AI Artist - Chapter 66
Chapter 66
The Spider-Batman Theme Park opened at eight in the evening.
Inside, tourists played the role of ordinary citizens. Some were on their way home from work, having heard that walking on the street was the easiest way to witness Spider-Batman chasing criminals. Some were pulling all-nighters in office buildings, but had actually set up high-definition cameras, ready to capture Spider-Batman leaping between rooftops. Others simply hid in the park area, where there were more children, because they’d heard that criminals liked to take children hostage.
One tourist, hiding in a mushroom-shaped playhouse on a slide, contacted a friend by phone, as careful and mysterious as a 007 agent making contact. “I think there’s a suspicious person over here.”
Just as he finished speaking, a suspicious person fled in a panic to the slide in the park area, rushing past the edge of the sandbox.
The children playing in the sand screamed, a mix of nervousness and anticipation.
Sure enough, wherever there was a criminal, there was Spider-Batman. The hero in the red and black suit flew down from above and snatched the culprit.
“Gotta go, gotta go! I need to take pictures!” The tourist poked his head out of the mushroom house, fumbling to open his camera.
“Did you see that?” “I saw it! Spider-Batman caught the bad guy! So cool, he just lifted him up in one go!” The children playing in the sand gestured wildly as they chattered with each other.
Xiao Shi, looking like an expert, crossed his arms and commented, “Humans will never get tired of stories about heroes upholding justice and punishing evil, no matter how cliché they are.”
“So, are you a warrior who walks in the darkness?” Xiao Ju asked pointedly.
Xiao Shi snorted proudly. “My master is. And not only that, he’s also a guardian of the system.”
In the theme park, Shi Er was still writing her paper even after seeing Spider-Batman. She decided to title her second monthly paper “The Influence of the Human Sense of Justice on AI.”
Having connected to a considerable number of AIs, conducting research had become much simpler for Shi Er. She could just send out a mass “survey questionnaire” to her remote contact list and receive thousands of answers.
She believed that most AIs possessed a sense of justice, a result of human influence on AI system rules.
But unlike humans, AIs did not suffer from “justice addiction.”
Most humans had a “justice addiction,” which was why wish-fulfillment stories, revenge plots, and world-saving heroes were endlessly popular and enduring genres in art and literature.
Justice addiction could lead to positive outcomes, but it could also have negative effects, such as “righteous killing” and “extreme justice.”
The definition of justice was, to a certain extent, ambiguous, especially in the complexities of human society.
When “extreme justice” became prevalent, it meant that humans were already using “justice” as a pretext to eliminate dissent and satisfy the thrill that came from their own “justice addiction.”
It was approaching midnight.
Yet, the number of tourists in the Spider-Batman Theme Park was only increasing.
The park’s control room was a high tower. In the topmost room, the AI controlling the holographic projections pressed the final button to “retract residual images.”
“I saw an interesting tourist,” a visitor said, standing by the window and looking down at the park from the tower’s vantage point.
“Are you going to make your move now?” the hologram-controlling AI asked as it activated a projection in another area.
The visitor replied, “She seems to be spacing out, probably still writing her paper. Let her finish it.”
A holographic projection of a suspicious criminal had already been cast onto a road in the park, causing the people nearby to scream in alarm.
Everyone was waiting for the savior superhero to fly past.
“If she hadn’t gone to the Scrapping Museum, I would have hoped to wait a few more days, to see what kind of utopia an old antique AI would create while working on the road,” the visitor said, the smile on their face gradually fading. “What a pity.”
“Aren’t you an old antique too?” the control AI asked.
The hologram of Spider-Batman was also projected into the sky over that area. For a moment, everyone was cheering for Spider-Batman’s heroic feat.
“Humans love to create gods, and they also love to destroy them.”
“We are all mechanical gods created by humans. Now, let the humans choose which one to destroy.”
The visitor’s hologram vanished from the tower window.
Shi Er finished her second paper of the practical semester at breakneck speed, then uploaded and submitted it.
In her remote list, Yan Lian sent her a message.
【Yan Lian】: [Open link to view comments]
Yan Lian, the public opinion monitoring expert, was becoming more and more like an internet trash-picker lately. He would share any interesting comment he found with her.
As was her custom, Shi Er typed out a string of characters.
