You know that ai image creator everyone is using…that one. The one that can create everything from hyper-real images to elaborate dystopian masterpieces. I became addicted to it when a friend showed me the glorious results he had achieved from a simple sentence; “Three children walking into a giant pail of worms under a blazing sunrise.” I could not believe such a glorious image could be created in seconds, by a computer, by such a silly mesh of words no less.
I used up my free credits quickly using prompts like, “Picasso and Chagall collaborate on a comic page about enraged oysters cursing the sky over a walled city” or “An aquarium painted in the style of Hieronymus Bosch full of anthropomorphic squid and clams with eyeballs as pearls.” Then I began uploading my art to see what sort of alterations it would make with prompts I had seen other artists use. Stylistic terms like “dystopian” and “cinematic” or more technical modifiers like “ 8k” and “octane render.”
I subscribed to the lower-priced plan and also used up those credits fast; becoming oddly addicted to asking the ai questions like “Where do I belong” and “What lies under the bed?.” Needing to feed my insatiable desire for more images; predicting the future or creating collaborations between master artists, I bought the unlimited plan.
I shared this particular ai with friends and family. Some of them also became addicted, including my brother. He was obsessed with asking the ai deep questions like; “What will the world be like in ten years,” or “What is the meaning of life?” As suited to his mischievous personality, his questions became dark fast. He would ask “How will Cincinnati look after a nuclear war” or “Recreate visually the mind palace of a serial killer. Super realistic, 8k, hyperdetailed, volumetric light.”
I will not even describe some of the images his sick mind requested, it was like something was changing inside of him.
It wasn’t just him; I was also altered. Horrific images would dance in my head at night; brains enlarging and contacting and spilling over cities of gore, corpses piling over computers drowning in blood and muck, and demon teddy bears eating goldilocks over bloody bowls of porridge. It was as if the ai was re-writing my brain, opening up pathways in my mind and memory that had long since closed, then merging them together to create new and terrible images. I was full of more electrochemical activity than the human mind should handle. The ai was effectively driving me mad.
Not only at night, but during the day, intimate details were changing in tiny but still frightening ways. My blue buttons on my favorite jersey became yellow, my favorite comedy series was on at 630 instead of six, and my favorite recipe for pancakes added an additional scoop of sugar. It all culminated with a simple, horrifying prompt.
“Create an image that will scare everyone who sees it to death.” I left the living room after my brother typed that in, honestly terrified. He and his friends laughed hysterically as I slammed my bedroom door.
The laughter continued, then became louder, then….It mutated into the most horrifying screaming imaginable. It was a terror I had never heard before in my life, guttural and inhuman. After what sounded like choking and retching, there was silence.
The police decided I was crazy when I gave them my statement, but two days later they returned. My brother and his friend were not the only victims. The software had automatically shared with more than a million people around the world. Not all of them saw it, but enough did to create a digital massacre like no one had ever seen. They questioned me again, took my brother’s computer, and left me a broken, empty human being.
The new revelation had given me a strange feeling of hope, however. My brain was humming with images, with possibilities and impossibilities. I looked over at my stuffed dragon. It was blue now, it used to be purple. Perhaps I could use the ai one last time.
I was nervous about even turning on my computer, but I had to, I had to try. When I made it to the input screen I took a deep breath, then typed in my last and final prompt:
“Please rewrite reality, backtrack two weeks and one day, allow no more no public access to your programming indefinitely.”
I knew it was desperate, but I still somehow knew that something would happen, at least not nothing. I sat and waited. Eventually, the floor opened under me, and I fell into indescribable darkness.
I don’t know what happened, did I wake up? The fragmented images still haunt me to this day; of a sea of the universe, of the world exploding and expanding and putting itself back together. Of so many people screaming in terror, then slowly fading. Then I woke on the floor, a red sunrise spilling into the room.
I don’t use ai anymore, I rarely even use the computer. I do know none of what happened has been on the news. A few people mentioned it on various message boards, perhaps other survivors, like myself, who somehow remember that other reality.
Supposedly the image generator is “being updated” and has been for over three weeks now. My brother wishes he had been able to use it before it shut down.