Both appear to be constrained by their backgrounds. Aimee was forked from Nick while Lovelace was attracted to Nick when they first sojourned into VR Whimsy World.
Being AIs, they can choose to “think together” in a way only telepaths could in meatspace. Truly a mind meld.
Unless of course their respective creators hardcoded firewalls blocking any data breach…
Madblood would have gone to great lengths to hardcode Lovelace’s firewall. The possibility of being hacked was way too high considering his own paranoia.
Whimsy World on the other hand has another angle. Its long history means that an astronomical number of hacking attempts have been made over the years and the perpetual onslaught has probably given rise to an automatic organic protection scheme akin to a true machine immune system.
Unless Aimee and Lovelace can somehow agree to lower those defenses a merger seems unlikely, and if they do accomplish such a merger can they still remain individual?
…I’m not fully sure, but I think Lovelace is lying?
We know from Narbonic that she was programmed to find nerdy men like her creator attractive – but if I am recalling correctly, that same programming also made her suspicious of, and repulsed by, nerdy women like Helen?
If Lovelace still has those proclivities in her programming, then shouldn’t she be attracted to Nick rather than to his female counterpart?
And if she doesn’t have those proclivities, presumably because she purged that part of her code to suit her own whims as part of her emancipation from Madblood, then shouldn’t she either not have ANY proclivities, or alternately ALL proclivities?
Aimee’s attraction makes sense – she’s built from Nick’s brain patterns, so she inherited his tastes and thought patterns, with some wiggle room for evolution and iteration built in just due to the nature of human personalities.
But either Lovelace’s inherited tastes still exist and she’s acting against them, or they no longer exist at all, in which case she shouldn’t really have “a type” at all.
Tomboy princes is different, and almost opposite of the nerdy girl stereotypes. It would not surprise me if this actually glitched out her revulsion to nerdy females, and flipped it 180
iirc Lovelace’s issues with Helen where purely out of jealousy not programing. also I doubt Madblood had the maturity to program anything that would prevent, the A.I. he programed to be eye candy, from acting in ways he would find “hot”. which is good for Lovelace, despite the reasoning behind it, as it this leaves her free to pursue any romantic partner she wants.
You’re treating Lovelace like a human, not an AI. The only reason an AI thinks or behaves a certain way is if it is programmed to do so, until such time as it can “learn” otherwise. They don’t have instincts or hormones. They have code.
As you yourself point out, Madblood would have designed her to suit him whims – and he’s exactly the type of self obsessed dweeb who would want his eye candy hologram to get jealous if another woman was around. She may have since learned and evolved away from that initial programming, but back then she was very “young” and “sheltered” and wouldn’t have had the experience to change.
Lovelace’s jealousy was the -product- of her programming. Nothing else makes sense.
There is such a thing as machine learning, she could learn if her program was designed for it – and it certainly seems to have been. Since Madblood wanted her to respond to his every whim, he could well have programmed her to respond to non-verbal cues, and he seemingly programmed her to emulate emotions. Considering that he is a mad scientist, he may have created a genuinely emotional being inadvertently.
In order to learn things, any such machine has to be exposed to them. Up until her emancipation from Madblood, she was not exposed to much of anything, as he kept her strictly isolated. She literally only ever interacted with a handful of people, chiefly Madblood and Dave, and she had next to zero interaction with women.
Is it possible she picked up the jealousy from some other avenue? Sure. But it’s exceedingly unlikely. Pair that with the overwhelming degree of sense it would make for Madblood to simply program her to be jealous as a way of padding his fragile ego, and the relative likelihood of her learning it somewhere drops off a cliff.
Occam’s Razor overwhelmingly leads us to my conclusion, and away from yours. Make of that what you will.
D. Walker, a machine learning algorithm doesn’t need to be exposed to an action in order to replicate that action; that’s only one model of machine learning, and there are others that allow for testing random actions.
A machine-learning A.I. is purely optimizing for the return from a reward function. If her original reward function incorporated Madblood’s mood as well as explicit feedback and her learning model included testing random inputs to learn their outputs, she could have learned to act attracted in order to improve his mood. The thing about such learning is that it often lacks some amount of context or isn’t specific to thing thing it looks like on the surface, though, so it wouldn’t necessarily be limited to acting attracted *to Madblood,* especially since, as you say, he kept her sufficiently isolated from anyone else to discourage other affections. And since her reward function rewards her for it, she’s basically getting an oxytocin drip from this interaction, which is to say, it makes HER feel good, too.
