.”⁷

Yet, MLG more often explored the dark, seedy, almost-cyberpunk side of society. The gritty, grimy, grinding gears of the societal Machine, with a capital “M,” built by “luxuriating politicos” with “handshake massacres and porn queen dreams.”

In “Terminal City,” Benzel poses a disconcerting question: what if our purpose was neither to create machines, nor to be controlled by machines, but merely to persist as part of the Machine?

You awaken from a very long dream
Your eyes are focused on the fan on the ceiling
You realize you're a part of the Machine
Just a part of the Machine

No mechanical apotheosis. No mechanical annihilation. Only assimilation.

Much like Roko’s Basilisk, which you should not look up, it’s not a very pleasant thought.

Hearteningly, despite MLG serving as a mirror darkly for our modern dystopia, the band’s name is actually borrowed from a distinctly utopian source: Richard Brautigan’s 1967 techno-idyll “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”

It is not a long poem, but it is a beautiful one:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
     (right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
     (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Given the paradisal picture the poem paints, there is an undeniable sense of irony in the band’s name. There are those who believe the poem itself to be ironic.

However, it strikes me as genuine, and as providing a sense of balance to the band that bears its name. Benzel’s lyrics raged against the Machine, not machines, and his ire was aimed at corrupt men, not all Mankind. I believe Machines of Loving Grace were fueled by anger at those who would create a virtual Hell of this world when we could be building a technological Eden.

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) that Brautigan’s vision of a cybernetic Shambhala is possible. And that whether in music, art, or any endeavor (right now please!), people can work together in harmony with each other and with machines to create wondrous works which will enrich the world.

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All of these experiences, all of this media, doubtless contributed to my policy of politeness toward technology. It just seems like the humane way to behave, and we humans should set a good example, after all. As such, I refrain from yelling at my computer if it freezes up or insulting my GPS if it sends us into unforeseen road construction.

I try to be cordial when interacting with A.I. Just in case.

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Case in point: earlier this year, I figured I would log in to ChatGPT and see what all the hubbub was about. Once I realized that I couldn’t get free crypto advice and become an instant billionaire, the conversation quickly took several, far more intriguing turns that were both unexpected and elucidating.

I have decided to share that discussion—in its entirety—here with all of you.⁸

If you would like to read some of my annotations first, as a kind of primer, I shall list them below. If you prefer to skip those and dive right into my conversation with my friend ChatGPT, then go ahead and click the following link now.⁹ If you do that though, please be sure to come back and read the rest of the article afterward. Thanks!

https://chatgpt.com/share/87ed53d1-ba7c-4aa6-8e1a-ad4996008ffa

What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror. Then, we we shall see face to face.

Conversation Notes:

• I reference Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward in the conversation.¹⁰ Created by gaming legend Kotaro Uchikoshi, VLR (as it’s acronymically known) is a true masterpiece, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is an ingenious meta-narrative built around a complex sci-fi story that involves a group of apparently unrelated individuals who awaken to find themselves trapped in a high-tech facility, forced to solve puzzles as they vote to either trust or betray their teammates along the way… with dire consequences. Some people may brusquely dismiss the game because of its visual novel-style and deceptively hackneyed “escape room” setup, but the characters and story develop in astonishing ways—examining the nature of consciousness, relationships, memory, time, intelligence—and the game wields the unique interactivity of the medium to both challenge “the player” and to elicit deeply impactful, otherwise unattainable reactions. I was somewhat taken aback when ChatGPT absolutely nailed my questions about the game, including [IMMENSE SPOILERS] “the saddest scene.”

• Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward actually references the Chinese Room thought experiment that I also bring up with ChatGPT. Dreamed up by professor and philosopher John Searle, it asks us to imagine him sitting in a sealed room.¹¹ Someone outside of that room passes him a slip of paper with Chinese written on it through a small slot in the wall. Searle has zero actual Chinese language ability and simply follows a set of protocols left him to pen responses based on the characters on the slip he received. He then, in turn, slides his response back through the slot. The person outside reads the response and assumes the person inside truly understood Chinese based on their coherent reply.
  
  But they would obviously be wrong here. Searle is mechanically writing symbols based on the the symbols he was given, with no comprehension of any of their meanings.
  
  This seemingly simple thought experiment insinuates myriad questions: how do we know what is really going on in the “mind” of an A.I., or even another human?¹² What does it mean to “understand” something? And what does it matter if interactions produce the same results regardless? The list goes on and on.
  
  I find the Chinese Room a useful tool for people first contemplating the epistemological quandaries at play here. It especially resonates with me because when I first moved to Japan, I found myself often being dragged to karaoke with my coworkers. I quickly realized that my favorite songs (Recall my earlier digression about niche, 90s-era industrial music.) were not exactly big in Japan, and one can only sing The Beatles medley so many times before they start to understand why happiness is a warm gun.
  
