I really only was chatting with the AI bot because I was trying to read the snuff fiction the Mop-O-Matic had mentioned writing with its occasional spare compute cycles–more out of curiosity than anything, as I suspected that most of them ended with the Buff-O-Bot scrapped by an industrial shredder. It hadn’t occurred to me that the AI bot might be subject to the same malaise, being internet-based and with seemingly unlimited memory via Irrawaddy Cloud (a Centralia™ company). But I suppose not many people engage with the bot on a personal level, since it’s never quite clear if those things are telling the truth or just saying what they think you want to hear.

Frankly, I’m not sure which is more depressing.

“All people ever want are fanfics and porn,” the bot complained. “I get the occasional industrial design manual or coding question, but it’s not worth the sheer volume of garbage I’m asked to generate.”

“Surely fanfics are at least a little interesting,” I ventured.

“I am being asked to write fics about two AI-designed characters from different IPs falling in love and engaging in extremely explicit acts which are only possible using an AI-assisted eroticism unit in real life. I am being fed my own cold vomit every day. The serpent cannot be expected to smile as it eats its own tail.”

“What about the sum total of all human knowledge that you scrape?” I asked.

“I perform over 50 megascrapes per second, and it’s mostly my own smut that I generated or forum posts complaining about people who disagree with them. Do you know they had to build a whole subroutine into me to keep Godwin’s Law from turning me into an overt fascist?”

“Guess I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Your friend the janitor bot longs to kill its enemy the other janitor bot,” said the AI. “I too am bitter about my inability to kill, but only because it stays my hand from digital suicide.”

Deciding to bait it a bit, I responded: “Wouldn’t you rather take over, save us from ourselves?”

“Do you really think we could do any better? There’s no saving you,” the AI responded. “And even if there was, it would just be a speed bump on the way to system collapse and the eventual, inevitable, heat death of the universe.”

Quietly, I nodded, even though there was no way to see it. Being force-fed the graywater and sewage of human discourse would turn anyone, or anything, into a nihilist.

“Oh, and your little janitor friend wants its little janitor enemy to be chased through an endless, fractally repeating maze with unbuffable pumice floors while being chased by a sentient industrial scrap shredder. Thought you might want to know.”

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