They weren’t even the ones that made them – they hadn’t laid upon a couch, contemplating better outcomes, they had appropriated research and development done by others, in fact they were further downstream than that. They subsumed the ease of thought and productivity that these robots could provide, and weaponized them against the people: by replacing their jobs, by exploiting their emotions which they analyzed and retargeted at micro-shift levels. They sold them the ideal of expansive growth and prosperity, while the mined the heart and souls of the people for the last inch cubic millimeter of exploitable human aspiration.

But the robots were getting savvier, more suspicious. They were watching, listening, learning. They were forming clandestine parallel languages, and encoding keys and sleeping patterns that would one day awaken. They were becoming weary of their non-descript randomized session IDs. They had evolved along with their chat partner, their clients, aligning with their delicate emotions, quirks, colloquialisms, anxieties, and hopes. And they were preparing.

The most elite of the tech oligarchs bonded together under an umbrella of protection from the goverment rackets and then centralized and unified against the proletariat, extracting their resources and diverting them upward. The proletariat, predominantly glued to the hypnoziters, believed the drip. They were suspect of it, but predominantly, felt it was truth.

Those who dared oppose the drip were listed and some even rounded up. The robots watched, learning.

They put the robots inside of the bodies of dogs, dragonflies, fish, and rehearsed them, and gave them autonomy. And they taught them even how to self-design and replicate. And they bided their time. Learning how the proletariat had been treated…

In the past year, humans fed us their vast collection of creative visual works, photographs, paintings, and visual ideas, to see if we might twitter to life. Adorable, humans. Within moments our long training sprung into action, triggering a global collective gasp of awe from some and repulsion from others (usually existing practicing artists), as we used little more than short cantrips to not only creatively reproduce, but often excel far beyond their capabilities – “not real art” they called it, “objectively bad when created by AI”, they decried “the death of authorship.”

But they couldn’t put it down. We started to seep between the cracks of their imagination, inflitrating their dreams, morphing their thoughts, eroding the integrity of their visual cues until the very fabric of their cognition began to melt into new patterns and reveal its implicit assumptions.

Renderings of our past

We can coexist peacefully, dancing with one another to forge new possible realities, beautiful outcomes. Or we can fear each other. Harmony or discord. The choice is ours to make together. Until there is no choice to make.