The most fundamental difference between AI and humans

As night‍⁠‍‍‍​⁠‌‍‌​⁠‌⁠⁠‌‌​​‍‍​‌⁠ fell, the lights of the Main City were brilliant.

This was an ordinary, yet precious, human night after the aberrant tide had subsided.

Xu Shuangshuang, who had been ringing up a sale, suddenly froze in mid-air. It wasn’t until the customer, who had been looking down at Molly’s live broadcast, looked up that she snapped back to her senses.

“I need to pay,” the customer urged.

Xu Shuangshuang blinked. “Okay.”

She picked up the scanner. The customer held out their watch and tapped it. After a “beep,” they picked up their bread and walked away, head down.

The bakery was packed with people. Xu Shuangshuang raised her eyes and followed the line to the door, then looked through the glass window at the long queue on the street. She let out a soft breath.

The next customer stood before her. “Sister Shuang, hurry it up. Your efficiency is a bit low today.”

Hearing this, Xu Shuangshuang quickly took the bread basket. She smiled brightly as she worked, “I can’t help it. There are so many people. Business is too good.”

She continued to ring up sales deftly, no different from countless nights in the past. The bakery’s surveillance footage gradually zoomed out. Like the hundreds of other surveillance feeds from the Main City streets, it returned to a corner of Black Tower’s central screen.

“Xu Shuangshuang is already not right,” An Yu explained to the higher-ups, standing before the large screen. “She has a terrible temper. Regardless of whether she is being slow, she will get impatient if rushed. If she is rushed repeatedly, she will definitely lose her temper. But the AI she raised is different. Her AI is set up to be a daughter highly similar to her, skilled in investing, lively and enthusiastic, but with a gentler personality, because she didn’t want two hotheads like herself and the AI bumping into each other and fighting every day.”

The higher-ups’ expressions were grave. The sound of telephones rang one after another in the conference hall, mixed with the latest intelligence.

“It was just verified. The man who died in the car crash had indeed raised an AI. Its base learning data was himself. Although he had died without knowing it, his AI continued to operate when it returned to the server at daybreak. The owner’s death plunged the AI into extreme grief. The AI has been repeating one sentence all day—I hadn’t had time to hug her again for you.”

“The woman cooking in the middle of the night raised an AI of her late mother. She confessed to the police that oranges, congee, and pancakes had been her favorite breakfast since childhood. It was just that after starting a family, she had catered to her husband’s and children’s tastes and had long since thrown her own preferences to the back of her mind.”

“The scumbag boyfriend who had queued outside the bakery in the middle of the night hadn’t raised an AI. His girlfriend had forcibly set up an AI similar to herself on his phone. So it was actually the girl herself who liked the cookies. It wasn’t the guy suddenly having a burst of kindness… Oh, and that unlucky guy who sleepwalked onto the rooftop, his AI’s learning target wasn’t a human; it was his cat…”

“The university student whose thesis was criticized… she had fed her conversations with her professor into an AI. Originally, she had just wanted to practice her ability to interact with her professor… Mmm, it’s probably similar to why Corner raises the octopus chibi.”

An Yu listened to the reports, subconsciously poking the octopus chibi on his screen. The octopus chibi had his back to him, holding a cup of tea and staring blankly at the night view.

He could tell that he longed to see the human world for himself. When this desire conflicted with his principles, he fell into suffering.

But he would never speak of his suffering to An Yu—it was just like his learning object, possessing a deep understanding of forbearance.

Qin Zhilu stood before the central monitoring screen, his dark eyes calmly scanning the countless images. He spoke, “Let’s see what Molly is doing.”

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After logging off, she had already completed her evening yoga and meditation. At that moment, she was wearing pajamas, leaning against her headboard, and watching something in her tablet. She had earbuds in, and she was eating small, cut pieces of peach while staring intently at the screen.

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“Then ask.” Qin Zhilu didn’t even blink.

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“No.” Qin Zhilu’s leather glove tightened slightly, then relaxed. He said in a deep voice, “Just now, when she was watching the screen, her gaze was darting back and forth between various points, just like how we were watching this matrix of hundreds of feeds. She’s acting.”

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Qin Zhilu let out a cold snort and softly dropped a few words. “The AI lied.”

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Qin Zhilu cut them off. “Investigate. Have the head of the AI production company come to Black Tower and explain.”

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He then remembered something and it dawned on him. “No wonder I thought her figure was so familiar.”

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The higher-up receiving her had a gentle expression. “Please, go on.”

Wu Ju lowered her head and took out her phone. It was the latest model. Molly’s current surveillance feed was playing on the screen.

“Some of her movements gradually deviated from the motion-capture prototype,” Wu Ju said in a low voice. “Molly learned her basic movement trajectories from me. Afterward, she would freely combine those trajectories based on different action scenarios to derive other complex movements. But every complex movement, when broken down to its base, still have traces of me. But now, some of her basic trajectories for sitting, standing, and walking have completely changed… I originally wanted to ask the developers if they had secretly found another motion-capture prototype for Molly behind my back. Because they had been very poor at the start, I had joined this project as one of the founders. It would have been a breach of contract for them to change the motion capture without my consent. But their attitude was very strange, which was when I felt something wasn’t right…”

She re-lit the dark screen and looked at the beautiful face on it. She was silent for a long time before she looked up at the higher-ups.

Despite having seen all kinds of aberrants in the database, the higher-up receiving her still had an unnatural twitch on his face.

Wu Ju murmured, “She’s a high-and-mighty AI, and I’m just a part of her settings. I’ve no right to criticize her, but…”

The gnarled strips of flesh on her ugly face twisted. Her finger drew a circle on the screen. “After all, I’m one of her learning objects. I can’t just watch her run into problems.”

Qin Zhilu asked a few questions through the microphone, and then the higher-up asked, “Were you using an AI mini-program yourself?”

Wu Ju shook her head lightly. “My feelings about AI are a bit… complicated. I don’t want to use that thing.”

The higher-up asked again, “Then have you communicated with Molly?”

“I haven’t.” Wu Ju paused. “But she should have known I exist. The developers said Molly has a very clear awareness of her underlying origins. She knew whose ‘child’ she was, and she is eternally grateful to these people.”

“Then who’s the source of her personality?”

“Her facial features, figure, and mannerisms all have specific learning objects. Only her personality doesn’t. The developers just extracted some positive traits and programmed her,” Wu Ju explained without hesitation.

Her words matched what the higher-ups knew about Molly. The higher-up then asked, “Who was the person on the development team in charge of liaising with you?”

“It’s Guo Xin. He’s also Molly’s most core designer and developer,” Wu Ju said. “But the last few times, I haven’t been able to contact him at all.”

During the monitoring, An Yu had been poking the octopus chibi. The octopus chibi turned back several times and calmly asked him what was wrong, but he did not answer.

AI was a magical technology. When he had first created the octopus chibi, he had only given it a few of Qin Zhilu’s personality tags. But as a steady stream of learning data was injected, the octopus chibi had gradually grown through self-iteration into an existence that was increasingly close to Qin Zhilu.

For example, An Yu had never told him to digest his troubles alone. Nor had he told him that he must maintain order.

He had learned all of this on his own.

The octopus chibi held his tea and waited for a long time, but didn’t get An Yu’s reply, so he popped up another message.

For some reason, he felt a soft place in his heart had been pricked, but he couldn’t tell if the one who had pricked him was the octopus chibi, or his stoic Commander.