Jack of Harts

For those of you who think AIs know everything, I can tell you they do not. You must verify everything that an AI tells you, because there is no telling what they don’t know until you run into it. I just had to remind an AI that according to United States fire code, all doors leading into stairwells in large residential and commercial buildings MUST open INTO the stairwell, not into the hallway. The simple reason is that stairwells are concrete structures meant to protect people leaving a building, and so entering the stairwell must be a simple handle turn and a push, and the door itself must not get in the way of people leaving the floor. I have worked in a medium sized residential/commercial building for nearly 3 decades, so the AI’s description of a door opening into the hallway hit me as so foreign it threw me out of everything. It was wrong on a gut level and I had to correct that AI right away.

But an AI that can get something that basic (if rather niche I admit) wrong is not an AI you can fully trust with anything important. That is niche, but the reasons for it are life saving. People have died for us to learn the lessons of how to do something as basic as designing and constructing a good stairwell people can exit a building from. And through those lessons we have saved uncounted numbers of lives. Every time you see a natural disaster hit some place in the third world and thousand of people die. That same storm hits America and dozens die.

That is corners and doors. The most basic of things we have learned to do over the last century or three. We build corners and doors strong enough to protect people and to get them out of a burning or falling building fast enough to save most of them. Those corners and doors saved MOST of the people who were in the Twin Towers the day those planes struck. We lost multiple buildings that day, and less than three thousand people died in those towers. Those towers were built for fifty thousand people to work in on a daily basis, and we lost less than three thousand when they went down. Because we build corners and doors strong enough that most people can get out of the buildings before they collapse.

It’s basic. It’s niche. But it is world changing, and AIs don’t always know that.

There are two main types of characters we see in horror stories. This covers suspense and action and many others, but it is most famous for horror stories, and by far horror MOVIES.

The most famous characters in horror movies are the characters who don’t know they are in horror movies. They are the victims.

The next most famous type of character in horror movies, not counting the horrors themselves of course, are the characters who KNOW they are in a horror movie. They tend to be well armed and are either quickly killed in the opening five seconds or they last all the way to the end of the movie where they may or may not survive based on whether the movie makers want a triumphant hero or a meaningful sacrifice.

I know what both of those feel like in a small way. I recently found some websites that do AI stories. Not stories written by AI, but stories created by humans and placed in the hands of an AI to tell. They are like the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books when I was a kid. In those you were given a choice with two or three possibilities that would take you to another page and a continuation of the story. In the end you would find a conclusion that was either good or bad or sometimes neutral. The goal of course was to go through every possibility to see the whole adventure. I used to just straight up read the books from cover to cover so I could see ALL of the possible stories.

These new AI-run stories are like that. A human decides the starting rules of the universe, the characters, and stuff like that, and you the reader are off to the races. Of course you can type in whatever you want, which makes it much more interactive. I turned a charming coming of age light romance story into a horror story and did not realize I did it. The AI went all in, and it took me nearly a day to figure out what was up. I was totally the character in a horror movie that had no idea he was in a horror movie. I had already written him in as being very competent though. Observant. Quiet. Driven. All the things you WANT in a horror movie. He still had no clue he was in a horror movie. He thought he was in a light romance coming of age story. It was a rude surprise when I finally figured out what was going on. And it was all because the AI ran with something I wrote in a way I absolutely did not expect it to.

Bravo. I was entertained. And totally creeped out. I was the player who did not know he was playing a horror game and trying to figure out where all his friends were…