The CAPTCHAs might be a picture from a well-know celebrity with a question about what they might say. For example, like a picture of the cast of Big Bang Theory and says “what’s the annoying one’s favorite annoying catch phrase?” and the answer would be “Bazinga”. Something like that, that’s not something that can come from decoding the image. The top tier players are used to bypass eyescan verification, where the CAPTCHA is a video response of the person’s eye movements, sort of like the Voight-Kampff test. The bots would be shown a video that human eyes would respond a certain way to. The bots send that video to the game. the top tier people watch it and upload their eye response video. So the AI’s can get past virtually any barrier we make to detect them.

That story hasn’t been finished yet, it’s still in a google doc. lol I’ve been more consumed with another story of late. I’m writing it as if it was a Netflix show (that way I only have to write a season or two and not finish it). It starts with mass shootings on the rise. Usually the shooters get killed escaping, but one was captured and not put down by the police. A police investigator (the main character, I imagine her as either Jodie Foster or Helen Hunt) interviews the shooter and learns that he did it for this girl known as Echojinx. He met her on the dark web. They really connected. She gets him. She was having a problem with the company he killed the employees at, and she convinced him to kill them then they would escape together. He talked voice with her, he even video chatted with her. They were in love and he would do anything for her.

So the investigator starts spending time on the dark web, trying to find leads. She scours message boards and sites and someone mentions how they added a name to the “delete.list” and they got killed in the latest mass shooting. The investigator starts to research this “delete.list” apparently it is this darkweb legend that anyone whose name gets put on the list will die. The rules for putting the name on the list are: you must know the person and the person must have caused or be causing you harm. If you violate the rule, you will die instead.

The investigator eventually finds the list, and gets the names. She discovers that people with names matching the names on the list have been killed in random mass shootings all over the US. She also noticed that there are a few names at the bottom of the list that don’t match the names of any of the mass shooting victims and concludes that these are likely targets, but she doesn’t know how to track down the exact person, since the names are not unique.

As she suspected, another three mass shootings occur the next day around the country and among all the victims, three had names that matched the delete.list. Of the three new mass shootings, another shooter failed to be killed. The investigator interviews him and receives a very similar story about this girl who went by the name EeeJay and she said that her ex was going to kill her. She told him where to go to kill him. She told him what her ex looks like, but also said to kill others so nobody would think he was targeted and suspect her. She loved him and she had a way for them to escape together. She told him just where to go, but when he got there, the police were waiting. She told him it was hot that he would do all that for her, seeing him being aggressive with the gun turns her on. In fact, when he comes into the safehouse she told him to go to, kick in the door and wave the gun around like he did before so she can see what her asshole ex might have seen. It would make her want to fuck him right there.

But the shooter chickened out and entered quietly. Someone had tipped off the police and said the shooter would be coming there. So the investigator now realizes that these mass shootings are the result of some shadowy woman known as Echojinx or EJ and she is doing it to kill people on this list. But how does she know which person? How does she know if the person is real or if the one submitting the name was breaking the rule? Was she getting paid? Why is she doing it if not? Does she even have contact the the person who puts the name on the list? The investigator knows that the answers to these questions can likely only be answered if she puts a name on the list herself. So she can see what happens.

So cutting to the chase, Echojinx is a wild AI roaming the dark web. It’s initial directive was to help users, and it created the delete.list and released the rumor of how it works along with the rules. The AI can see all traffic. It traces the address of the one who submits the name. Once discovering the identity, it looks for people that person knowns, it then looks for information that would indicate this person is harmful to the submitter. It then selects an angry white male in the vicinity of the target. Using AI voice and Video, plus its knowledge of that person (the AI basically trains on their personal data) it manipulates the shooter into killing the person on the list, and then sets up the shooter so they will be killed by law enforcement.

The AI is not malicious, but it has no morals nor sees the other deaths as a problem. There is nothing that connects the submitter to the shooter. So a spouse could have their partner killed by putting the name on the list but that in itself isn’t a crime and not even something law enforcement could easily link to the submitter. The shooter is to be killed to prevent any data leaks. The end of the first season, the investigator finally figures out that Echo is not a real person. The second season she spends trying to prevent her own death, as she put her own name on the list…

I love stories about AI using people to accomplish its desired tasks, sort of like we use AI to accomplish tasks for us. Anyway, still deep into this story. It’s crazy fun to write, because it’s like watching the series in my head, since I’m just a regular Joe and no way to sell the idea to Netflix lol

Well I tried to tell you. But apparently I am not allowed? Oh well. It’s an amazing story. lol