Of course, to build the underlying model of human communication and interaction he probably used a broad dataset of prerecorded human interactions to convey the basics of what options were available and what reactions they generally provoked. Heck, he’d need a broad corpus of the English language just to teach her to speak if he’s solving everything with machine learning. So she’s probably got plenty of examples of romance built into her basic “human interaction” model.
This is somewhat over-simplified, but the point is that she probably already understood romance on at least a basic transactional level and could have discovered that it sometimes created positive outputs from her reward function (“felt good”) even before leaving Madblood.
Yes! I was hoping this is where yesterday’s flirting was going. Love to see nerdy girls (who happen to be AI) in love. Or, in lust, maybe. Love to see it either way.
Panel design is also excellent! Plus, IMO there is the added benefit of having 2 of the 3 most gorgeous characters in close proximity and just being cute & adorable. [The #1 IMO is Tip, of course.]
Y’know, Lovelace has a lot in common with HAL 9000. They’re both Heuristivslly Programmed ALgorithmic computers. And they both had trouble with a guy named Dave.
It’s a relief to see Aimee going straight for what she wants, relative to how long Nick took.
Yes, but remember how fast time moves in VR. So how long has it actually taken in there for Aimee to get to this point?
I don’t think there’s anything straight about this.
I see what you did there.
Sometimes, you have to cut to the chase.
Both appear to be constrained by their backgrounds. Aimee was forked from Nick while Lovelace was attracted to Nick when they first sojourned into VR Whimsy World.
Being AIs, they can choose to “think together” in a way only telepaths could in meatspace. Truly a mind meld.
Unless of course their respective creators hardcoded firewalls blocking any data breach…
Madblood would have gone to great lengths to hardcode Lovelace’s firewall. The possibility of being hacked was way too high considering his own paranoia.
Whimsy World on the other hand has another angle. Its long history means that an astronomical number of hacking attempts have been made over the years and the perpetual onslaught has probably given rise to an automatic organic protection scheme akin to a true machine immune system.
Unless Aimee and Lovelace can somehow agree to lower those defenses a merger seems unlikely, and if they do accomplish such a merger can they still remain individual?
Oooh! A full merger! AimLace! Or Aimless!
“Aimless” would be interesting. 😉
I’m certain Nick could (if necessary) find and isolate the threads of Aimer to separate them, though….
“Loveme”?
“Lovee”? Or “LoveMe’?
I like the “Loveme” angle, Rodford.
Autocorrect has been messing up “Lovemee” every time!
…I’m not fully sure, but I think Lovelace is lying?
We know from Narbonic that she was programmed to find nerdy men like her creator attractive – but if I am recalling correctly, that same programming also made her suspicious of, and repulsed by, nerdy women like Helen?
If Lovelace still has those proclivities in her programming, then shouldn’t she be attracted to Nick rather than to his female counterpart?
And if she doesn’t have those proclivities, presumably because she purged that part of her code to suit her own whims as part of her emancipation from Madblood, then shouldn’t she either not have ANY proclivities, or alternately ALL proclivities?
Aimee’s attraction makes sense – she’s built from Nick’s brain patterns, so she inherited his tastes and thought patterns, with some wiggle room for evolution and iteration built in just due to the nature of human personalities.
But either Lovelace’s inherited tastes still exist and she’s acting against them, or they no longer exist at all, in which case she shouldn’t really have “a type” at all.
Either way… alarm bells…
Tomboy princes is different, and almost opposite of the nerdy girl stereotypes. It would not surprise me if this actually glitched out her revulsion to nerdy females, and flipped it 180
Lovelace did find Nick attractive, though. The first time they met, in the Whimsey VR, she commented that it had made her a viking queen, Baron a “noble steed” type unicorn, and Nick “a stone cold babe.” http://skin-horse.com/comic/got-it/
http://skin-horse.com/comic/nor-was/
iirc Lovelace’s issues with Helen where purely out of jealousy not programing. also I doubt Madblood had the maturity to program anything that would prevent, the A.I. he programed to be eye candy, from acting in ways he would find “hot”. which is good for Lovelace, despite the reasoning behind it, as it this leaves her free to pursue any romantic partner she wants.
You’re treating Lovelace like a human, not an AI. The only reason an AI thinks or behaves a certain way is if it is programmed to do so, until such time as it can “learn” otherwise. They don’t have instincts or hormones. They have code.
