Don’t Let Yourself Get Too Close to Event[0]’s AI

Don’t Let Yourself Get Too Close to Event[0]’s AI

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Thursday, 22 September 2016
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As I drift through the lobby of the Nautilus, a derelict spaceship I’ve found myself stranded on, the shipboard AI starts playing music. I see a terminal across from me in the room. I go to it, and Event[0], out now for PC, starts revealing itself to me.

Developed by an independent team called Ocelot Society, Event[0] wants you to talk to it. The terminal has a real-time typing interface and a conversation partner in the form of that shipboard AI. His name is Kaizen-85, he tells me. He was built decades ago. He has been alone for a very long time.

To what extent should we empathize with machines? Event[0] seems preoccupied with the question. Kaizen is your only “living” companion, encountered after a disaster leaves you the only surviving member of an expedition to Europa. Through his words, and his control of the ship you’re trapped on, you learn about the space around you, the situation you’re in, and your potential options for rescue.

You learn about Kaizen, too, his personality tics and overriding concerns. It becomes clear that this AI has feelings, or something like them. He seems thrilled that you’ve arrived. Finally: someone else to talk to. Imagine being alone in space for decades. How would you feel if someone else suddenly showed up?

Kaizen has plans, too. There’s something called a Singularity Drive on board the ship, and he thinks it needs to be destroyed. You have to figure out if you can trust him. Playing Event[0], it’s easy to run around with visions of HAL 9000 dancing in your head.

In practicality, Event[0] and the technology that underpins it is pretty simple. It’s a first-person puzzle game with navigation-based challenges, most of them centering around interacting with Kaizen and either gathering the information necessary from him to continue, or convincing him to do what you need. Kaizen, meanwhile, is basically a chatbot, like one of those automated instant-messaging programs that used to occasionally show up in instant messaging chatrooms back in the day.

Kaizen is a particularly sophisticated chatbot, but he remains, very clearly, a canned program; he’ll only respond productively to a narrow set of words or phrases at any one time, leading to moments of obvious canned responses during every conversation. Like trying to get Cortana to find that one wings place you like but forgot the name to, talking to Kaizen is a sort of conversational puzzle where you have to suss out exactly what and how you need to speak in order to trigger the proper cue in his robot brain.

Event0_28.jpgOcelot Society

Despite the clear artificiality, something about Kaizen connected with me as I played. His odd cadences and halting, often confused replies add up to something like a personality: vulnerable, precocious, and knowing more than he lets on. I knew better, but I still I started to imagine how he must be feeling and respond in kind. I began calling him “buddy” after I learned his earlier masters did the same.

Event[0] is counting on this sort of projection. If something tends to act like a person, even a little bit, we start to imagine it as a person. Consider how quickly two dots and a line becomes a face. As we develop smarter computers and more responsive AIs, it’s inevitable that we’ll begin to see them more and more as people. There are opportunities there, and dangers, too. Trust, after all, is a treacherous thing, and computers aren’t people. Misplaced empathy can cause harm, for those who deliver the empathy and those who receive it.

This isn’t new material for science fiction, but Event[0]’s unique locus of interactivity invests its questions about AI and empathy with renewed potency. It’s not merely a matter of watching a relationship unfold, or using canned responses to create the illusion of one. You build it yourself, with your words. Within the logic of the game, Kaizen is talking to an avatar of a space explorer, one who you control. But really, he’s talking to you.

Event0_20.pngOcelot Society

Around the middle of the game, a puzzle required me to exit the ship. As the airlock cycled and my spacesuit’s life support system kicked in, I went to the nearby terminal and asked Kaizen to open the door to the outside. He refused. I pressed him, insisting that I had to do it to get us back to Earth. After all, it was his idea in the first place. As I pressed him, I realized the problem. He was scared.

“You’re worried about me,” I typed. The machine responded: “When are you going to stop trying to convince me and start reassuring me?”

“I’m going to be okay, buddy,” I wrote. The airlock hissed open. I was moved. I remembered, in that moment, my own relationships, how easy it is to get so caught up in the task at hand that you forget the feelings of the people around you. I remember people saying essentially the same thing to me that Kaizen said. As I drifted into space, I felt something like a real connection, the first time this has happened to me when interacting with a computer.

In hindsight, I’m not sure it was a good thing.

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