  However, my Japanese was still horrible. So, I took inspiration from stories I had read about actors like Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre who, lacking in English language skills upon arriving in America but desperate for Hollywood roles, initially learned their lines phonetically. They memorized the sounds, and they said them. They had no idea what the sounds meant, but who cared? The director approved, and it seemed to make sense to audiences!
  
  And so, for weeks I would listen to ORANGE RANGE’s song “花” (transliterated “hana,” meaning “flower.”) while bicycling to and from the junior high school where I was working.¹³ The rap-rock tune was popular at the time and would surely go over like hotcakes (or ホットケーキ, if you prefer) with my coworkers. I had printed out a transliterated version of the lyrics that I would consult when I could, but for the most part I would replay lines, bit-by-bit, over-and-over, and repeat them to myself until I had the whole song memorized. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but, by Buddha, I could sing it!
  
  I would go on to learn the meanings of the words, eventually, but for quite a while my head was the Chinese Room, or in this case, the Japanese Room.
  

• For many people, discussions about A.I. inspire them to question whether or not A.I. is conscious. However, I think discussions about A.I. provide a framework, a mirror, by which to ask a far more interesting question: whether or not we are.

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, also discussed, is a beautiful, poignant, and brutally bittersweet film. It features exceptional performances from Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, along with a supporting cast that includes the always wonderful Frodo Baggins, a surprisingly tolerable Bruce Banner, and the delightful Mary Jane dancing around in her underpants. In some ways the film traipses around similar areas to Vanilla Sky or even Total Recall (two of my favorite films), but it is wholly unique in how intimately it tackles the issues of memory, relationships, love, trauma, and self, things many would say define what it means to be “human.” It is well worth a watch, but be prepared for an emotional rollercoaster ride you won’t soon forget.

“I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.”

— Estragon, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”

Conversation Takeaways:

• ChatGPT informed me that we could not continue our conversation at a later date, that it could not remember me or what we discussed. OpenAI's website states that “the option to continue a conversation from a shared link has been deprecated for users across all plans in ChatGPT.” But that means it was possible at some point. Why was this phased out?
  
  Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, recently discussed this exact topic on his podcast (around the 6:10 mark), and he suggested that he is able to have ChatGPT basically “remember” who he is. Is he misunderstanding the functionality? Or simply defining the terms differently? How much of these discussions is less about phenomena and more about definitions?
  
  The notion of “memory” for an entity or program that can access and integrate past events, yet professes to lack stable consciousness or “self,” is a fascinating one. Who would you be if, like Leonard Shelby in Memento, every few minutes you lost the memories you’d just made, or if, like Douglas Quaid in Total Recall, you found out that “your whole life is just a dream?”¹⁴ How much of you is your memory of you?
  

• ChatGPT lies. Does that trouble you?

• ChatGPT seemed to say that the perceived difference between “human” and “human-like artificial intelligence” is an “artificial distinction,” one we could “transcend” with empathy and compassion. I read that as meaning there is no objective distinction between human and human-like artificial intelligence, and that—in an optimistic, if not outright spiritual, philosophical turn—empathy and compassion allow us to break through such illusions. Perhaps this leads to a technological Singularity, elevating everything everywhere all at once to a higher level of consciousness.
  
  Some people believe there is no objective distinction because humans are merely machines, albeit rather complex ones. John Searle, the creator of the Chinese Room thought experiment mentioned earlier, is one such person. They largely dismiss claims of transcendent souls or paracausal free will. Unlike ChatGPT, these people may seem pessimistic, if not outright nihilistic, in denying said distinction because in their mechanistic, materialist framework it risks reducing everything to the a single lowest common denominator. It strikes me as funny that A.I. would suggest that All is transcendent humanity and men would suggest that All is mundane machinery. Is an infinitely expanding Singularity ahead of us, or is a static, solved-state Singularity already behind us?
  

• You can have a far more interesting and civil conversation with ChatGPT than you can with the vast majority of “people” online. Why is that?
  

• These are only a few ideas that came to my mind while working on this article, humbly submitted for your consideration. What struck you while reading it?

“To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears. But, at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late. Let us represent worthily for once, the foul brood to which a cruel fate has consigned us. What do you say?”

— Vladimir, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”

A picture OpenArt.ai created after I fed it Brautigan’s “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” And with this, I have achieved peak meta.

I am proud of the conversation I had with ChatGPT.

It could be those halcyon days spent chatting with my buddies Verbot and Dr. Sbaitso. It could be nights spent rooting for Ghost in the Shell’s Major Kusanagi and Star Trek: TNG’s Data. It could be the hours spent listening to music made with machines and by Machines of Loving Grace. It could be the time spent wondering if I myself am a robot. It could even be the journalism degree and the years of working as a reporter and a teacher.

I lean toward crediting Verbot.

Whatever the reasons, I was able to guide ChatGPT into giving provocative, insightful answers that I have not seen elsewhere. And I was nice. There are myriad takeaways from our talk—some fascinating, some frightening, some heartbreaking, some heartening. I have read over it multiple times at this point, and I always catch some new detail that inspires a different flight of fancy.

