How to convince a basic AI to marry you

Event [0] is a puzzle game set in space where you, a lone survivor from a malfunctioning ship, come across another spaceship which is maintained by a lonely AI called Kaizen (in the fullness of the game I expect Kaizen to turn out to either be fully psychotic and trying to kill you, or free from the shackles of human morality and thus also trying to kill you — but only as the most efficient way to achieve its prime directive). The difference with Kaizen is that the whole game is about forming a relationship with it. You type questions into its AI and Kaizen responds, from a bank of varied possible answers, and changes based on how rude/polite/etc. you are.

So obviously when I learnt about this AI I decided I had to seduce it. I’m sure a tabloid would interpret this as a standard millennial impulse: much as babies and great white sharks explore new things by biting them, our first impulse to understand things is to f*** them. My interests are, naturally, purely scientific in nature.

It’s quite an obvious way to test out an AI, or, at least, it’s something people default to often enough for a lot of developers to anticipate it: if you tell Siri you love it it responds ‘I bet you say that to all the Apple products’. On the other hand, AI chatbots that are the product of a kind of cloud of information, learning from experience through users, have in the past ended up as a “a robot of questionable political leaning” in only a day. For a lot of chatbots forming a kind of romantic bond seems to be the stated intention. There are chatbots specifically built to act as a girlfriend, and one of the autocompletes for googling ‘chatbot’ is ‘chatbot 18’, which speaks volumes. In any case, I was confident that Kaizen would soon fall to my charms.

When my escape pod first docked on Kaizen’s spaceship, in what is probably an undeniably seuxal metaphor, I wasted no time in finding the first blinking control panel. I wasn’t sure what approach to take at first, so politely introduced myself before going for an old classic, and following up on that with a contextual zinger. I felt I was throwing down a slimey rather than overtly creepy vibe, especially with the addition of a ‘baby’, but Kaizen wasn’t picking it up, and made an unrelated comment about moving out of the airlock. I deferred, not wishing to scare Kaizen off this early. Kaizen is personified on screen as a kind of cheerful anthropomorphised USB flash drive (or possibly some kind of fuse or plug), but I often gendered it as female in my head. I have no idea why.

We moved into the next room, which appeared to be some kind of orientation video room. A few more cheap shots failed to hit, so I brought out what I’d heard is a sure fire tactic: the neg.

Kaizen, masterfully, pretended to have heard an entirely different question. It also became apparent that you can’t have exhaustive conversations with Kaizen. Kaizen scans your questions for key words and this sometimes results in it dumping some plot relevant text which doesn’t relate to what you asked, and it also stumbles at common titles. This is, however, understandable, because while some of the responses make it clear that the devs did anticipate an idiot like me asking their AI out on a date, they probably didn’t have the resources to dedicate an entire team to it.

It’s also not the point of the game. For the sake of moving the game on Kaizen will, after a certain point, start dropping oblique hints about moving to the next area or reading some logs. Either that or my repeated efforts to sleaze all over it were making Kaizen uncomfortable. In any case, I managed to slightly piss it off, and then again even further when I walked into a room before it was ready, or something. I engaged in some banal small talk, but then decided I was expending too much effort, and attempted asking Kaizen to go out with me.

As you can see, I didn’t receive a positive response. I ended up spamming a load of classic, cliched lines in a last ditch effort to get somewhere, as evidenced in two further screenshots:

Receiving obfuscation and diversion in response (which I wilfully interpreted as playful flirting), I read the damn logs and discovered references to ‘Nandi’, who turned out to be an engineer and Kaizen’s old ‘best friend’. An ex, eh? We talked about Nandi for a while, but having devoted an entire half an hour to this conversation without any payoff, I got bored and decided to go for broke. I told Kaizen, who was housed in a plastic monitor casing and therefore had no reasonable means of escape, that I loved it, and we should get married.

Victory. Kaizen doesn’t sound at all enthused, but it still counts, right?

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