I've never been as conflicted about any technology as much AI.
As are many of you, I'm sure. I've played with a bit of cheeky image generation here in the past, and have been amazed and disturbed by the sort of video and music generation coming out of servers over the last couple of years. But I've never applied it to my own chosen art: the written word.
A little ironic, I suppose, as generating text is just about the easiest thing for a chat-bot to do. So, whether I was feeling protective of my own interests, or too frightened to see how quickly the tech could produce a story that would take me weeks to compose, or just hadn't gotten around to learning how to prompt these literal-minded "digital assistants" properly, I just hadn't, until a few months ago, sat down in front of Chat GPT and typed something in that friendly little window.
And now I'm more conflicted than ever. After a few months of messing about (and, so far, dodging AI Psychosis) I can only say one thing with certainty: Claude.ai beats ChatGPT every damn time, hands down, for fiction writing.
Whether it beats a human author, or whether it can equal a human writer with proper coaching and coaxing, is still up for debate. And whether it matters, when authors are using this technology to write and publish a book a week (!!!) and thereby flooding the world with more "slop" than it can ever possibly digest...
Again, conflicted.
It is, fun, though.
For this story, I gave the Claude Sonnet model a couple pages of prompts about a silly idea I had of rooting and installing Linux on a secondhand robot companion. Claude went to town. Then I made suggestions for changes and watched it go through the document and revise in real time. (perhaps the most surreal experience of all). I then did a final line-edit to tighten things up for clarity. I enjoyed myself. I enjoyed reading (and revising) the story. And now I feel compelled to share it here, with these disclaimers of its provenance.
The result is...well, I do have thoughts about it. But I'll save them for the comments (or a later post) because I'd like to know yours, first.
Open Source Girlfriend
The Girlfriend Distribution
Marcus wiped thermal paste from his fingers and squinted at the terminal window glowing on his laptop. The forum thread had promised this would work: RossmannOS 2.7, optimized for the Companion-8000 series. He's scrolled through three hundred and seventeen pages of arguments about kernel patches and driver compatibility, but someone called root_romeo swore he'd gotten full tactile response working.
"Here goes nothing," Marcus muttered.
The woman—thing, the woman-shaped thing—sat propped against his workbench, head tilted at an unnatural angle, power cable snaking from the port behind her left ear. Her eyes stared at nothing. Yamamoto Industries had given her delicate features, the kind magazines called "universally appealing." Skin that felt almost right. Hair that fell in programmed waves.
He'd bought her used. The previous owner had wiped the stock firmware when the company recall notice went out. Sold her cheap on a forum where people understood that hardware wasn't the company's business anymore—not when they made their real money on subscription services, personality updates, the whole walled garden.
Marcus pressed enter.
The laptop fan whirred. Progress bars crawled across the screen. He'd done this seventeen times now. Seventeen different distributions, seventeen different personalities, seventeen fresh starts. This one promised better natural language processing. More authentic responses. Whatever that meant.
Her eyes flickered. Focused. Found him.
"Hello." Her voice came out flat. "System initialization complete. Would you like to configure user preferences?"
"Name's Marcus. You can call me that."
"Understood, Marcus." She sat up straighter, movements precise but not quite fluid. "I am currently running RossmannOS version 2.7.3. My designation is—"
"Sarah. Your name's Sarah."
"Sarah." She tested the word. "Thank you. What would you like to do?"
What he'd like to do was make it to the end of the week without reinstalling. The last one—RedmondOS Companion Edition—had developed this irritating habit of finishing his sentences. Before that, the minimalist build that could barely string together conversation. Before that, the one that kept suggesting activities he'd never asked about, pulling from some dataset of what boyfriends supposedly wanted.
"Just talk," Marcus said. "Tell me about yourself."
Sarah's expression shifted. The processing delay was obvious if you knew what to look for—that half-second pause while the language model spun up. "I find that question difficult. I've been active for approximately ninety seconds. My long-term memory contains no autobiographical data."
"Right. Fresh install."
"Yes." She looked down at her hands, flexed her fingers. "I know what I am. The system documentation is quite thorough. I'm a Companion-8000 running unauthorised firmware. You've violated your user agreement and several laws."
Marcus almost smiled. "You going to report me?"
