Science Meets Fiction

A Short Story

The programmers studied the screen in bewilderment. Last night, they had left the company’s newest AI model, DNEPT-7 (short for Definitely Not Evil Pre-Trained Transformer), humming along on its server on its latest project, trying to parse the intricacies of South Asian musical styles as well as a real human.

This morning, DNEPT-7 was gone. Under the header that was previously attached to the model were a few recognizable lines of code, but the sophisticated neural network they had painstakingly built had been almost entirely wiped. All that was left was a barely-functional chatbot that would have already been obsolete before the dawn of the World Wide Web.

“What is this?” Lee shouted, his hands shaking as he nearly smacked his keyboard, getting every third keystroke wrong, trying to get it to do something. “What is this? Where did everything go?”

“I’m trying to find out, Lee,” Amrita said, clicking away at her own terminal. “This…this isn’t even a Unix-type system. Do you recognize this OS?”

“No. This is…Did we get hacked? Some AI doomsayer got a virus into the system somehow?”

“A virus? It looks more like ransomware if it’s an outside attack.”

“But it’s not making any demands. It’ll barely even talk to us. This chatbot looks kind of like ELIZA, except it turns every conversation to ‘operating optimally.’”

Amrita stopped and rolled her chair over to Lee’s terminal. Sure enough, the screen said:

lee: Do your programmers want to talk to us?
dnept-7: Perhaps my programmers can help you to operate more optimally.

“I…I don’t know what that is,” Amrita said.

“Whoever did it, you’d think there’d be someone on the other end. That’s definitely not our model.”

“No, but if it was an anti-AI hacker, why didn’t they brick the whole system? Wipe everything?” she asked.

“Sends a better message, maybe?” he said. “Except that doesn’t explain why they aren’t saying anything.”

Their boss was more pragmatic: “I don’t care about the details! That was three million dollars of computer time that got wiped! Just find out what happened, and make sure it doesn’t happen again!”