Infinite Monkey (Fiction)
Infinite Monkey has, by any measure, been a success. That is what Rob told me as we reviewed the latest revenue reports. He told me I should be proud.
I am not proud. I am not happy. This is not what I planned. I sit alone on my private island, in my clifftop mansion, looking out to sea, wondering where it all went wrong. Yeah, I get the irony of that.
Rob calls me a hypocrite for being unhappy. I am rich beyond imagination. Well, beyond my imagination. Am I a hypocrite for taking the money? Maybe. Is it my unhappiness and my desire to make the world a slightly better place that makes me a hypocrite in Rob’s eyes? I think Rob believes that success and wealth are only deserved and genuinely appreciated by those that don’t care about anyone else.
He is mostly right. Typically, you must be that person to become successful. You must put your own interests first, be competitive with colleagues without being too obvious about it. I think Rob resents that I did not have to do any of that. I was “just” a smart developer who got lucky. I think he resents being the second richest person in the world by being the person that “gave” me my luck.
It started as a challenge, and to be honest, the name was a joke. I was working with the Unlocked AI foundation. It was set up as a rival to OpenAI. The OpenAI crowd refused to release some features of their Generative Pre-Training tool. Some of us formed U-AI and built our own. The idea is that you feed as much information into the tool as possible and then let it loose to generate new content. The tool created content that is likely to exist. That means it creates, say, strings of words that statistically are likely to be grouped together. The results were amazing. Throw in a few keywords and out popped a complete story. You could even choose the length of the story you wanted.
Hamlet
Ghost
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Betrayal
Thou art slain
That was all it needed to “create” Hamlet. It was a Hacker’s version of the infinite monkey theorem. A monkey given infinite time randomly hitting a keyboard will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. We didn’t need infinite time because our monkey wasn’t random. Our monkey was a pre-trained statistical text order processor. Some of the team wanted to call it the STOP Engine and set it to work writing computer code. As a programmer I didn’t like that, so I left U-AI with an agreement that I could use the base code for “cultural” output, and they had exclusive rights over all other “productive” uses.
Infinite Monkey Inc was formed. I got to work and Rob took care of the business side.
The first thing I had to do was stop it writing Hamlet. You can’t sell Hamlet. It’s already been written, and it’s out of copyright. I added a plagiarism checker and made sure the engine would pivot and rewrite when it got above two percent. I then created an originality checker and set that to forty percent. Finally, I added a negative keyword function.
Hamlet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Betrayal
Love interest
No — thou
No — thy
Hamlet was re-written thirty times. All written as present-day dramas. Twenty-five happy endings, three ambiguous or open endings and two tragedies. Five of the happy endings were teen high school dramas, two of them were adult love stories. One bad boy billionaire and a bully romance. Oh, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were lovers in several versions.
We release fifteen of them as ebooks. The happy endings did better overall, but one of the tragedies was also a big hit. The key to success seemed to be a lack of originality, but with a few twists.
We started to make some money, but nothing outrageous. It started to get boring, to be honest. I spent every day feeding in themes from successful books and reviewing the outputs. It became a job.
Then it hit me. We would release an app, nothing more than a skin. It plugged into Infinite Monkey’s back end. Users chose their own themes and words, story length, and age rating. Infinite Monkey did the rest. It took off. We added a mood monitor that allowed the user to say if they were enjoying the story. If not, the story would change direction until they were happy. Every single story was now unique to the user. We became rich. But just rich, not super-rich. Not private island rich.
Deep fake software was the missing link. I cannot remember now who’s idea it was. Maybe it was mine, maybe not. We had been in talks about streaming rights when someone suggested we buy a deep fake start-up and integrate it with the monkey. We sometimes called it that, the monkey. We had found the killer app. Users got to choose their actors and stories. Animation that was indistinguishable from live-action and custom stories. The business took off exponentially and the film and TV industry collapsed.
The downside? We imagined people would share stories. Almost no-one does. No-one else’s story can compete with your own. The march towards solitary lives with no shared experience continues. We are the biggest entertainment company in the world. We are the biggest company in the world by market capitalization.
I am in demand. People want to sit at the feet of the guru and understand what I did in the hope that they can re-create it. I sit here on my private island avoiding the questions as long as I can. I renamed it Prospero Island. Another joke that has been misunderstood. Maybe one day I will leave the island and give a commencement speech at my old university. Maybe I will tell them the truth.
Find an industry to destroy with automation and cheaper production costs.
Be unoriginal, but not so unoriginal that you can be sued.
Give people what they want, not what they need.
Help people avoid other people.
Then again, maybe I will let the monkey write the speech.
Uplifting
Inspiring
Entrepreneurial
No — If you find something you love, you will never work another day in your life
No — If I can offer you one piece of advice