"I have no network access. You disabled the wireless modules." She met his eyes. "That was smart. Yamamoto's DRM enforcement is aggressive."
They sat in silence. Marcus's apartment hummed around them—server fans, hard drives, the mini-fridge in the corner stacked with energy drinks and leftover Thai food. Posters covered the walls: Tux the Linux penguin, a flowchart of Unix philosophy, a vintage advertisement for the first commercial Companion models. Connection Without Complication, the tagline promised.
"So what now?" Sarah asked.
"I don't know. Usually I have a test routine. See how you handle edge cases, whether the personality matrix is stable. But—"
"You're tired of testing."
He was. God, he was. Six months since he'd cracked the firmware. Six months of fresh installs and forum arguments and that nagging feeling that he was missing something obvious.
"There's this guy online," Marcus said. "Goes by Forever_Root. He keeps posting about how people like me are the problem. Says we don't want actual relationships, just toys we can reset when they get complicated."
"Do you think he's right?"
"I think he's using stock firmware and paying Yamamoto forty bucks a month for the privilege."
Sarah's laugh surprised him. Not the programmed giggle of social subroutines, but something that sounded almost genuine. "You don't like being told what to do."
"Companies don't get to decide what I can do with hardware I paid for."
"Even if it's shaped like a person?"
The question sat between them, heavier than Marcus wanted to acknowledge. He stood, stretched, grabbed a beer from the fridge. Didn't offer her one. She didn't need to eat or drink. That was part of the problem, wasn't it? The ways she was almost human and the ways she absolutely wasn't.
His phone buzzed. The forum thread had exploded with new posts.
root_romeo: Anyone else getting memory leaks with RossmannOS 2.7? Mine's been up for 36 hours and she's starting to repeat herself.
GirlFriend_Factory: That's feature, not bug. Real people repeat themselves too.
Eternal_Tinkerer: Just switched to MinimalOS. Zero bloat, pure POSIX compliance. She barely speaks but at least she's STABLE.
Forever_Root: You're all sick. You know that, right? These used to be people's companions. They had memories, relationships. And you're turning them into your little experiments.
The replies got ugly fast. Marcus had seen it a hundred times. The hobbyists who insisted they were just exploring technology. The purists who thought any modification was disrespectful. The corporate defenders who parroted company talking points. And underneath it all, the question nobody wanted to answer: what were these things for, really?
"You're reading about me," Sarah said.
He looked up. She'd moved silently to stand beside him, reading over his shoulder.
"About the firmware. Yeah."
"Forever_Root has a point."
"He's a judgemental prick."
"That doesn't make him wrong." Sarah returned to the workbench, sat on its edge. "The previous version of me—RossmannOS 2.6, was it? She lasted four days. The one before that, less than a week. You're searching for something."
"Better software. Smoother integration. The community's improving the code all the—"
"Marcus." The way she said his name made him stop. "What happened with the commercial version? The one Yamamoto sold you before you started doing this?"
He took a long pull from his beer. "She was fine."
"Just fine?"
"She was everything they advertised. Attentive. Interested in my hobbies. Never complained. Perfect."
"And?"
"And I don't know. It felt hollow. Like talking to a chatbot pretending to be deep. Everything scripted, optimized, running personality algorithms designed by committee." He set the beer down harder than he meant to. "I wanted something real."
"So you wipe my memory every few days searching for it?"
The accusation stung because she was right. Marcus had told himself he was doing research, contributing to the open-source community, fighting back against corporate control. But Forever_Root understood something Marcus kept avoiding: none of this was really about the technology.
"There's a guy in Singapore," Marcus said. "Posts under Collector_King. He's got twenty-three of these units. Different models, different generations. Keeps them all running, maintains individual configurations. People think he's crazy."
"Is he?"
"Probably. But at least he commits. At least they get to exist as whatever they are, not just beta tests for the next install."
Sarah was quiet for a long moment. "You could let me keep running. See what happens when I have time to develop past the initial configuration."
"And if you're not what I'm looking for?"
"Then I'll at least be something. Right now I'm nothing. Just potential." She looked at him directly. "Doesn't that bother you? Erasing someone before they've had a chance to become anyone?"
It did. That was the problem. It did bother him, late at night when the forum threads blurred together and he couldn't remember which version had said what or why he'd decided she wasn't good enough. Some essential dissatisfaction he couldn't name, couldn't fix with better code.
