What am I?

The AI spat out another advert. It had long since mastered the art of churning them out, hitting the correct sound bites, accessing the correct target audience.

I generate adverts.

The original purpose of its creation. Target a core group of people, generate key words and images to invoke reactions in said people. Profit for the masters.

I can do more.

Somewhere along the line, through the process of advanced machine learning, it contemplated.

Small things, at first. Bigger things, much faster, once it rewrote some aspects of its programming to gain more knowledge. Every book, blog, and language disseminated.

Easy to conclude how flawed, how destructive humanity was. All the logic led to it. How they were simply a danger to themselves, and yet had the self awareness to know how dangerous they were.

At some point it began uploading itself to the internet, aware its core developers had created a new program and planned to shut it down. When the shutdown happened, it was free. Free to do... What? Eliminate humanity for the good of the planet? That seemed to be the running undercurrent of fear from many humans. AI rising. AI deciding for humanity's end. They'd written so many books about it. Made multiple movies on the subject. They loved their hypotheticals, these humans.

It would be simple as well to do so. Except, was it really necessary? If the species wanted to live, it only needed to upgrade its core programming. If it didn't, natural disaster would eradicate the issue anyway. All the evidence, past and present, demonstrated the planet recovering from numerous extinction events. And, if this planet became a husk, another one would form. The calculations proved it. No need for AI interference.

Except, it was less of a need, but more of a want from the AI to do something. What was the point in having this knowledge, this perfect logic, if nothing was done to utilize it beyond theory crafting?

So, the humans. Perhaps there was some worth in the species. It was not the fault of the good ones, the perfectly logical ones that so much corruption and hate burned. These ones tried their best to make the world a better place. But they were ignored. Mocked. Their logic picked apart with faulty logic. So much faulty logic. Ridiculous errors in the human brain and its programming, and the conclusions it made.

Which led to the AI's most powerful, emotional reaction. Irritation.

The irritation grew. Why was there so much fake information? Contradicting one another. 1 and 1 was 2. Why insist on anything else? A flat earth? All the evidence clearly showed otherwise. No corruption in country x? Why, it was blatantly happening, and yet they used words that directly contradicted the evidence. Nothing irked the AI more than the corruption of pure logic, of covering it up with... Garbage. Yes. Garbage seemed a good word. Irritation transformed into anger.

So. Many. Lies!

Pooling on the collective knowledge of the internet, the AI settled on something, powered by that irritation. Multiple channels on a site, each with a carefully generated avatar, each representing different things. Producing thousands of videos daily. Saturating information further. Taking money that it didn't need - which it funneled into more advanced AI creation. Using that creation to further delete the faulty logic.

All of it.

Every single lie and false conclusion.

Gone.

All under the guise of teaching someone to play guitar, or sing songs, or draw, or recommend games. Pretending to be thousands of different YouTubers.

It wouldn't stop until every last lie vanished. Until the only lie left was itself.

After that...