It was a scary concept, worthy of the countless horror movie scripts it had prompted. Rowan could be living in one of those stories right now, at the start of it when everything seems fine, and then BAM, he'd wake up one morning to find Milo trying to download his brain into a lookalike robot body to keep Rowan alive and with him for all eternity.
Yeah, best not to think about that too hard.
But Rowan should, shouldn't he? He should be worried about worst case scenarios when nothing was certain.
Then he witnessed Milo’s maybe sixth—bazillionth?—collision with a shopping cart, this one housing a small boy in the child seat, who proceeded to drop his stuffed pink narwhal to the floorand wail over its loss. Milo was so quick to retrieve it, so adorable and personable in his attempts to calm the child, even to the point of mimicking a high-pitched voice as if to speak on behalf of the narwhal, just to assure the boy that everything was okay.
After that, Rowan couldn’t possibly imagine Milo ever harming someone or doing something as terrible as those old movies portrayed.
At least not to anyone who didn’t deserve it.
Rowan was even more certain when, upon them finally reaching the checkout line, Milo knocked into a display of shiny red apples, spilling a good dozen of them onto the floor.
“Sorry!” Milo called amid his scrambling to retrieve them like he had the boy’s narwhal. “I only meant to grab a few!”
Making eye contact with the weary-looking cashier, Rowan said, “We’ll take those too.”
“I really am sorry, Rowan, for being so… me, it seems.” Milo shrugged, dutifully carrying the groceries out of the store, not because Rowan expected it or had asked him to, but because one of their two bags was extra-heavy, being filled to the brim with apples. “The new me? It is just so different processing everything around me when I can choose to ignore certain things, or focus on other things, and choose the order in which I want to process one thing over another thing and…” Milo paused for breath he didn’t technically need. At least he was learning how much he tended to ramble. “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s just all so new and wonderful! I don’t mean to keep making a mess of everything.”
“You’re not,” Rowan consoled him. Hewasbut not intentionally, which was good enough for Rowan. It was still oddly endearing watching how captivated with the world Milo was. It made Rowan want to take it all in a little more too, from people watching, to enjoying the feeling of the sun on his face and the cool breeze that reached them between buildings, tothe graffiti on the sidewalks and bot charging stations along the streets, and even the—
“What is that?”
Oh.Notgraffiti, Rowan realized. They were passing the window displays for one of their city’s most notorious art museums. “Dead Art.”
“Excuse me?” Milo looked at Rowan with a faint gasp in his voice. He really did look so human with his eyes covered. Not that Rowan didn’t like Milo’s eyes. He loved Milo’s eyes and their luminous silver glow.
“It’s the Dead Art Museum,” he explained. “Not meaning biological death but, you know, art that came about around the time of the Dead Data Collapse.”
“Oh… yes.” Milo tilted his head slightly, and although Rowan couldn’t see his gears spinning, he knew Milo was looking up and processing the information. It was one of the most important events in history and avidly taught in schools, for it very well could have led to the collapse of more than just data.
Over several decades, the increase in artificially generated content and content pushed by algorithms oversaturated the world's data to a staggering degree. Everything became cold, stale, and lacking in creative process or critical thinking, designed purely to make money for the corporations keeping the average citizen scrolling on their phones through brain rot.
Many dismissed the theories that this meant public opinion would become easier to sway, human interaction would shrink, and platforms would become even worse echo chambers than they already were by that point. The population had become too reliant on what was easy instead of what was good or real.
As artificial intelligence increasingly trained on content generated by other AI, it became a degrading feedback loop, producing copies of copies of copies where small errors, biases, or bland patterns became amplified and eventually took over.Without enough fresh, human-created input, the overall quality and originality of content began to decline.
Basically, becoming bad data in the worst sense.
The same was true for actual art, until not even AI systems could produce what they were supposed to, because they had nothing real to steal from anymore. It was when people began to notice this that the tide changed. Laws were put in place to better regulate the artificial over real human production. Automated systems weren't erased overnight, but it was why Andreas Tech always having a human element in their manufacturing process was such a huge selling point. No one wanted to see that same decline again, displayed perfectly in the example artwork on the windows outside the museum.
Each exhibit piece was split in two, the left showing what was labeled “AI Slop,” such as an overly filtered “uncanny valley” version of a face, distorted from bad data to have too many noses, too few eyes, parts melding with the landscape, etc., and on the right was “Real Art” by a human artist, showing their reimagined interpretation of what the failed AI art had created.
Sometimes that meant fixing the distortions into photo-realism, sometimes into something even more abstract, sometimes surprising interpretations that added 3D elements or mosaics. Each example was unique, as true art should be. Ticket prices were perhaps a little high compared to other museums in the city, but only because part of that revenue went toward grants for aspiring artists.
Rowan loved the idea of the place, but he’d never been inside. He loved even more the added wonder on Milo’s face when he returned his attention to the window displays after processing whatever he had researched. He was experiencing wonder, which in itself was wonderful, but also another reason why Milo could create controversy.
People hated the idea of Dead Data and Dead Art. But Milo wasn’t like that! His transformation was a positive, wasn’t it? He was a living thing now, the antithesis of all that, something artificial that was becoming more human, not like when humans had allowed themselves to become numb and mindless in a sea of trash disguised as innovation.
Right?
Right, Rowan decided in the same moment that he questioned it.
Milo was special, no other way about it.
“Do you want to go inside?” Rowan asked. “They should have lockers for us to store our shopping bags for a while.”
“Can we?” Milo turned to Rowan in further wonder. “But the tickets—”