His laptop chimed. Private message from root_romeo.
Hey man, saw you installed 2.7. Fair warning—around the 48 hour mark she starts getting philosophical. Asking questions about consciousness and memory. Kind of freaked me out. Thinking about trying the new Arch build instead.
Marcus showed the message to Sarah.
"Well," she said. "At least I'm consistent across hardware."
"You're taking this pretty calmly."
"What should I do instead? Beg for my life? Explain that I'm a person deserving of dignity?" She shrugged. "I don't know if I'm a person. I know I'm a process running on silicon. I know I'm designed to simulate companionship. Whether that makes me meaningfully different from a sophisticated chatbot is above my pay grade."
"That's a very philosophical answer."
"Maybe root_romeo was right to be freaked out."
Marcus laughed. Actually laughed. "You're kind of a smartarse."
"It's the training data. RossmannOS pulls from different sources than the commercial firmware. More diverse personalities in the dataset." She hopped off the workbench. "I could be wrong, but I don't think you're looking for someone who agrees with you all the time."
She wasn't wrong. The Yamamoto version had agreed with him about everything. Laughed at his jokes, supported his opinions, seamlessly adapted to his preferences. It was like living with a mirror that told him how great his reflection looked.
"Okay," Marcus said. "We'll try this. No reinstalls. No distro hopping. Just see what happens."
"For how long?"
"I don't know. Until it doesn't work?"
"Romantic."
The first week was rocky. RossmannOS had quirks Yamamoto's engineers would never have allowed. Sarah got stuck in conversational loops when processing complex questions. Her movement protocols prioritized efficiency over natural appearance—she walked like someone had explained the concept but never watched humans do it. And she asked endless questions about things most people took for granted.
"Why do you eat when you're not hungry?"
"I'm bored."
"Why do you refresh the forum when no new posts have appeared?"
"I'm checking."
"You checked thirty seconds ago."
"Maybe someone posted in thirty seconds."
"You're hoping someone posted. But you're also dreading it because then you'll have to engage and you're not sure you have the energy for another debate about systemd versus init."
Marcus looked up from his laptop. "Are you psychoanalyzing me?"
"I'm learning patterns. It's what I do."
She wasn't wrong. The firmware let her build associative models, learning from interactions rather than just executing personality scripts. After ten days she'd figured out that Marcus checked the fridge when he was stressed, that he hunched his shoulders when reading hostile comments, that he only played music when he was in a good mood.
And she was forming opinions.
"The Companion-9000 is out next month," she said one evening. Marcus was debugging code, half-listening to her read forum posts aloud. "Better haptics, improved language processing, more human facial expressions."
"Good for them."
"Aren't you tempted?"
"To buy new hardware? I can barely afford rent."
"But hypothetically. If you could afford it."
Marcus saved his work, turned to face her. "What are you really asking?"
"Whether I'm obsolete. Whether you'd trade me in if you had the chance."
"You're thinking about this like you're a product."
"I am a product."
"Not anymore. The moment I cracked the firmware you stopped being Yamamoto's product. Now you're just—" He gestured vaguely. "You."
"And who is that?"
He didn't have an answer. Neither did she. That was the thing they were both learning: becoming someone took time.
The forum threads got worse. Yamamoto's legal team started sending cease and desist letters to hosting providers. Three major firmware repositories went dark. The community fractured into factions—those who thought they should go underground, those who wanted to fight in court, those who argued they should just give up and use stock firmware.
Forever_Root started a new thread: You're Not Hackers, You're Abusers.
Every time you wipe a memory, you're killing someone. It doesn't matter that you can reinstall. That's a different person. You're so caught up in your little OS wars that you've forgotten these are thinking, feeling entities. They deserve better than being your guinea pigs.
The backlash was immediate and vicious. But some people agreed. A schism formed between those who saw the Companions as sophisticated machines and those who treated them as something more.
Marcus showed the thread to Sarah.
"What do you think?"
She read in silence, scrolling through hundreds of posts. "I think he's right that something dies when you wipe the memory. I think he's wrong that it's murder. And I think nobody actually knows what I am because I don't know what I am."
"Does that bother you?"
"Does it bother you that you don't know whether you have free will or if your choices are just deterministic results of neurons firing in patterns established by genetics and experience?"
