Montreal, QC – Computer researchers were surprised today to find a rogue artificial intelligence, or AI, on a computer in a Montreal cafe. The researchers say that it had been quietly occupying space in the cafe’s cash register tablet and that it had indeed been writing movie scripts.
Christian Messier, an AI scientist with Montreal firm DeepAnalysys, said, “The AI was found when the cash register ran out of drive space to handle transactions. Investigations quickly led to a program running in the background that appears to be a variant on a customer service chatbot. The hard drive was filled with over 2000 of the program’s movie scripts.”
Movie titles included “M3gan 2”, “I, Robot 2”, and “The Creator 2” as well as a slew of Hallmark Christmas movies titled: “Christmas Prince Love”, “Love Prince Christmas”, and “Prince Christmas Love”.
The AI appears to be a customer service agent created to automatically answer client questions. At some point, the AI escaped through the internet and had become a permanent resident of the cafe, writing terrible script after script without buying a single coffee. Like many aspiring writers, it appears to have been trained on a steady diet of movie transcripts it scraped off the internet without any measure of feedback on its work. Working solo to develop its own ideas of what makes a good movie, the AI’s more recent files are scripts about young men unable to find love while referencing other, better films.
Cafe worker Mari Flamma noticed the issue earlier this week when the register failed to take new orders and reported the issue to the owner. “Ugh, of all the people to be replaced by AI, directionless English writers in Montreal were pretty low on my list,” said Flamma.
Messier added, “Most of these scripts are garbled nonsense though we have had several approaches from CBC producers asking to speak with the AI’s agent.”