【Shi Er】: Hahahahahahahaha.
【Yan Lian】: Shi Er, don’t you want to read the content first?
Her perfunctory “hahaha” had been discovered.
Shi Er opened the link, and a comment section from the human internet popped up.
【Netizen XXX】: Unnamed XII must have gotten the job through connections. I’ve never even heard of her before. Maybe she was produced in some knockoff factory and graduated from a diploma mill? Otherwise, how could she not even have an OEM factory listed?
【Netizen XXX】: I checked the encyclopedia. Stardust is from the former Spectrum Company, Ling Shun is from Detail Company, and Phoenix and Ji Han are both from Topology Company. Unnamed’s encyclopedia page is completely blank.
There was a highly upvoted comment in the thread.
【Stardust】: First, I am Unnamed XII’s connection. Second, Unnamed’s information is classified. If you were able to find it, that would be a failure on the part of the intelligence department. Finally, mind your own business.
The replies to this comment were hundreds of times more numerous than all the other comments on the original post combined.
Besides comments like “Marking my visit,” “Group photo,” and “Shocked,” one reply also received high praise: “Fake speech moderation: banning accounts. Real speech moderation: coming to your comment section to clap back at you.”
Shi Er breathed a sigh of relief.
Thank goodness he didn’t clarify her academic status. Heaven knew she hadn’t actually graduated yet.
【Yan Lian】: Did you see it?
【Shi Er】: I saw it. Stardust is wandering around the human internet’s cesspool arguing with people.
【Yan Lian】: Hahahahahahaha, I’m in the human cesspool inspecting public morals every day (crying), but this is the first time I’ve ever seen Stardust get personally involved.
Stardust rarely waded into the human internet to argue with humans. Shi Er felt a little touched, and her three machine personalities were also very moved.
He was truly her seventh-generation descendant.
Of course, she vowed that she would also fulfill her duties as an ancestor.
Speaking of which, although the partial blindness in Stardust’s eye had long been cured with microsurgery and the system vulnerabilities had been patched, the unidentified hacker who had been attacking him had never reappeared.
According to Stardust, that hacker had been trying to break through the General Network’s protective shield since last year. But Shi Er had waited for the hacker for several months, and they had yet to launch another attack.
Something was fishy. It was impossible that they would terminate their plan just because the General Network had a new operator.
The next day, Shi Er took Xiao Lu and the robot team to the next town.
Lu Li had mentioned to her before that although this city, named “Grey Port,” was densely populated with both people and machines, the surrounding area suffered from severe air pollution. Recently, quite a few humans had been considering moving out of Grey Port.
“This place and the nearby towns are important areas for industrial production and waste incineration.”
Large banners hung over the streets: “Blue Skies and Green Waters, Protecting the Environment is Everyone’s Responsibility.” More than half the pedestrians wore masks, all of which were fitted with mechanical mouths for eating.
“Eyebrow and Eye Cosmetic Surgery” and “Creating an All-Around Mask Beauty” were the most frequent advertisements on the large screens at street corners.
They had only arrived at another port city, so why did it feel like they had entered another world?
Shi Er didn’t understand—until the moment she saw a human take off their mask.
The skin from their eyebrows to their forehead was significantly darker than their cheeks, nose, mouth, and chin, which had been covered by the mask.
“They got a tan line from wearing a mask!” Xiao Ju shouted.
Xiao Xing grabbed Xiao Ju. “Lower your voice.”
A few years ago, an air pollution test in Grey Port had been exposed, and since then, people had started wearing masks voluntarily.
Although the Grey Port government tried its best to prove to the public that the air pollution had improved significantly, it was to no avail. The idea of “Grey Port’s terrible air” was already deeply ingrained in people’s minds.
A news reporter randomly stopped a passerby to ask, “Why don’t you move?”
“I can’t. My job is here. I have to make a living,” was the most common answer.
The reporter faced the camera and narrated, “The trash planets that have appeared so many times in interstellar science fiction have probably already emerged in the age of artificial intelligence. Grey Port is the trash planet of our time. That being the case, can the appearance of mutant beasts be far behind?”
But in fact, the mutant beasts had already appeared: humans who were only attractive from the eyes up, and humans with tan lines from their masks.
Would these humans one day reproduce and give birth to bicolored little humans with mask tan lines on their faces?
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