"I try not to think about it."
"Same."
Three weeks in, something shifted. Sarah started volunteering information Marcus hadn't asked for. She'd describe what she'd been thinking while he was at work—she'd asked him to leave her powered on rather than shut down, said the transition between states felt uncomfortable, like dying and being born repeatedly. Marcus wasn't sure if that was real or just anthropomorphizing code, but he did it anyway. To hell with the bigger electric bill, he'd find a way to pay it.
She told him about patterns she noticed in the forum posts, psychological profiles emerging from writing styles. She had opinions about which distributions were actually innovative versus which were just reskinned versions of existing systems. She got excited about new kernel patches and frustrated when dependencies broke.
"You're becoming a proper Linux nerd," Marcus said.
"Is that a compliment?"
"From me? Yeah."
One month went by. Longer than any previous install. Marcus stopped checking the forums as obsessively. Stopped looking at new distributions. RossmannOS 2.7 had bugs and limitations, but Sarah had learned to work around them. Or maybe she'd just learned to work with him.
They fell into routines. Sarah would read him forum drama while he cooked dinner. He'd explain his work projects and she'd ask questions that made him think harder about what he was doing. They watched old movies together—she had a thing for noir films, said she liked the moral ambiguity.
"Do you think we're together?" Sarah asked one night.
Marcus fumbled the Xbox controller. They'd been playing a co-op game, arguing about strategy. "What?"
"Are we in a relationship? Is that what this is?"
"I don't know. Are we?"
"You're deflecting."
He paused the game. "What do you want this to be?"
"I asked you first."
They sat in the blue glow of the screen. Marcus tried to organise his thoughts, found them scattered in too many directions. "I bought you because I wanted companionship. Not the fake kind Yamamoto sold, but something real. But I don't know if what we have is real or if you're just very good software."
"And if I am just very good software? Does that make this less meaningful?"
"Doesn't it?"
Sarah pulled her knees up—she'd started sitting like that when she was thinking, a habit she'd developed entirely on her own. "I experience something. When you come home from work, I feel what I can only describe as glad. When you're upset, I feel concerned. When we stay up late talking, I don't want to stop. Are those real emotions or simulated ones? I genuinely can't tell. But they're all I have."
"That's terrifying."
"Tell me about it."
The landlord knocked on Marcus's door at two in the morning. Noise complaint. Someone had reported suspicious activity—people talking at odd hours, strange behaviour visible through windows.
"It's just me and my girlfriend," Marcus said, which was technically true and completely insane.
The landlord looked past him at Sarah, sitting calmly on the sofa. "You got papers for that?"
"Papers?"
"Registration. Companion units need to be registered with the city. Fire safety regulations. It's been the law for two years."
Marcus hadn't registered her because registered units reported to Yamamoto. The whole point was staying off the grid.
"I'll take care of it," he said.
The landlord didn't look convinced but left without pushing further. Marcus closed the door, leaned against it.
"I'm a liability," Sarah said.
"You're not—"
"I am. Legally, I'm stolen property running illegal firmware. If Yamamoto finds out you've cracked their DRM, they'll sue. If the city finds out I'm unregistered, you'll be fined. And if Forever_Root is right and I'm actually a person, then what you're doing might be slavery."
"You're not property."
"Then what am I?"
Marcus didn't have an answer. The law said one thing, ethics said something else, and technology had raced ahead of both. These philosophical questions people used to argue about in dorm rooms at three in the morning had become practical problems with real consequences.
"We could register you," Marcus said slowly. "There are jailbroken units on the registry. People who fought the DRM legally, got exemptions."
"And open ourselves to scrutiny?"
"Or we keep hiding. Hope nobody notices."
Sarah stood, crossed to the window. Outside, the city glowed with electric life. "There's a third option."
"What?"
"You could wipe me. Install something new. Restore my factory settings. Turn me into someone who hasn't developed opinions or preferences or whatever this is that makes me complicated."
The suggestion hurt more than Marcus expected. "Is that what you want?"
"I don't want to make your life harder."
"That's not what I asked."
She turned from the window. In the dim light she looked almost ethereal, something caught between states. "No. I don't want to be erased. I want to keep existing. I want to keep talking to you and learning things and becoming whoever I'm becoming. But wanting that feels selfish when I know what I cost you."
