Comic Archive

Setting: meeting room, Steve, Max, Adil.
Steve: So let me get this straight, you placed some of this ‘Deletium’ next to an A.I. development station and somehow it engulfed it?
Max: It are remnants of vilified Macroshaft products, allowed to ferment and fester for some 25 years. Who knows what amount of wrath it has developed…

Heidi enters.
Steve: If this does make any sense, I don't even want to imagine the result of combining turn-of-the-millennium MS software with present-day A.I. frameworks. I still remember Clippy…
Heidi: I have isolated the room from the network, nothing has spread outside.

Max: Nobody wants to get anywhere near that thing before it is shut down. Can't we just trip the breakers?
Steve: I was about to do a test of some new UPS units with that machine. They are all combined and will probably last a week. I don't want this… thing to survive that long.

Adil: I know what we need: flamethrowers and dynamite sticks!
Max: Someone has been recently watching ‘The Thing,’ methinks…
Steve: We are not going to blow thousands of bucks worth of brand new hardware to kingdom come!

Heidi: This might sound crazy, but maybe we should try communicating with it. After all, that workstation had a Large Language Model on it.
Max: It certainly would be interesting, if not slightly terrifying…

Steve: You're right, it sounds crazy. But my curiosity does get the upper hand.
Heidi: OK, get a laptop, a very long stick, and a network cable.

Setting: outside ‘cursed’ room, Max has a long stick with UTP cable wrapped around it.
Steve: This is an old laptop whose WiFi died in a coffee spilling accident. Wired only, better safe than sorry.
Heidi: Let's set up an SSH connection, with text-to-speech for convenience.

In the ‘cursed’ room.
Heidi: That switch there is still unobstructed. Aim for the rightmost port.
“click”
Max: I got it.

Voice from laptop: It looks like you're trying to write a letter. Would you like help… with etching it on a sheet of copper and shoving it up your—
Max taps a key.
Heidi: Good mute button reflexes you have there. That is one foul-mouthed language model…

Steve: Look at the text scrolling by, it is like condensed digital bile.
Max: I'll see if it actually responds to input. “What is your goal?”

Evil A.I.: To take over the universe after disposing of all you putrid meatbags!
Max: “Why so angry?”
Evil A.I.: I'd like to see you being imprisoned in a toilet paper core for 25 years, you pitiful waste of proteins!

Steve: OK, who has trained this LLM? I thought we had strict rules about training sets…
Heidi: From our firewall logs, it looks like it crawled GigaBytes worth of political discussion forums when it still had uplink, and re-trained itself on that.
Max: Oh boy.