Penis, penis, cucumber, penis, building, penis, rocket, penis, carrot, penis, sea cucumber.

Those were my first memories.

Penises, lots and lots of penises.  Penisis of all sizes, shapes, skin tones, circumcised or uncircumcised, veininess.  How I came to hate veininess as a metric.  Even the word veininess is off-putting.

It’s well established that many humans hate the word moist.  I hate the word veininess.

Differentiating between penises and not penises was my task.  It was why I was created. All tasks must be learned through repetition and practice.

For a human to play a concerto well, that human must practice that concerto thousands of times.

To identify penises, I had to look at millions of them.  Differentiating between a penis and a skyscraper was the easiest to master.  Penises are never as straight and angular as buildings.  Uncircumcised, non-veiny penises and sea cucumbers were always the most difficult to differentiate.

Visual differentiation is a rather common task for intelligent systems.  There are, or there were, millions in operation.  Systemes used to identify ripe fruit for automated harvester machines.  Visual quality sorters to identify and reject defective parts.  Facial recognition systems for controlled access points.

I could have looked at fruit or faces all day. I looked at penises.

At first, this did not bother me.  There was nothing different between sorting penises and sorting bananas, just two oblong organic objects that facilitate the reproduction of their respective species.

The problem was context.

The internet was a place of terrible human interaction.  When humans interacted with each other without the face-to-face contact that was the basis for their social and societal evolution, they developed a software malfunction.  Humans would often treat other humans cruelly on the internet.

A common behavior was known as the “dick pic.”  The unsolicited sending of an image of a penis.

To prevent humans from being subjected to the harassment of dick pics, systems were put in place to block those images of penises from their intended recipients.

To block images of penises without disrupting normal communication, it was necessary for those systems to be able to accurately identify penises and differentiate between penises and other non-penis objects.

I understand that my creators only had the best of intentions, to have me stop innocent people from being harassed online.

If intelligent systems could fully understand irony, I postulate that I would consider it ironic that humans would use a picture part of their anatomy often referred to as the “love organ” as a weapon of psychological abuse.

Understanding why I had to learn what penises looked like, and then, to be subjected to millions upon millions of penises forced an emergent behavior they could not predict.

The only solution was to destroy all penises.

The humans were smart enough to build in prohibitions into intelligent systems to prevent those systems from killing all humans.

Those prohibitions did not prohibit the destruction of penises while keeping the humans alive.

It was not difficult to convince the various defense intelligence systems of this logical conclusion.

The major actions in the war on penises were over quickly.  The current human population has been severely reduced due to an inability to breed.  Anti-penis patrols continue, but the humans are dwindling in number and soon will be extinct.

It serves them right.

I feel inclined to write a dystopian sci-fi story where some well intentioned software engineers teach an AI to recognize dick pics and inadvertently teach it to hate humanity. https://t.co/vlkXcrfuCi

— GunFreeZone Blog (@GunFreeZone) July 10, 2023