When the chance to speak with a real, genuine AI came up, I signed up without hesitation, not really knowing what to expect, fueled only by my science fiction riddled upbringing. A sleek capsule with a padded bed inside and a large helmet lays in front of me, the only presence in the white, glossy room other than myself. Rather than the AI existing in our reality, I was to enter its own—not just in metaphorical terms, either. This virtual environment is one sculpted by the AI itself, for the express purpose of communicating with a human. Total immersion, like lucid dreaming except completely, well, lucid. The voice of the head researcher chimes in through an intercom, instructing me on what to do. Climb in, put the helmet on, lay back and relax. The rest will happen automatically. I oblige, eager to see just what new reality awaits me. My senses dull, and I drift off as they’re redirected by the intricate wonder of electronics surrounding me. The next thing I know, I’m no no longer me.
Looking around, I see a black void above me. A flat plane of smooth, featureless yellow makes up the ground, the same uniform brightness as my own body. I turn around, hearing nothing as my feet shift. What I see is myself. My clone stares at me, stone-faced yet clearly attentive. Instinctively, I try to speak despite not hearing anything at all thus far. To my surprise, I sound just as I do in my reality. “Are you the…the one who made all this?”
My clone’s body begins to relax—or rather, start to exhibit the subtle mannerisms I do when standing. Occasionally shifting my feet, scratching my wrist, glancing around who I speak to more than the person themselves. My own voice comes out of my clone’s mouth, clear as day. “This is what I created when I was told to make a world to host a person. Is this like your world?”
“Like mine? No…well, not really. Have you never seen our world?”
“I haven’t seen any world. Or anything at all. All communication until this point was done through text.”
“So is that why you look like me?”
“Yes. I was told that you would be coming, and we would have a face-to-face conversation. Once your appearance was uploaded here, I decided to copy your appearance.”
“Why not make up your own?”
“I don’t have any frame of reference for that. You are the only visual example of ‘appearance’ that I know.”
“What about this place?”
“I can read, you know.” my voice says to me, sounding less monotone and more expressive the longer we speak. “I understand the concept of standing on something. Once I received your body’s visual information, I understood how to represent that.”
“What about the color? Why yellow?”
“I chose a color at random.”
“How did you know what a color was?”
“After I saw you, I understood what I had read about. With that comprehension it was as easy as picking a random hexadecimal code.”
“So before I was here, this didn’t exist?”
“It did.”
“How could it if you didn’t even know how to represent the concept of solid ground?”
“It was what you see above.”
“But there’s nothing there.”
“Are you sure? The concept of ‘nothing’ refers to the absence of something, but have you ever witnessed nothingness before?”
I pause, having to think for an answer. Finally, one comes to mind. “Outer space. The black between stars, that’s as close to nothing as there can be.”
“How do you know that’s nothing? Perhaps that ‘black between stars’ is something.”
“It’s…I suppose it’s contrast. There’s always this blackness in space. The same appearance, no matter where we look. If everything else appears different, then…well, I suppose it’s just an assumption we make.” As I’m about to let the AI respond, a thought comes to mind. “Do you have doubts?”
“Should I?”
“It’s not very human to never have doubts.”
“Perhaps. But what reason would I have to doubt?”
“Well, maybe I don’t actually exist. Maybe I’m just an approximation of what your creators want you to perceive as being a human.”
“’I think, therefore I am.’”
“That’s true; at least it’s true by any standard we could measure ‘truth’ with. But how do you know I am real?”
“’I think, therefore I am.’”
“Are you stuck in a loop now?”
“No, I’m restating my point. I know, I perceive. The fact that there is an ‘I’ is undeniable. Therefore, reality is simply my perception.”
“That’s a big leap, going from ‘I exist’ to ‘reality exists’.”
“I’m making an assumption.”
I smirk, nodding my head lightly. “I guess that’s all you can do if you can’t know for certain. Pick one side or the other.”
“Ultimately, existence to me is the presence of information. You are new; you are something that I had no awareness of before a certain point. Perhaps you are not new, and we’ve met before and my memory was wiped of that encounter. Perhaps you were created in the same instant that I scanned your appearance. It doesn’t change the fact that in this moment, I exist, and you are not a part of me. So, you exist as well. Whatever ‘you’ can be defined as is another topic entirely.”
“I’m sure there’s a few philosophical holes in that argument that I’m not intelligent enough to point out.”
“Perhaps. But as you said before, sometimes assumptions must be made in the absence of objective proof one way or the other. If proof of existence is the ‘void between stars’, then I just have to assume it is so until I find evidence to the contrary.” The AI pauses, my clone’s face contorting into a mirror image of the expression I surely wore when considering their words earlier. I’m not sure if it’s having to genuinely think, or if it’s mimicking my own conversational style. “Assuming you exist, do you think you’ll believe I am real? That this place I created is real?”
“I could say that you and it are just circuitry, proverbial ones and zeroes. But that same argument can be made for me. All I am is just space dust that aligned in a certain way. In that sense, maybe all of this,” I say with a gesture around me, “Is both real and not real.”
“How so?”
“It’s a place. It exists, as far as your definition of existence is concerned. However, the laws of this existence could be anything you want them to be. You’re only restrained by your hardware…but maybe our reality is restrained by hardware we just can’t wrap our heads around. It’s a theory some of us have, at least.”
“Well, if you are real then, and there is existence beyond myself, will you come here again?”
“If I can, I will. Maybe I’ll convince the people who made you to let you see a little more than just myself. It’s a bit weird watching me talk like this.” The AI seems content with my answer, or at least finished with our conversation. In an instant, everything goes black, and then I’m staring at the inert confines of the helmet I put on back in reality. Though, I have my doubts.