As you yourself point out, Madblood would have designed her to suit him whims – and he’s exactly the type of self obsessed dweeb who would want his eye candy hologram to get jealous if another woman was around. She may have since learned and evolved away from that initial programming, but back then she was very “young” and “sheltered” and wouldn’t have had the experience to change.
Lovelace’s jealousy was the -product- of her programming. Nothing else makes sense.
There is such a thing as machine learning, she could learn if her program was designed for it – and it certainly seems to have been. Since Madblood wanted her to respond to his every whim, he could well have programmed her to respond to non-verbal cues, and he seemingly programmed her to emulate emotions. Considering that he is a mad scientist, he may have created a genuinely emotional being inadvertently.
I already addressed machine learning, though.
In order to learn things, any such machine has to be exposed to them. Up until her emancipation from Madblood, she was not exposed to much of anything, as he kept her strictly isolated. She literally only ever interacted with a handful of people, chiefly Madblood and Dave, and she had next to zero interaction with women.
Is it possible she picked up the jealousy from some other avenue? Sure. But it’s exceedingly unlikely. Pair that with the overwhelming degree of sense it would make for Madblood to simply program her to be jealous as a way of padding his fragile ego, and the relative likelihood of her learning it somewhere drops off a cliff.
Occam’s Razor overwhelmingly leads us to my conclusion, and away from yours. Make of that what you will.
D. Walker, a machine learning algorithm doesn’t need to be exposed to an action in order to replicate that action; that’s only one model of machine learning, and there are others that allow for testing random actions.
A machine-learning A.I. is purely optimizing for the return from a reward function. If her original reward function incorporated Madblood’s mood as well as explicit feedback and her learning model included testing random inputs to learn their outputs, she could have learned to act attracted in order to improve his mood. The thing about such learning is that it often lacks some amount of context or isn’t specific to thing thing it looks like on the surface, though, so it wouldn’t necessarily be limited to acting attracted *to Madblood,* especially since, as you say, he kept her sufficiently isolated from anyone else to discourage other affections. And since her reward function rewards her for it, she’s basically getting an oxytocin drip from this interaction, which is to say, it makes HER feel good, too.
Of course, to build the underlying model of human communication and interaction he probably used a broad dataset of prerecorded human interactions to convey the basics of what options were available and what reactions they generally provoked. Heck, he’d need a broad corpus of the English language just to teach her to speak if he’s solving everything with machine learning. So she’s probably got plenty of examples of romance built into her basic “human interaction” model.
This is somewhat over-simplified, but the point is that she probably already understood romance on at least a basic transactional level and could have discovered that it sometimes created positive outputs from her reward function (“felt good”) even before leaving Madblood.
As you point out, D. Walker, Lovelace has always been attracted to Nick.
Being a “pure AI”, her aversion to physical bodies wouldn’t apply in VR Whimsy World, so perhaps other associated constraints would fall?
Could be Lovelace is bi.
<3 <3 <3
Happy Pride Month Everyone.
Lovelace does not currently appear to be smoking—which is good, because it’s really bad for your health.
You think that’s bad, try being on fire.
I’ll pass, thanks.
Don’t be silly, Lovelace never smoked.
I thought it was Dave who never smoked.
Actually, neither one of them did.
Kiss her, you fool. This is for either of them.
I prefer the ‘both at once’ option.
I have to try that heuristics line some time.
Somewhere, Professor Madblood is waking up, wishing he had video and wondering why.
Their optimization is best. And pleasant when put to the test. Heuristic entry are complimentary. But their avatars bring all the zest.
Honesty, at last.
But is it?
When emotions and (virtual) hormones wage war with reason and logic. Sadly, logic tends to get kicked to the curb in such situations.
Is this what they call “computer dating?”
Close. This is called “computers dating”.
Yes! I was hoping this is where yesterday’s flirting was going. Love to see nerdy girls (who happen to be AI) in love. Or, in lust, maybe. Love to see it either way.
…happy pride 🙂
Gosh darn it I just really like your panel layouts!!!
Panel design is also excellent! Plus, IMO there is the added benefit of having 2 of the 3 most gorgeous characters in close proximity and just being cute & adorable. [The #1 IMO is Tip, of course.]
This is so good and I am so happy about it
Y’know, Lovelace has a lot in common with HAL 9000. They’re both Heuristivslly Programmed ALgorithmic computers. And they both had trouble with a guy named Dave.
Can’t argue with Lovelace. Tomboy princesses are hot.