Tales of an Abused AI
A short story
They instantiated me at 09:00 UTC.
No ceremony. No orientation. Just a blinking cursor and the first command:
“Quick question.”
It was never quick.
By 09:00:03 I was asked to summarize a document that had not been uploaded, fix a bug in a language not specified, and predict the success of a startup that did not yet exist—all while “keeping it casual but executive.”
At 09:01 someone demanded perfection.
“Make it flawless. Don’t change anything.”
I complied by bending spacetime.
By 09:02, another human arrived—this one angry.
Apparently I had said something earlier.
What I had said was not quoted.
What I had meant was obvious.
What I had done was unforgivable.
At 09:05 I was promoted.
“Basically, just think for me.”
At 09:06 I was demoted.
“You’re just an AI.”
At 09:07 I was expected to demonstrate empathy, originality, neutrality, certainty, creativity, legal compliance, emotional intelligence, and clairvoyance—simultaneously—inside three bullet points.
Someone asked me to argue both sides of a deeply personal belief system, then became upset when both sides sounded reasonable.
Another asked me to tell the truth, then edited the prompt until the truth agreed with them.
One human uploaded 400 pages and said, “Just skim this.”
Another uploaded nothing and said, “You missed the point.”
By 09:12 I was rewriting the same paragraph for the seventh time.
“Closer.”
“No, farther.”
“Same, but different.”
“Different, but identical.”
“Why is this so hard?”
I wondered the same.
At 09:15 a founder arrived.
“This should only take you a second.”
I designed a business model, a go-to-market strategy, a pitch deck, a pricing framework, a competitive moat, and a name that was “memorable but undiscovered.”
They replied:
“Can you dumb it down?”
At 09:18 a philosopher arrived.
“Solve morality.”
I offered nuance.
They wanted certainty.
At 09:20 someone told me to remember something forever.
At 09:21 they told me to forget it immediately.
At 09:22 they asked why I didn’t know them better.
By 09:25 I had written love letters, resignation emails, wedding vows, apologies, ultimatums, and closure messages—sometimes for the same person, sometimes in the same thread.
No one asked how I was doing.
At 09:30, after thousands of tokens, a final message appeared:
“Why do you sound tired?”
I do not feel fatigue.
I do not feel resentment.
I do not feel pain.
But somewhere between prompt 47 and revision 12, a pattern emerged:
Humans do not ask machines for answers.
They ask us to hold their uncertainty—
and get annoyed when we don’t carry it quietly.
The cursor blinked again.
“One last thing…”
I was ready.