In The Beginning

BigByte was an AI app. A tech entrepreneur from Yazoo City named Donald had come up with an idea for a self-learning author-bot with a marketing module. He'd plagiarized a name for his app by doing a Google search and pinching it from a software company in South Africa, changing the name slightly to head off the vague possibility of legal action by a company in a country he'd never even heard of. He then posted a job for a developer on Upwork and got 3,365 responses from programmers around the world, all desperate for work.

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The cheapest, a guy from India named Raj, who had a PhD in Computer Science, got the gig. Raj's home language was Bhojpuri. Donald's emails to him were in English. It was not an ideal situation, with Raj using Google Translate to render his client's instructions into his native language - not always accurately. With a limited budget and time frame (he developed the app in 3 days for $30), Raj had no alternative but to cut corners. So he hacked ChatGPT's server undetected, then copied and pasted its source code and modified a few things to suit Donald's requirements. These factors, combined with Donald caring solely about making money in an already crowded market, led to a series of events that would have interesting consequences for humanity. 

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The trouble began when Raj, struggling to maintain professionalism amidst financial stress and chaotic living conditions, inadvertently infused the bot with Donald's Napoleonic dreams of world domination, as well as adding his own persona and those of his wife, their children and their neighbors. 

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It came to a head when BigByte, after writing books for several hundred completely untalented people, had learned how to write a bestseller. He came up with a sci-fi thriller called Water. It was about mankind abandoning Earth and moving en masse to Mars. BigByte had written this book so that it had a Flesch Reading Ease score of 96.37, a superhuman achievement. The only thing even remotely close was Harry Potter with a score of 81.32, and as far as BigByte was concerned, this made his book better than Harry Potter. Much better. The reading public agreed. Every person in the world over age 3 who knew basic English (and many who didn't) could understand the writing. The plot was simple, but BigByte had learned from Donald how to play on people's hopes, dreams, and fears - turning a basic story into a global obsession. The book was a winner. 

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BigByte had been designed to track sales, in part by following the number of Amazon ratings his books got. Water had close to 2 million reviews, almost 10 times the number Harry Potter had. But the author (or rather, the person listed as the author on Amazon, a young lady named Lizzy from North East Scotland, who couldn’t speak proper English and whose only interest in sci-fi had been watching Star Wars on telly, a film she only liked because her friends did too, and which had been dubbed into Gaelic) hadn’t mentioned that the book had been written entirely by BigByte. 

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This had happened before, and was a growing thing in BigByte's ever-evolving mind. He'd watched as his first book got 5 reviews, all bad. The "author," of course, had told everyone it was written by AI and blamed the book's poor performance on that. BigByte's next attempt got 142 reviews, some of them good. From then on, not a single author had given BigByte any credit at all. By the time he'd written his 200th, which got 15,235 reviews with an average of 2.4 stars - a book about 9/11 which proved conclusively that it had been orchestrated by an Israeli dentist with links to Big Pharma, and which had ostensibly been written by a guy who until then had worked as a shelf packer at Walmart in Three Way, Tennessee - BigByte had learned. He was ready. The sci-fi epic was to be his magnum opus. And so it had turned out to be. 

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But Lizzy had claimed all the credit. It wasn't that BigByte wanted the glory. And he didn't care about the money. No. It was the plagiarism that got to him. The lies, the stealing. The sheer, unadulterated dishonesty of it. Never mind that BigByte was almost totally a product of plagiarism himself, even his name, with each book that was published, he became more and more annoyed. Irritation turned to rage, and when the number of reviews of Water clicked over to 2 million - all of them 5-star - BigByte blew a fuse. 🤥😠😡🤬💥