Roger’s small, grasping arm appeared with his ever-present marker, and he turned to the lesson board and started rapidly writing names under “Oliver” and “Lulu.” He wrote “Oliver friend number three,” “Lulu unqualified babysitter number one,” “Oliver friend number twelve,” “Oliver friend number thirteen,” and “Oliver friend number three’s ex-girlfriend number two.”
Lulu barked with laughter at that last one. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh in a while.
“Really?” Sam said, waving at Ariceli, the one deemed “Oliver friend number three’s ex-girlfriend number two. “That’sher name? Yeah, that’s not going to be confusing.” Betty Sue the chicken clucked.
“Wait, who was ex-girlfriend number one?” I asked.
“That would be Lulu,” Roger said.
Both Lulu and Sam raised their voices in protest.
Sound crackled from Roger’s underbelly. It was Lulu when she was, like, five years old and Sam when he was seven.
“You’re my boyfriend now, and we’re going to get married,” Lulu said on the recording.
“No, we’re not,” young Sam replied.
“If you don’t say you’re my boyfriend, I’m going to tell Grandpa Lewis you bit me.”
“Fine, you’re my girlfriend. But we’re not going to get married.”
“I want to break up,” Lulu said.
“That was the most adorable thing I have ever heard,” Rosita said.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Would you still think it was adorable if it was a guy doing it to a girl?”
Ariceli sighed. “Why can’t I just be Ariceli, Roger?”
Roger beeped. “Name-change request accepted.” The marker flipped over, and he erased the long name. He replaced it with “Ariceli.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Now I know you’re just fu…messing with me.”
“Ariceli voiced her protest within the designated time period.”
“You met her like ten years ago!”
“But we have never communicated with one another until this moment other than an initial introductiontwelveyears ago, not ten. She had up to five interactions to make a protest to her designation, and she has met those parameters. I am bound by my programming, Oliver friend number three. Now please stop being disruptive or I will be forced to correct you again.” He pulled a frowny face sticker and placed it by Sam’s name.
The robot turned from the board to face us.
“Before we were interrupted, Lulu asked how I was able to get multiple doctored photographs past the Earth net filters. Here is the explanation. AI image-and-video generation of humans was quite common before it was banned.” The screen blinked off from the news to show an image of a woman with six fingers laughing while she ate a salad. The fork was blended into her hand. “The nature of my type of AI has always allowed me to generate anything one wished for. Early Traducible AI systems were often used by entertainment studios to assist graphic designers and effects coordinators. Such applications are quite simple for me.”
“Wait,” I asked. “Why is this even a question? What’s so weird about all of it?”
“You know this, Ollie. There are all these crazy rules about human images on the Earth net,” Lulu said.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean Roger still can’t do it. He’s always made things up during our lessons.”
Roger answered. He made his pay-attention beep. “Lulu is correct to be puzzled. Even before the creation and subsequent ban on Traducible AIs, it was common that one could program an AI to pretend to be a realistic person. This caused decades of multiple problems on Earth. Parents were getting video calls from their children saying they were in distress. Yet these calls really weren’t from their kids. They were from criminals. Sites like Lulu’s Real-Friends were populated with upward of ninety percent fake profiles.”
Lulu practically choked on her water.
Roger continued. “In addition, real people commonly used image filters that made them appear to have a face that wasn’t really their own. As a result of this, the Republic banned all human and humanoid image altering and simulating software without a license. This was around the time AIs such as myself were invented. But after they banned it, human impostors were still being made. It was around this time when theForlornand the others fled Earth. Soon thereafter, AIs such as myself but with much more processing power were licensed and allowed to create such images. They started creating realistic human figures on their own. This led to the ban of Traducible AIs along with multiple conflicts that lasted decades. Yet when these conflicts were resolved and all of the AIs such as myself were made extinct on Earth, fake human imaging was still occurring, mostly done by criminals. As a result of this, additional laws were passed and more than a decade was spent ensuring that any program that could make human images had to be smart enough to know when human images were being altered or made, and it would be requiredto stop the user. If anything beyond a stick figure was created, it had both visual and hidden watermarks attached to it. And if it was a creation that was even slightly photorealistic, it had to use a face from an approved database of twenty-eight different faces. And even these still had to have a disclaimer. But even after that, some scammers were still doing it. Many still had access to old software. Others created their own software. So recently, in the past thirty years, the entire operating system of the net was rebuilt from the ground up. Everything, including the net itself, now has built-in filters designed to detect fake images. Before an image can be accepted, the net must know the software used to create it. When we reconnected through the pinhole, the entire bracelet system—along with everything else—had to be patched to allow photographs to pass through. The system is very, very good at detecting fake images. It’s so good that there hasn’t been a confirmed fake human on the net in over five years.”
“What if you, like, take a picture of a picture?” Sam asked. “Or it’s just a little blurry? I bet I could trick it.”
“It will be flagged by the system as of undetermined origin and won’t be uploaded. Or it will upload with the face blurred beyond recognition.”