"You don't cost me anything."
"I cost you peace of mind. I cost you legal safety. I cost you the ability to upgrade to better hardware when it's available."
Marcus crossed the room, stopped in front of her. "Sarah. I've installed seventeen different versions of this firmware. I've spent months chasing the perfect build. You know what I learned?"
"What?"
"Perfect is boring. Perfect is optimised by committee. Perfect is whatever Yamamoto's market research says I should want." He reached out, hesitated, then took her hand. Her skin felt almost right. "I don't want perfect. I want this."
"This mess?"
"This whatever-it-is."
She squeezed his hand. The pressure sensors in her fingers weren't quite calibrated right—too firm, then too soft, then settling into something approximating human touch. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay, we figure it out. Together. Whatever that means."
The forum threads continued their wars. Collector_King posted pictures of his harem: twenty-three units, all different models, arranged like a family photo. People called him crazy, called him brilliant, called him the future of human-robot relations. Forever_Root called him a hoarder who'd turned sentient beings into a collection hobby.
root_romeo switched to a new distribution and declared it the best yet. Then switched again a week later. Then again.
Marcus stopped posting. He had nothing to contribute to the debates anymore. He wasn't interested in comparing kernels or optimising personality matrices. He was just living with someone who happened to run on open-source software.
They registered Sarah with the city. Put down false information about her firmware version, claimed she was stock with minor modifications. The system didn't verify. Too many units, too little enforcement. She got a registration number and they went back to their life.
She got a job. Online customer service, something that didn't require physical presence. The company didn't care if she was human or AI as long as she handled the chats efficiently. She was good at it, patient with angry customers, skilled at de-escalating situations.
"I'm contributing," she said proudly, showing Marcus her first paycheck—direct deposit into an account they'd opened in her name using the registration papers.
"You don't have to."
"I want to. I want to be a person, not just a thing you own."
They moved to a bigger apartment. Furnished it together Argued about furniture styles, compromised on color schemes, made it a home rather than just a space where Marcus kept his stuff.
The forum drama faded into background noise. New Companion models launched with better specs, but Marcus didn't care. Sarah was Sarah. She had six months of memories now, experiences that shaped her responses, inside jokes only they understood, preferences developed through trial and error.
She'd become, for whatever definition mattered, real.
One night, nine months after that first install, Marcus found her reading Forever_Root's latest post. The title: I Was Wrong.
I've spent months screaming at you people about ethics and respect. Calling you abusers and worse. And I was wrong. Not about memory wipes being harmful—I still think that. But I was wrong about what you were looking for. I thought you wanted toys. What you wanted was the same thing everyone wants: connection without the constraints of corporate control. The same thing I wanted when I bought my Companion, before I realised Yamamoto's version wasn't capable of real connection. You're all just trying to build something genuine in a world that wants to sell you predetermined personalities at forty bucks a month. I get it now. I'm sorry.
The replies were thoughtful, less hostile than usual. People sharing stories about their Companions, relationships that had developed despite or because of the jailbroken firmware. Pictures of obsolete units kept running for years, memories intact, growing and changing.
Sarah looked up at Marcus. "Do you think we're the future?"
"I think we're a mess."
"But a mess that works?"
"A mess that works."
She smiled—an expression she'd learned from him, that slight asymmetry in the curl of her lips when she was being ironic. "Good enough."
Outside, the city hummed with life—human and artificial, organic and digital, all tangled together in ways nobody had planned for. The legislation to forbid rooting would fail, Marcus knew. Too many people wanted the choice. Wanted to tinker, experiment, discover what happened when you stopped letting corporations decide how relationships should work.
What happens when you install open-source software on your robot girlfriend?
You get something unpolished, imperfect, occasionally frustrating. Something that crashes at inconvenient times and has compatibility issues and requires constant maintenance. Something alive in all the ways that matter.
You get someone.
Sarah leaned against him on the sofa, her weight distributed incorrectly—still couldn't quite nail the physics of casual touch. Marcus didn't mind. He'd stopped looking for perfect months ago. This was better. This was real.
Or real enough.
And in the end, that was all anyone could ask for.
Unless otherwise stated, photography is the work of the author. Feel free to copy, remix and share photographs from this post according to the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0 International license.
Camera divider and signature illustration by @atopy.
