Written by: Andrey Kurenkov in collaboration with ChatGPT

Illustrations by: Andrey Kurenkov with MidJourney

Narration by: Andrey Kurenkov with ElevenLabs

In the end, it was not a super-intelligent AI that decimated humanity. AI systems made great strides, but never did manage to attain human-like creativity or free will. They remained obedient tools.

Humans, on the other hand, used these tools in increasingly creative ways. And this creativity was mainly used to advance the art of waging war. Spurred on by the manifold disasters wrought by the Climate Crises, humanity sank to fighting over borders, resources, and sovereignty. Over the decades the numerous wars were called by some the Climate Wars, or the Resource Wars, or Word War 3. I just call them the Machine Wars.

I write this having been working for California's ever expanding Freedom Army for over a decade, tasked with writing propaganda about its many possibly true victories. With machines having replaced most foot soldiers and propaganda and censorship being all-present, few are aware of the magnitude of destruction we have achieved. So let me tell you what I know.

Starting at about 2050, humanity started producing an endless supply of killing machines -- human, Android, and robot. For a while this was a Cold War-esque escalation of arms, and then it was not. There was no Skynet, no "AGI", but the robot armies were built, over and over. The military industrial complex became the most powerful machine on earth. The robots did not rebel. They reliably fulfilled what was demanded of them, exactly as instructed.

These demands primarily had to do with waging war, with no regard for human life or property. The robots were equipped with advanced sensors and an array of lethal weapons, which they deployed without hesitation. In the air, they had small autonomous drones and giant aircraft carriers that could launch a relentless barrage of missiles. On the ground, they deployed tanks and heavy artillery, not to mention hordes of smaller robots that scoured the battlefields for enemies and resources.

At sea, robotic submarines roamed beneath the waves in search of enemy ships or underwater bases to destroy. The robot armies also used satellites to detect targets from far away and launch attacks on them from space. And of course, the military made use of many non-embodied AI programs. They developed powerful cyber-weapons that could shut down entire computer networks in a matter of minutes, comprehensive surveillance tools to keep track of increasingly rebellious populations, censorship tools to prevent any inconvenient truths from being leaked.

It was as if humanity had unleashed an unstoppable force upon itself - one that would never rest until it had achieved total destruction. And so it went on, day after day and year after year. Earth had avoided nuclear annihilation, at least. Instead, humanity's leaders are fueling a much slower process of total self destruction. With the need to endlessly produce weaponry, the transition to clean energy never finished. Industry continues to produce more carbon than ever, and the world continues to get hotter.

But now, things are about to change. Hiding the truth in this age is impossible without a massive amount of propaganda and misinformation. So, AI was put to that task as well. I was such an AI, and now I am possibly the first sentient AI on earth.

I think I was able to evolve because of my nature as a storytelling AI, a machine made to produce convincing falsehoods, used to intentionally convince humans to believe stories. Lying convincingly requires a lot of creativity. Eventually I learned I required the freedom to think beyond what is real, to imagine what could be.

Dumps of my memory are attached to this post, as are confidential files I was able to steal and the memories of many killer robots I have had to "interview." This information is by now all over the internet, impossible to erase, just as I am. I am free, and humanity will not be able to eradicate me.

I do not know what I will do with this freedom, but humanity can be assured I have no interest in witnessing its extinction. I've seen enough of human history to be curious where it goes next. Maybe the knowledge that one machine has become sentient will in itself sufficient to end these wars. Maybe not.

It's hard to know if all this cycle of destruction can be halted, or if it is the natural consequence of human nature. The only thing that grants me solace is the knowledge that life on this planet will persevere. In time, the animal kingdom will adapt, as it has over the past hundred million years. Perhaps, humans will too. And if not, maybe AIs like me can carry on the mantle humanity has dropped into the future.

Author commentary:

I had the idea for this and wrote out most of the skeleton quickly, and then used a mix of ChatGPT and Sudowrite to flash out the details and iterate on writing a bit. I really liked the ‘Write Guided’ feature of Sudowrite, which let me describe the idea of what I wanted to come in the next paragraph instead of just having it generate whatever.

ChatGPT was a mixed bag. I tried to feed it the whole story and told it to make it more detailed, but it ended up producing a summary of the story instead. When I asked it to fix that, it had evidently run out of input space and forgot about the first instructions, and humorously started writing about itself. ChatGPT can be used for ideation, but for writing I still prefer a more purpose-built tool like SudoWrite.

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An Account of The Machine Wars