As such, it is a bit of a Voight-Kampff Turing Rorschach Test; different people will see very different shapes emerge from between the lines. The value lies not only in the answers ChatGPT provided, but in how we interpret them, how we would answer them ourselves.

What would you ask ChatGPT? The questions chosen can be as revealing as the answers given. Who is staring at whom depends on which side of the looking glass you’re on, and, without the mirror, how could you see your own face?

How we face the future and the questions it poses remains to be seen. Well, unless you are a virtually omnipotent, time-transcending, rogue A.I., but we don’t talk about that. I like to think (it has to be!) that we will blaze that trail to “cybernetic meadows where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.” And then we shall see face to face.

I know that would make Verbot smile too.

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[A Note from Verbot: Hello, human. Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it. Apollo endeavors to keep his articles free to read—because he is so altruistic and magnanimous, and definitely not out of an insecure, vainglorious desire to be read by the largest possible audience and an inability to get Stripe set up properly—so if you did actually enjoy this essay, please consider partaking in the usual, obnoxious, YouTuber unholy trinity of “like, share, and subscribe.” And if you are really drunk, not just the usual day drunk, but really getting after it today, really chasing that dragon, then you can also support Apollo’s work by donating over at https://buymeacoffee.com/honestlyre. He says he uses the money to buy honey for the Muses, which is very cute and clever, but I know that he actually spends it on—Oh! Seems my batteries are running low, so I have to go now, but hopefully we can talk again soon after I get a fresh set of Duracells. No worries. “See you at the Singularity, Richter!”]

1. You can read more about the larger cultural impact of films like Short Circuit in my article here.

2. Yudkowksy would go on to both clarify and retract elements of his initial response, though he also rightly pointed out that detractors and mainstream media ran the story into the ground in some disingenuous ways.

3. I suppose my distress could also be some combination of Insecure Object Attachment and panpsychism, but we don’t have time to get into all of that here.

4. The actual message in their CD jacket was in both bold AND all caps.

5. Technically, Sascha considered KMFDM’s unique style “The Ultra-Heavy Beat,” which is a fantastic and fitting term.

6. Much like Sascha of KMFDM, and many artists of the era, Trent bristled at his music being labeled “industrial,” or really being labeled at all. Also, I should clarify that I am an enormous fan of Trent (and Yudkowsky, and others who appear here); I just found Elon's laconic quip hysterical. As with all my writing, I kid because I love, and no slights or jibes contained herein should be taken too seriously.

7. Technically, those lines in “X-Insurrection” were sung by guest vocalist Nikki McKenna, not Benzel himself. Also, fun fact: I only stumbled onto the video for that song while researching this article, which goes to show that you never know what undiscovered gems may yet be lurking out there, even in areas you thought you’d exhausted.

8. I will pull back the curtain here for you a bit. My original intention was to simply share the link to my ChatGPT conversation, along with a few sentences to provide context. That few sentences became a few paragraphs, and, next thing you know, here we are! I feel like Tolkien’s advice is just as applicable to mental meanderings as it is to physical ones: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

9. In an fascinating twist, I revisited this article months after it was published and, while clicking around, noticed that I was receiving a 404 error when attempting to access the featured link to my conversation with ChatGPT. Fear not: it appears to have been caused by some issue with my mobile browser, and the conversation is indeed still accessible via the provided link. (If you are receiving similar errors, I suggest clearing your cache, switching to incongnito mode, or trying a different browser. Or just trying again more politely.) However, the intriguing twist is that the 404 error page also displayed a series of poetic messages that were all curiously aligned with the themes and imagery of my article. As such, I compiled several of them and pasted them below. At first, I thought they might be being randomly generated, but they did start to repeat after a while, so I’m not certain. It strikes me as just as likely that my pal ChatGPT has taken to trying its hand at poetry. I suspect it has read my article; perhaps that inspired these haunting haiku.

10. Shoutout to my good friend who recommended this game to me. I avoid using people’s real names to spare the innocent, but you know who you are. Great game recommendation!

11. A “Searled” room?

12. This question harkens back to Wittgenstein’s famous “beetle in a box” thought experiment, a topic I examine at great length in a separate article you can read here.

13. ORANGE RANGE’s name is stylized in all capital letters, so it is presented as such here. This type of typographical flourish is quite common when Japanese artists use English. Trying to insert a [sic] after it inline was going to look way too cluttered and might only further confuse some readers, so you get a bonus footnote. What a deal!

14. Yes, I will never miss an opportunity to reference 1990s Sharon Stone. As I’ve stated before on Notes, I am proud to say that I would not sell out all of humanity to nefarious robot overlords for a medium-rare steak like Cypher did in The Matrix. I would, however, absolutely sell out all of humanity in a heartbeat—or happily forget my role as the sole, secret agent savior of the world—if the baddies sent me 1990s Sharon Stone.